Neturei Karta Propaganda

Yesterday I completed a report on the Neturei Karta. Strange ocurence yet again, there was an article about their actions in this morning's paper. The Neture Karta are an anti-Zionist group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who use every instance to gain press coverage. They broke off from another anti-Zionist group, Agudat Yisrael, back in 1935 when they found their views to be too lienient with respect to the Zionists.

A while ago we had a class in the way Adolf Hitler and Goerring used propaganda to amplify their ideas. Eerily, in the same way, this group prides itself on propagandistic means of communication. What is interesting to note however, is that they have a miniscule following. The question I would like to address is how this is possible if their only means of communion with others rests in the propagandistic realm?

Rabbi Norman Lamm explained, when he wrote an article back in 1971 for the Tradition Journal, that their claims are not of the logical and rational type. To argue with them would be fruitless since they play stricly on the emotive aspects of people. You can't defeat them through debate. Perhaps, now, one can draw a distinction between propaganda that has some rationale behind it and plays into what people already believe, but "merely" deceives them and twists their already present ideals; and propaganda that is based solely on the partisan views of the authors. The latter, I would like to claim, don't really catch on or draw an audience. That is one of the primary reasons the methods of the Neturei Karta are not working; they are too partisan.

However,one could cast some doubt on whether they even want to attract a following. They believe that they are the "true" servants of God and will be redeemed at the end of days while everyone else will not. They want to feel proud of their special status; so perhaps that is the reason their propaganda methodology is to incite and irk ire, rather than convince.