"Exodus" Now Hurling Real 5,000 Pound Bombs

Israel still retains absolute mind control over the western world, thanks to the selling of an Israel narrative which was boosted high into the literary lights and onto movie screens with the fictional Israeli narrative written by Leon Uris in 1954.

After its publication, the novel Exodusbecame the guide book for all who studied, traveled, or gave even the slightest attention to the start of the modern nation of Israel in 1947-48.

How powerful is a movie image? It has been said that when Ronald Reagan first arrived at the White House as president, he wanted to see the "war room" which he had seen in the movie, Dr Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.

He had to be told that the Strangelove war room was a movie set, (shown below) built at Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, Surrey, England. In reality, the real war room is much smaller.

Was the President serious? As one line from Strangelove puts it, "No one can say."

Exodus, the novel by Leon Uris, was far removed from the reality of Palestine in 1948.

Undeterred by reality, the novel grew into a 208 minute, 1960 movie version, with Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, a leader of the Hagannah (the Jewish underground), and Eva Marie Saint, as Kitty Fremont, his love interest.

In one scene, Kitty sits beside Ari on a hill overlooking an ancient biblical battlefield. She gazes up admiringly at the Jewish underground leader, hanging on his every word as he tells her how his people conquered this land centuries ago.

Overwhelmed by his superior biblical certainty, she quietly says, "I'm just a Presbyterian."

It was the generation that absorbed Exodus as novel and as a movie, that accepted and acted on, the Israel "narrative," which Ari Ben Canaan is convinced is biblically sound.

Would Paul Newman deceive us? The lone Presbyterian voice in the film who, might have countered Ari Ben Canaan's certainty was, after all, "just a Presbyterian."

How was she to know there was another "narrative" that told an entirely different story? In 1954, the Palestinian narrative was lodged in very few western world views.

Today, 60 years after the novel Exodus first appeared, the Palestinian narrative has great difficulty being heard in the cacophany of a culture shaped for more than six decades by a propaganda (hasbara) campaign, each defended with bogus cries of "anti-semitism."

Over time, however, reality continually forces hasbara spin masters to launch new campaigns. The latest: The sudden discovery and immediate peddling, of a series of "rights," promulgated simplistically by advertising spin masters.

"Israel has a right to exist" was the first of a recent set of slogans pushed by Israel's hasbara teams. That "right" was followed by "Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state." Standing alone, of course, these lies have no connection to reality.