We live in a world of lies.

On major issue after major issue, both domestic and foreign, we are saturated with lies.

Remember the “Hands up, don’t shoot” narrative that dominated American media and all of the protests against a white officer’s shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.?

It was all a lie.

Never happened.

Yet, media personalities, NFL players, and even congressional representatives employed the arms-up gesture and recited the mantra “Hands up, don’t shoot” for the television cameras. And even after the Justice Department released a report thoroughly refuting both the lie and Brown’s victim status, President Barack Obama has made multiple references to Ferguson in his speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma march — as if there were all sorts of moral parallels.

That lie ruined a city’s economy, not to mention the livelihood and life of an innocent policeman. And, of course, it gave those Black Americans resentful toward America another reason to express anger at white America.

But that hysteria is small scale compared to the hysteria fomented against Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s voters for his having won an election he was supposed to lose.

This hysteria — whipped up by the (Jewish as much as non-Jewish) left and especially by the president of the United States — has allowed this president to weaken the bonds between America and Israel more than at any time in the 66 years of Israel’s existence.

The vitriol directed against Netanyahu and Israel is allegedly based on two comments Netanyahu made in Israel shortly before the election.

One was about a Palestinian state:

“The right-wing rule is in danger. The Arab voters are coming in great numbers to the polling stations. The left-wing nonprofit organizations are bringing them in buses. Go out to the polling stations, bring your friends and family, and vote Mahal [Likud] in order to close the gap between us and the Labor Party.”

The president of the United States and most if not all of America’s and Israel’s left repeatedly describe this as “racist” and

anti-democratic.

That is a lie.

There is nothing racist or anti-democratic about the comment.

If “racist” actually means something — other than being useful as a left-wing epithet with which to regularly describe right-wingers (in America as well as Israel) — there is not a hint of racism in the comment. How exactly are Arab Israelis depicted negatively in this comment? Do not Democrats in America regularly inveigh against “old white males”?

Nor is there a hint of disenfranchising Arab Israelis. The message to Netanyahu’s followers was simply an appeal to get to the polls because his political opponents appeared to be ensuring that as many Arab voters as possible got to the polls where they were expected to vote against him and his party.

Yet, not only is the accusation false, the comment on which it is based is almost universally mistranslated. Almost all citations of the phrase use the term “in droves” or, less frequently, “hordes of.” Both terms are far more derogatory than what Netanyahu actually said — “in great numbers” (kamuyot adirot). But because “great numbers” of Arab voters sounds considerably less disrespectful, the Western press prefers “in droves” and “hordes.” That’s how they can charge Netanyahu with “racism” never implied in the original Hebrew — by manipulating his words in translation.

On the day of the Israeli election, March 17, The New York Times correctly translated Netanyahu: “Right-wing rule is in danger. Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” But it has since joined the other mainstream media in using the inaccurate and loaded translation, “in droves.”

(To be sure, I do not think a leader of a country — who, after all is the leader of all groups in his country — should single out any group other than an ideological one as inherently politically problematic. But that is a far cry from any of the charges Obama and the left are making. Moreover, Netanyahu has since apologized to the Arab-Israeli community.)

The other charge, the one Obama is using to suggest that America abandon Israel at the United Nations, where the world’s nations gang up on Israel to such a vile degree that last week Israel was the only country in the world the U.N. condemned for mistreatment of women, is equally false.

This is what Netanyahu said in an interview right before the elections:

“I think anyone who is going to build a Palestinian state today will be freeing up space to give an attack area to radical Islam against Israel. This is the reality created here in recent years. Anyone who ignores this sticks his head in the sand. The left does this, burying its head in the sand again and again.”

Other than it being entirely accurate, what so offends the left and the president?

I would like every prominent left-wing writer and politician to take a lie detector test while answering this question: “Do you believe that if Israel completely abandoned the West Bank and the Palestinians had their own state, no violent Islamist group would take root there and seek to destroy Israel?”

Unless completely capable of self-delusion, I have to believe even those who condemn the comment recognize its validity. As David Suissa of the Jewish Journal notes, even Israel’s most revered living writer, and a man of the left, Amos Oz, has acknowledged this truth.

And the biggest truth of all is that the left so hates Netanyahu that it has created a hysteria — just as it did in Ferguson.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host (AM 870 in Los Angeles) and founder of PragerUniversity.com. His latest book is the New York Times best-seller “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph” (HarperCollins, 2012).