Internet bollocks

Sometimes you start by wishing you hadn't. I got involved in an online discussion with someone that posted the following quotation:

"Our race is the Master Race. We Jews are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." - Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech to the Knesset quoted in Begin and the Beasts," New Statesman, June 25, 1982 by Amnon Kapeliouk

The quotation is obviously absurd. It is a crude and stupid assertion of brutal racial superiority. Begin was many things during a long life, starting as a refugee from war-time Poland, through being head of the Irgun, to founding the right-wing Likud, to eventually becoming Prime Minister. He was a forthright, right-wing nationalist. He was not a racial supremacist. And Prime Ministers are not prone to make statements of incriminating, rancid garbage to national parliaments. Curious too how there are no Parliamentary records of such an inflammatory remark nor any contemporaneous press reporting. It is an obvious fabrication. Yet there was a proper citation, Amnon Kapeliouk, the leftist Israeli journalist and writer.

So I started checking. The quotation is all over the internet and heads up articles on Kapeliouk, but only the right-wing seemed to question it. In 2009, the Begin Centre, not a natural home for me, had traced what they saw as the earliest use of the quotation on the web and it appears to have been fabricated by one Texe Marrs. It is on his site without any attribution. I refuse to link to his stunningly vile web site. It links end-times Christian fundamentalism, homophobia and loopy conspiracy theories with an all pervasive, drooling anti-Semitism. Preserve your mental health, don't even Google it.

There was no way that someone like Kapeliouk would have used an obvious fake like that, but my discussant was adamant. Even more suspicious was the article it had come from. It was a report from the early days of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And it had been under attack previously for Kapeliouk's use of Begin's real words, describing Palestinian terrorists as "beasts walking on two legs", as if they had been directed against all Palestinians and not just terrorists. The fact that the article was known made it easy for someone to use it to construct an internet meme by adding a bogus quote to it.

The only way to resolve the argument was to find the article. It wasn't easy, but someone had uploaded it to Scribd. You can read it here. The 'master race' quote is nowhere to be seen.

There are three lessons to draw from this. The first is do not trust those endless photographs with slogans and quotations next to them without checking the proper attribution, especially if they seem as outlandish as this one. Seeing them reposted on like-minded web sites is not checking, you need to match them to authoritative sources with proper citations. Internet memes reproduce and multiply. Don't encourage them or draw quick and easy opinions from them.

Secondly, and this is more worrying, it shows that Israel/Palestine tends to make even the most reasonable of people lose their marbles. Wild enthusiasms for whichever cause win out over any reasoned argument. How else would anyone believe something that was such obvious bollocks? Passionate belief makes us credible dupes. And we all fall for things.

Finally, there is the fact that in the end I am glad I did have this argument. After I sent the link to the full article, I was thanked and the post was taken down. The people you disagree with are not necessarily bad people and there are plenty of times I get it wrong. It was a small crack in a profound ideological disagreement, but in these febrile times the smallest of victories for knowledge over propaganda are welcome.