GIYUS as Microcosm

GIYUS, standing for Give Israel Your United Support, and also the Hebrew for “recruitment” or “mustering”, is an initiative of the World Union of Jewish Students to provide a response to media misinformation, lies and reutering levied against Israel by Muslim propagandists and their useful idiot allies in the West. As the main page says:

Today’s conflicts are won by public opinion.
Now is the time to be active and voice Israel’s side to the world.

Nearly six decades late, I would say, but better late than never. The reactions to GIYUS on the lefty blogosphere, however, have been nothing but turnspeak: GIYUS is claimed to be the propaganda arm of the Zionist government, and everyone should beware the lies it spreads.

The reason GIYUS exists is actually the glaring ineptitude of the Israeli government as far as the war of hearts and minds goes. GIYUS is a recruitment of the Jewish people to do the job the Israeli government isn’t doing well. I’ve thought of it as the parallel of the IDF: though encouraged, perhaps even sponsored, by the government, it’s by the people for the people. The Jewish people answer gladly the call for self-defense.

That thought has carried me further: I argue that the initiative of GIYUS and the criticisms of it are a microcosm of the present situation of the IDF, Israel and Jews worldwide. Consider the following parallelism: Israel and the Jews are attacked on the media front, so they launch the GIYUS initiative, which is then criticized as “Zionist propaganda”, meaning that the terrorism-sympathizers would prefer Israel and the Jews not defend themselves, that they leave the media onslaught upon them unanswered; on the macro level, Israel is attacked on its northern and southern borders, so it launches a counterattack to eliminate the terrorist threat, which is then criticized as a “disproportionate response” or “genocide against the Lebanese people”, meaning that the terrorism-sympathizers would prefer Israel not defend itself, that it leave the military onslaught upon it unanswered.

As with the IDF operations against Hizbullah, the rightness of the GIYUS initiative is proved by the criticism: the demand that Jews stop defending themselves from attack means they should keep on with what they’re doing. There’s nothing the world (I mean those whose hearts G-d has calloused with anti-Semitism and sympathy for terrorism) abhors more than to see Jews defending themselves.

As long as we counter with facts, pure, unvarnished and unreutered, we have nothing to be ashamed of.