By Ariel Cohen

As the Israelis were busy hosing pools of blood off the streets after the latest murder-suicide bombing at Jerusalem's Machane Yehuda market, the Palestinian propaganda machine was busy churning out yet another Big Lie: the "massacre of Jenin."

Palestinian mouthpieces claim that the Israeli military killed as many as 500 civilians in Jenin, a stronghold of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When the Israelis cleared the booby traps and allowed Western media into the city on Monday, the reality turned to be completely different: difficult door-to-door infantry fight; 23 Israeli soldiers fallen in battle; dozens of terrorists killed. No massacre.

When Israeli troops surrounded Jenin, it was widely reported by the Western and Arab media that the local terrorist commanders swore to fight them to the death. Arafat, holed up in Ramallah but still pushing for more violence, had called for a "million martyrs" to march to Jerusalem — and Jenin looked like a good place to start.

There were important assets to be protected in the refugee camp. Several dozen chemical labs where explosives for suicide-bomber belts and Kassam rockets were being manufactured, and arsenals of machine guns and anti-tank weapons, and a cadre of would-be suicide bombers. Trapped.

The fierce fighting went on for days in the small, winding alleys of the town and in the Jenin refugee camp that Arafat did not even think to eliminate despite years of his rule. Many houses were booby trapped by the terrorists who hoped to blow Israelis to smithereens. The IDF repeatedly ceased fire and demanded that all civilians leave the area, but the top Palestinian terrorists, true to form, were using them as human shields.

If this action had taken place in Afghanistan, U.S. troops would have called in the "vitamin B": B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers. If it had happened in Chechnya, the Russian generals would have called in artillery and flattened Jenin, just as they did Grozny. Israeli tanks were there, and they could have shot straight into town and the refugee camp. Instead, Israelis fought on foot, placing themselves at risk while trying to protect Palestinian lives. One of the fighters, reportedly a young boy, detonated a booby trap in a building already taken by the Israeli reservists, and 13 were killed on the spot.

After the city fell, 1,000 Palestinian fighters surrendered. In any other place, in any other war, there would be no one left to surrender. The air force, rockets, and artillery would have done the job. The Israeli Army is putting the number of Palestinians killed in a five-day battle at about 200, while 30 Israeli soldiers were killed. While crying foul in English, the Palestinian and Arab media are praising the "martyrs" in Arabic, and the Saudi TV has raised millions in a Jerry Lewis style telethon to pay off the families.

The Jenin "massacre" that never was is yet another Big Lie in the Palestinian PR campaign, a campaign that for its persistence and audacity would have made Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler's propaganda chief, proud. And with good reason. Goebbels's legacy lives today — from Damascus to Ramallah to Cairo. According to a prominent Egyptian writer, the Egyptian press ministry was set up in the early 1950s by the East Germans who learned the trade under Stalin, but before that, under Hitler and Goebbels. And Communist archives in Moscow demonstrate that many Palestinian leaders were trained at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow and KGB camps in the Crimea, both temples of Soviet propaganda and subversion.

One of Goebbels's contributions to the world of "black" PR was the concept of the Big Lie — repeating something so loudly and persistently that people begin to believe it. Yasser Arafat is fond of blaming Israelis for using "uranium" shells against Palestinians, implying radioactive damage. The Egyptian propaganda machine made up the "immoral" Israeli chewing gum, purported to drive up the libidos of Egyptian women. President Bashar Assad of Syria accused Israel at the recent Arab League Summit of killing "thousands of Palestinians a day." His long-time defense minister, Mustafa Tlas is getting into show business: He wrote a book called The Matsa of Zion, and is now producing a movie in Egypt that accuses Jews of using the blood of a Christian priest for baking Passover matzah breads. The Saudi government-owned newspaper recently also ran a story alleging that Jews use baby blood for another traditional food, the triangular cookies known as Hamentashen, baked for the holiday of Purim. It is no surprise, therefore, that Hitler's Mein Kampf is selling briskly on the Palestinian street.

Other people at other times have used the Big Lie to dehumanize their targets. The Soviet KGB planted rumors that the CIA manufactured AIDS. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam has said repeatedly that Jewish doctors infected black babies with AIDS. And the grand wizard himself, Goebbels, used the Big Lie to poison the image of Germany's Jews so successfully that when the Nazis began rounding the Jews up to ship them to the death camps, fellow Germans or other Europeans cheered and helped in the process.

The truth is, Arafat's PR foot soldiers are trying to use Jenin as a sort of "instant replay" of the tragedy in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Twenty years ago, a Lebanese militia killed Palestinians in revenge for the murder of President Bashir Jemayel of Lebanon, but the Palestinians and their fellow travelers blamed Sharon for the massacre. In 2002 a Belgian court refused to hear a case against Sharon brought by families of the Sabra and Shatilla victims.

Yasser Arafat's strategy is to turn Sharon into a war criminal, and to turn the West against Israel. He is using Slobodan Milosevic as a model. Arafat wants to preside over his sheikhdom of terror from behind a human shield of international observers. Then Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and the Al Aqsa brigades would be free to continue killing Israelis while Arafat himself could issue periodic denunciations (much like the one he issued Saturday when pressured by Secretary of State Colin Powell), and maintain (im)plausible deniability.

To achieve this, Arafat needs the world to ignore the mountains of documented evidence connecting him beyond reasonable doubt with the terror campaigns of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Tanzim, and Al Aqsa. He needs the U.S. government and the Western media to shut their eyes to his close links with Iran and Iraq. He needs Powell not to look at the Israeli streets where the real massacres are taking place: in Netanya, Haifa, and Jerusalem.

This is why Arafat invented the "Jenin massacre" — a story that never was. Why the Arab and European media hastily reported it is another question.