Israel's Foreign Ministry wants to spend $150,000 to plant shills on websites around the world to fight Israel's bad image. Happily, Rona Kuperboim at Ynet is agin it, for the right reasons, calls it thought-police:
Foreign Ministry officials are fighting what they see as a terrible and scary monster: the Palestinian public relations monster. Yet nothing can be done to defeat it, regardless of how many foolish inventions will be introduced and how many bright communication students will be hired.
The reason is that good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved. Yet nonetheless, the Foreign Ministry wants to try to change the situation. And they have willing partners. “Where do I submit a CV?” wrote one respondent. “I’m fluent in several languages and I’m able to spew forth bullshit for hours on end.”
Any attempt to plant talkbacks online must fail. Especially if the State is behind it. Not only because it’s easy to identify responses made on behalf of someone, but also because it’s anti-democratic.
Thanks to Felice Gelman for tip.
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- NYT shills Israeli consulate’s rebranding campaign
- Israeli Tourism Ministry still features a map of Israel that includes occupied territory
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You will see them here, in the comment threads here on Mondoweiss. At Moonofalabama.org there was a very capable readership, who could smell astroturfers immediately, whether they were formally organized or otherwise. It was interesting to see the types of arguments – distractions and misdirections, really – that were regularly exposed on that forum. Tho' they've recently closed, I urge the honest among these discussions to examine many of the archive discussions on that site.
This is an ongoing program by the Israeli government that has been going on for some time….
An ongoing program that is ongoing. With morons like Steve around, who needs to post anything?
The problem is they don't have any creditable arguement or defense for Israel's actions. All their rants are very transparent and simple minded..paid or unpaid.
Ismail, dude, does the Israeli government pay YOU to spew hasbara? You're gonna have a rough time "re-branding" Israel when it's clear that it has a racist, Semitic-superior, attitude about its conduct in Operation Cast Lead ("Hey, how about this — let's re-brand the IDF as the 'most moral army in the world'!") Whenever the WashPo posts another neo-con piece agitating the US to send its children into harm's way on another "Clean Break" misadventure in Iran, the comments are 10-to-1 flaming Fred Hiatt's Zionist propaganda. American makes a slient point. The Israeli conduct cannot be glossed over by putting out The Israel Project's Dictionary of Hasbara and getting on the same page with Mark Regev talking points. That's why Ismail's contribution to the discussion is to call stevieb a "moron." Wow. How many US taxpayer dollars go to funding Israel's global "rebranding" program. Shessh.
Good thing America can feign ignorance. It allows him to sleep at night after advocating genocide.
The only point "America" made was that you and he are idiots.
I am so sorry to hear Moon of Alabama shut down. I did not get to the site often but loved it every time I did. I'm going over there now to pay my respects.
You should all read the latest Hasbara bible put online (and distribution verboten elsewhere) by Newsweek without explanation; in addition to the settlement talking points already discussed a bit on this blog, here's some of what it says about the right of return: quote: A TOUGH QUESTION AND AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE Q: Could you explain for those who may not understand the right of return means for the Palestinians? A: It is basically the Palestinian demand that all Palestinians, not just Palestinians who have lived here historically but their children and grandchildren, should be able at some point in the future to flood what is currently Israel with mass Palestinian immigration. For us it’s a tremendously worrisome statement by the Palestinians that they’re not willing to give up this demand. Because at the time when we are trying to achieve a peace based on the notion of two states for two peoples, it suggests that the Palestinians are not going to be content with one state. The Palestinians are saying at the outset that they want a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, which we accept, but they are also making demands for land inside what everyone recognizes as Israel – and that is unacceptable. A TOUGH FOLLOW-UP QUESTION AND RESPONSE Q: And yet you believe that Jews, even converts, have the right to return, even Jews who may have never set foot in Israel in a thousand years have a right to come. And yet Palestinians who actually lived in Tel Aviv don’t have the same right to go back to their homes? Isn’t that hypocrisy? A: Anybody who looks at the history of the century will recognize that Jews over the world have been brutally persecuted and hounded because of their Jewish identity, wherever they’ve lived. Unfortunately some sixty years ago, we were witness to the atrocities perpetrated against six million because they had no place to go. The notion there should be a place no matter what where Jews can go for refuge was one of the reasons for the establishment of the State of Israel. That is a very different than the Palestinians saying ‘we want to have a state for our people, but we also want land in yours.’ We accept the former. We cannot accept the latter. This has it all, covert racism, immigration fears, and invoking of the Holocaust, all to justify "We shouldn't let those Arabs come back to the land we stole from them."
The UN stated the conditions under which the Palestinians could return to their alleged homes. The Palestinians refused the very simple conditions – "desire to live in peace." Opportunity lost. Tough shit.
You've certainly got that down to an art form haven't you Ismail?
Rubbish of course. Israel stated that the Palestinians were not allowed to return because it would threaten Israel's Jewish majority, which would never had been achieved had Israel not destoyed 300+ towns and driven out 800,000 Palestinians.
Shingo, the number of Palestinians displaced goes up every time doesn't it? Do you know how many jews were displaced after the Palestinian Nakba? 800 trillion!
Yoni, I thought 800 trillion was the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust…….are you sure you have your numbers right?
No Kidding. AIPAC Founder Isaiah Kenen used to work for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in *public relations*. http://irmep.org/ILA/Kenen/default.asp
Wait, you mean people get paid for this? And all this time I've been doing it for fun. Go figure. As for PR. Since the Palestinian PR is to spin terrorists who murder children as "heroic resistance fighters" and Israeli soldiers who attack terrorists as "war criminals" when they hit the children that the Palestinians hide their terrorists among, it shouldn't be that hard for Israel to use PR to provide the truth. Well, I say that optimistically, in fact the Palestinians have the advantage in PR. They are the underdogs. Too many movies in this country portray the underdogs as the good guys for the sake of drama, so too many people think that if you are weaker, you must be the good guys.
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