Nearly 80 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda remains the go-to source for how-to advice on large scale con-artistry. “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly,” Joseph Goebbels reportedly instructed. “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

In other words, keep it simple, stupid.

This rule was meant to work in tandem with another cynical Goebbels dictum: people are naturally susceptible to confident-sounding demagoguery. “You can’t change the masses,” Goebbels once said. “They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.”

This, at least, is what those who have always wanted Israel to disappear have always hoped, and since Oct. 7 they have channeled Goebbels not only with vigor but with a vengeance. On that day, Hamas, an enterprise whose very raison d’etre is the elimination of Jews, sent thousands of fighters into Israel for the purpose of slaughtering as many Jews as possible, succeeded in slaughtering or mutilating about 5,800 of them and even now pledges to return again and again to finish “the job” as best they can. “Genocide” is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. Genocidal is what Hamas is, and genocide is what Hamas does.

But Israel doesn’t merely face 40,000 or so well-trained and highly-motivated (to put it mildly) Hamas slaughterers a few kilometers away in Gaza, and Hezbollah’s 150,000 missiles on Israel’s northern border, and now Yemen’s similarly-inclined Houthis launching rockets at it. All are funded by Iran, likewise resolved to annihilate Israel.

It also faces an international anti-Israel public relations war which it has no capacity to win. Those who want Israel gone have many more platforms, many more voices and many more resources than Israel can ever dream of. And in America, they benefit from billions of dollars of petrodollars that have been strategically disbursed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other abhorrent nations to colleges and universities, think tanks and advocacy groups in order to buy allyship when events like Hamas’ invasion of Israel take place and retaliation inevitably ensues.

Israel’s enemies – and there are plenty of them – have a message so ingenious, so mendacious, that it would make Goebbels himself exclaim “Jawohl!”  It is that Israel, which was after all the victim of attempted genocide by those sworn to genocide on Oct. 7, is actually the party guilty of genocide – for attempting to make sure that it does not become the victim of attempted genocide again, or at least anytime too soon. One might imagine that those genuinely concerned about genocide would take a moment’s notice of what Hamas actually did on Oct. 7 and pledges to continue doing: blowing families to pieces, tying families up and burning them to death, riddling children with bullets, decapitating and dismembering innocent souls and raping women en masse, while laughing, gloating and boasting about it.

But no.

Outside restaurants owned by Jews, and where people are trying simply to celebrate Christmas, and in public squares, comes this cry from those who don’t know what the facts are or know but couldn’t care less: “Fill-in-the-blank, fill-in-the-blank, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” The propaganda is genius itself: those who were the victims of attempted genocide are the ones guilty of it.

And, if the polls are accurate it works, at least among younger Americans. After all, it wasn’t only Goebbels who understood how easily some people can be conned. “The bigger the humbug,” said P.T. Barnum, until recently regarded as the most successful con artist in American history, “the better the people will like it.” The Hamas lobby, which hurls the epithet “genocide” at a country that did not seek Oct. 7 but rather was shocked and brutalized by it, is nothing if not clever about humbug.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.