‘Post-truth’: Why Jew-haters will adore 2016's Word of the Year
By HUGH ASHUpdated: NOVEMBER 22, 2016 16:04SO, it appears Henry Ford – founder of the eponymous motor company, creator of the assembly line and die-hard anti-Semite – touched a nerve when he pronounced, “History is bunk”.Actually, the immortal drivel the man who made automobiles affordable for average Americans uttered to the Chicago Tribune in 1916 was, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” It’s taken a century, but – defying recorded evidence –history is now in lockstep with Ford’s idiocy. Because the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016 is ‘post-truth’, which beat off stiff competition fromnouveau lingo like: ‘chatbot’ (a computer program designed to stimulate conversation), ‘coulrophobia’ (an irrational fear of clowns), and the now hackneyed ‘Brexiteer’ (a term all too familiar to Europeans). OD’s definition of ‘post-truth’ is, ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ The word first emerged, circa 1992, but its usage exploded by 2000% in the past 12 months, according to the dictionary’s bean-counters, as it captured the English-speaking public’s mood and frustration.So it’s an apt choice for Americans and Brits, who’ve been subjected to raging populism as facts got torched on bonfires of nationalist vanities. And the kindling is being readied for more towering infernos of truth to be lit during Europe’s election season, come 2017.Personally, I welcome OD’s tribute to ‘post-truth’, since it lampoons all those peddling phony history as ‘fact’, inverting veracity or inventing mythical, alternative narratives that corrupt addled, naïve or fertile minds.Nobody does this better than the Palestinians, who’ve polished ‘post-truth’ into fine-art PR by crafting a heretical ‘history’ that’s been swallowed – hook, line and stinker – by Leftist suckers and allowed every Jew-hater to crawl from beneath their stone and sound off.That’s a feat beyond Madison Avenue’s best.What’s more, the bigger the porkies – for those ignorant of Cockney rhyming slang porkies (pork pies) = lies – the greater they are believable.The year’s apogee of Palestinian ‘post-truth’ must surely be UNESCO bigots enshrining Jerusalem’s holiest of holies as exclusively Muslim, summarily dismissing Judaism’s rights to a city Jews built eons before Muhammad and Christianity’s founding tenet that Christ lived and died there centuries prior to Islam’s prophet hearing the word of Allah.So, viewed through this ‘post-truth’ lens, it must surely be the case Palestinians really are the ‘true’ descendants of Canaanites, a people conquered and consumed by the ancient Israelites, but whose celebrity survives, much like Santa and the Tooth Fairy.That adds credence to the PLO’s assertion that, as the only indigenous people, they are merely trying to wrest back land criminally allotted to ‘white, European, colonial-settler’ Jews by the perfidious British in their outrageous Balfour Declaration of 1917.Therefore pay no heed to the 1920 San Remo Agreement (a shameful carve-up of the Levant that incorporated Balfour), keep shtum about any offers of nationhood the Arabs spurned and, crucially, dismiss the then-honorable UN’s 1947 restoration of a Jewish state in its biblical homeland (post-WW2 guilt). I could bang on deconstructing Palestinians’ mythology, which iswatertight as a sieve by any established historical reckoning, but ‘post-truth’ renders that irrelevant.As Rod Liddle noted in the Sunday Times, “Truth is only beauty if it’s your truth. When it’s somebody else’s truth it can be very ugly indeed, often best not mentioned.”It’s a fair bet, then, that the next strand of Ramallah’s chutzpah will declare that America was discovered by a Palestinian, since Christopher Columbus was descended from Jewish converts and, ergo, was really a…well, you know what. Oh, and Hamas want the US back.So watch this space and for heaven’s sake don’t tell Donald Trump.What beggars belief is how this mendacious game is played out by the Left-leaning mainstream media (MSM) – New York Times, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Agence France Presse to mention some of the usual suspects – not merely the internet’s self-anointed ‘citizen journalists’.To some extent I can understand, though not pardon, the latter, since they are a confusion of pious, purblind, socialist ultras – like British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn – who won’t comprehend that anti-Zionism means anti-Semitism, and certifiable racist loons who bash Israel as a cipher for Jews.Uncomfortable as it may be for Trots and neo-Nazis to acknowledge, where Jews and the Jewish state are concerned, they’re closer allies than they imagine.Because the staple diet of both is conspiracy theories…anything from the hardy annual of Jewish financiers controlling the world – that includes you, George Soros – to diabolical smears, like calling on Israel to investigate faux allegations IDF emergency medical teams abroad harvested kiddies' organs (once a pet hobbyhorse of disgraced British peeress, Jenny Tonge).The ‘net is awash with such ‘post-truth’ tosh and it’s resonating, not just among dorks, but those who claim to own a brain, notably college undergrads and their educators.Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, explains, “Fueled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the Establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.”For myself, judging by what litters Facebook, YouTube and Tumblr et al posing as ‘news’, I’d rather glean my info from the gypsy palmist, who once forewarned me to expect ‘bad tidings’ (which I did when I left her funfair tent and found a parking ticket on my windshield).Quite why youth, in particular, thinks social media is a more reliable news source than MSM is baffling, but maybe we hacks have read the runes – and polls – so erroneously of late, we’ve only ourselves to blame.Conversely, the kids, who are last (if ever) to vote and first to rebel when democracy bites them in the butt, seem so ignorant of history they might as well subscribe to Henry Ford’s bunkum.My submission, then, for next Word of the Year is: ‘alt-news’ (‘post-truth’ guff, which isn’t worth the paper it isn’t written on).