Since there probably isn’t a word or phrase for when abysmal pro-Israeli propaganda fails to achieve the depraved outcome you seek, you resort to grotesque anti-Palestinian lies, it’s become necessary to conjure one up: Mencerism.
David Mencer, former Israeli lobbyist within the British Labour Party, is the current Israeli government spokesperson who replaced the former propagandist Eylon Levy, who was suspended in March this year after his egregious lies stopped impressing the Western audience he targeted. Instead, he became the stuff of derision and ridicule. Whereas Mencer is a crude, groveling amateur liar, Levy is slick and polished verbally and visually. However, you can tell only so many lies before you become blatantly obvious.
Wikispooks lists Mencer as a “spin doctor, propagandist, lobbyist, politician.” It’s clearly in that specific order because he fails spectacularly in proficiency from left to right. While his lies are transparent and desperate, watching him spin the latest Israeli war crime on mainstream media has become nauseating.
Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) have denounced him for an abusive attack on a BBC journalist. He accused Mishal Husain of “blindly repeating what terrorist organisations” fed her. It’s ironic because the Israeli government lies that he regularly repeats are so blatant and obvious it defies understanding. When Mencer cannot answer awkward questions, he resorts to attacking journalists, as is evident below.
However, besides turning on his interlocutors, his forte appears to be making shit up. Perhaps the most despicable lie manufactured by Mencer was in response to a question from a British LBC talk-radio journalist on the gruesome death of nineteen-year-old Palestinian Shaban al-Dalou. Shaban was filmed while he was burned alive in an Israeli bombing of a tent encampment outside a hospital where he was receiving treatment from a prior bombing incident.
Mencer claimed that the incident was staged by a Palestinian version of Hollywood, which Israeli propagandists have dubbed Pallywood, to “encourage world outrage” and sympathy. It’s not the first time such outrageous claims have been made by Israel. Palestinians have previously been accused of filming dolls to mimic babies that were killed in the constant bombing raids.
Yet again, the irony of projecting a Pallywood on the long-suffering Palestinians is clearly lost on Mencer and his ilk. I’m not even sure if Hollywood has scriptwriters capable of dreaming up the intensity of the dystopian inhumanity we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip. Such a barbaric depiction on film would fall foul of the censors, yet we’re watching it live-streamed daily.
Mencer is clearly well-paid to lie with gay abandon. However, I don’t believe he’s doing it for the money. This level of depravity does not come without conviction.
I’ve been debating on Facebook, someone I thought was a kindly old man and who I used to know personally several years ago. He’s convinced that the genocide being perpetrated by Israel is not only acceptable but necessary. He frequently posts support for the Israeli Defense Force, even when they’re caught committing the most heinous, inhumane war crimes.
He’s not exactly a Mencerite because he doesn’t make shit up. He just blindly apologises for the inhumanity going on because it either conforms to his personal biases or he has generational sympathy, which is, of course, misplaced.
However, there are many others out there who deliberately lie and obfuscate to entrench the murderous rampage, and they’re true Mencerites.
lenny unencumbered 