The quote that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” is usually attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, but he was far from the first to adopt this manipulation to misguide the masses.
Long before mass media existed, the Soviet Union understood that the public would largely believe any narrative if it was repeated often enough, no matter how insane it sounded or how little sense it actually made.
Hence, when USSR leader Joseph Stalin, one of the world’s worst mass murderers, died, many young Soviet Jews wept over him, despite the bitter irony that he embodied the very oppression and torture of the Jewish people. Those who wept over him were simply victims of systematic mass indoctrination.
Inventing a people
In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union sought to diminish the influence of the United States in the Middle East, it devised a course of action to weaken the US’s closest ally in the region, Israel. The Soviets embraced Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian-born Arab, and effectively constructed a narrative casting him as the leader of a people who did not formerly exist: the Palestinians.
The so-called “liberation” narrative, which was the basis for the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was inherently misleading, as it referred to the liberation of lands occupied during the Six Day War in 1967. The PLO was established in 1964, a fact that directly undermined the narrative, but that did nothing to deter its creators. Facts were never allowed to interfere.
Creating chaos in Western-led strongholds served the Soviet regime by undermining American influence and projected strength.
From Moscow to Ramallah
Interestingly, Abu Mazen, also known as Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Fatah movement (or the PLO) in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), was educated and indoctrinated in the former Soviet Union. In the 1980s, he studied there, completing his doctoral thesis, which largely dealt with Holocaust denial. A little-known fact is that he was recruited and groomed by the KGB to continue to leverage and strengthen what Arafat had begun with Soviet backing.
In 1979, the leaders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran also sought to carry out a similar doctrine – the red-green alliance – as first conceptualized by the Soviets, to manipulate the minds of young, impressionable Western liberals wishing to promote freedom and equal rights.
The red-green alliance was based on planting doubt, unrest, and self-loathing among the young generation in Iran – namely students, artists, and intellectuals – who believed they were demonstrating for freedom and equal rights, only to be swallowed by the Islamic regime as soon as it came to power.
Chaos as strategy
Radical Islam, whether Shi’ite or Sunni, does not recognize the concept of a nation-state (El-Watan in Arabic). It only allows for the concept of a larger, global, Sharia-based Islamic community (Umma in Arabic). The two concepts are contradictory, making it impossible for any religiously led revolution – whether Shi’ite or Sunni – to adopt a single country, land, or geography, whether in Iran or elsewhere.
Over the last few decades, Iran has exported its extremism and indoctrination far beyond its borders, seeking leverage through the exploitation of populations that are not its own. The system by which it strengthened these proxies relied on creating chaos, dissent, deep societal fractures, and instability from within, into which it then embedded its own experts and proxies to maintain strategic assets, both economic and military.
In this manner, Iran sought to “ride” the Palestinian cause – not because it believed in the Palestinians, whose Soviet-crafted narrative was based on nation-state independence, a concept entirely foreign to Islamist ideology – but because it generated chaos, allowing Tehran to extend its grip across arenas such as Syria, Yemen, the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, Iraq, and even Jordan. In Egypt, these attempts failed, though not for lack of effort.
Throughout this period, indoctrination and incitement against Jews and Israel strengthened the cause, as it was – and remains – comparatively easy to galvanize support against this enemy throughout the Islamic world, among both Sunnis and Shi’ites, despite their profound disagreements on nearly every other issue.
From bullets to algorithms
Over the past two decades, the Qataris, a state of just 350,000 citizens, have taken this information war to an entirely new level of sophistication. Lacking military might, they have instead deployed billions of petrodollars to infiltrate societies across the Middle East – and now the West – buying influence and undermining institutions from within.
They have elevated Soviet-style manipulation into an era of hyper-adaptability, speaking the jargon of ultra-leftist circles when useful, and that of the ultra-right when convenient.
Today’s Russian Federation, together with China – both harboring imperial ambitions – continue to seek the weakening of the US-led West. What better way than dispersing self-loathing, guilt-ridden anti-American sentiment, jointly fueled by Qatar-funded Islamists and Russian and Chinese operatives, each pursuing their own interests.
The shared objective is the implantation of chaos, self-hatred, and paralyzing doubt among Western societies in general, and Americans in particular, toward the very values upon which the United States was founded: liberty and equality.
As a result, schools, colleges, and universities across the West increasingly teach extremism, Marxism, and activism as core intellectual frameworks. One need not rely on rhetoric to see this; a review of curricula in Australia, Europe, Canada, and the United States – the latter two most affected – is revealing enough.
Never was truth mandatory throughout history, but in a technological world where information ownership is radically decentralized and money can purchase any platform, control of the narrative has become an entirely different battlefield. The only question that remains is whether the West is willing to fight – or surrender – to the dominance of China, Russia, and Islamist warlords.■
Ruth Wasserman Lande is an expert on Arab affairs. She previously served as a member of Knesset and as Israel’s deputy ambassador to Egypt. She is currently a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security.