This Lie Would be Laughable if People Were Not Taken in by it

The personal Facebook blog by Olive Palestine has about 40K followers. The blog owner must have lots of free time on his hands as he puts up an incredible number of posts each day. Let me show you just one post that demonstrates how he assumes his followers are stupid — and it seems it is proven to a degree that many of them are stupid. Here is his post and let’s see how long it takes for you to identify why he relies on stupidity to get his anti-Israel point across:

In case you did not notice, just look at the lights on the cars and you can see that the traffic jam on the right side of the road are cars going into Jerusalem and on the left are cars going in the opposite direction. A normal rush-hour occurence  in cities around the world. So no, Olive, this is not apartheid in any shape or form. Nice try.

We do not know who Olive Palestine is, but just let us compare the number of followers he has with other Facebook pages: Combatants for Peace – 17K, Peace Now – 39K, B’Tselem – about 120K. That is on the left. On the right, there is Im Tirzu with 80K likes and 104K followers, Reservists on Duty – about 10K, In other words, he has a respectable number of those digesting his posts.

This one got 25 shares, which means that this lie will spread. It seems that these individuals were not detered by the commenters who pointed out on Olive’s page why this is pablum for stupid Israel haters. About half the comments identified the lie and half accepted it as truth.

On the one hand, 40K people among the entire world population is next to nothing. And we have no way of knowing how lies such as these affect policy makers and leaders in other countries. It is possible that political leaders are not taken in by the lies against Israel and their anti-Israel policies are due to how they see their own national interests. I am not sure the same can be said about commercial interests and academic interests behind BDS. Therefore, I do not believe we can be complacent in face of such lies and their dissemination. But how does one fight “stupid”?

Feature Image Credit: Screenshot of the FB feature image for Olive Palestine