The Powerful are better liers, I heard someone say. They certainly are. They practice a lot.
The early Zionists are the best proof of this assertion. They created the Hasbara, Goebbles picked it up to build the Propaganda of the Third Reich, and the powerful & the far right all over the world built Fake News from the old effective Zionist hasbara.
Yes, first there was Hasbara. The best tool of deception ever. It has been standing for more than 150 years, and counting.
I read somewhere in Israel that "the battle for Israel’s image is not one between nuanced and ‘simplistic’ narratives. It is a battle between truth and lies". The Zionists and their accomplices are experts on lies.
Hasbara was created as a propaganda tool even in the name itself. The Hebrew meaning of the word Hasbara (הסברה) is “explanation” (the term “propaganda” has a different word in Hebrew – תעמולה). I believe that the popular use of this term also reflects a widespread public notion that a better effort of "explaining" Israel’s actions to the world will generate better understandings of Israel’s policies, and more international support. A less common use of the verb “to explain” (להסביר), which has to do with welcoming someone, was used in the past by the Tourism Ministry in campaigns urging Israelis to show a hospitable approach to tourists. Israelis are known for their aversion to Christian tourists that bring millions to their country and nothing for Palestine, although most of Christian sites are located in the West Bank.
Hasbara represents only one side of propaganda, as it is mostly aimed at foreign audience. The use of the Hebrew term Hasbara in a critical context, rather than “propaganda” or “public diplomacy” (the title of the Wikipedia entry on the issue), is necessary, because Hasbara efforts are wider and their goals much more ambitious than any similar activities taken by all democracies and most non-democracies. Hasbara targets political elites, opinion makers and the public simultaneously; it includes traditional advocacy efforts as well as more general appeals made through mass media, and it is carried out by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, lobbying groups, private citizens, students, journalists and bloggers.
The Israeli government encourages all citizens to actively engage in Hasbara. Recently, it even distributed brochures with talking points to all Israelis traveling abroad (a Hebrew web version of the campaign can be viewed here). Israelis are asked to engage in politically-oriented conversations with their hosts and contacts abroad. Rather than discuss the Palestinian conflict, they are advised to cite Israeli technological achievements, mention environmental policies and take pride in notable cultural works. The West Bank is to be discussed – under its ancient Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria – as a potential tourist marvel.
Until a few years ago, the main government agency carrying out Hasbara work was the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its Media and Hasbara department. Under Ehud Olmert’s government, and more so under Netanyahu’s, there was a considerable increase in Hasbara efforts.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has launched for the first time a Hasbara Ministry, headed by a government minister (the current hasbara minister is Yuli Edelstein). The Hasbara Ministry includes a situation room, which operates in five languages; it has a new-media team that can reach, according to the office’s web page, 100,000 volunteers on social media networks, as well as many bloggers.
On top of the Hasbara Ministry, there is a Hasbara branch in the Prime Minister’s Office (in charge of both local and international PR). The IDF Spokesperson has an international arm with a new media branch, which makes Hasbara efforts and does not limit itself to providing information on army activities. Other government agencies, such as the Ministry of Tourism or the Ministry of Culture, also take part in ad-hoc Hasbara activities. There are other agencies that have gradually moved into greater involvement in Hasbara – perhaps the most notable is The Jewish Agency, which used to serve as a liaison to Jewish communities abroad, and now trains its envoys to American campuses to engage in propaganda.
Under Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Ministry was instructed to take a bigger role in the Hasbara effort (a popular rant against the foreign ministry for many years was that it deals with peacemaking instead of advocacy, and Lieberman has promised to solve that). There is a private agency that won a contract with the foreign Ministry that contact press professionals to play hostile journalists in simulations with Israeli diplomats.
Much of the Hasbara work carried out outside official channels – but with heavy official influence – is carried out through non-governmental organizations such as Stand With Us, The Israel Project and more. These organizations produce resources – booklets, slideshows, flyers, maps, polls and more – and spin news events in ways which are favorable to the Israeli government. A lot of thought is put into influencing opinion-makers: journalists and bloggers are flown on a regular basis to tours in Israel, accompanied by government officials, while Israeli representatives – former diplomats, journalists, soldiers and officers – are brought to give lectures at campuses, think-tanks, conferences and other public events around the world. Organizations also try to influence the grassroots level by granting Hasbara fellowships to international students in Israel.
There is an interesting tension in Israel between the tremendous efforts put into Hasbara – Israeli advocacy is probably the most widespread and ambitious state-run propaganda effort in the world today – and a sense of “Hasbara failure” in the Israeli public. Rants about the fact that Israel is misunderstood and complaints about the incompetence of those dealing with Hasbara are often heard in the popular media. The Israelis are so blind to their crimes that they can't see, or admit, that “the failure of Hasbara” is actually a failure of policy – especially, but not limited to, that relating to the occupation and the cruel control over the Palestinians.
Understanding this point could shed light on a self-defeating element in the Hasbara battle: as Israel loses interest in finding a solution to the Palestinian question that would meet the minimal moral standards of the Western World – either “one man one vote” or complete Palestinian sovereignty over a contiguous territorial unit – Hasbara efforts are just likely to draw more attention to the ongoing Israeli failure to live up to the promise of its talking points, and will shed more light on the ever-growing gap between the model, picture-perfect democracy reflected in brochures and the grim reality of the ethnic cleansing that is happening on the ground.
To close this chapter, one must know that there is Hasbara and there is Hasbara culture, which is a social construction of reality. Hasbara culture is a Jewish-Zionist ethnocentric way of looking at the world. Hasbara culture, the ethnocentric Jewish-Zionist experience of the world, is a proselytizing and aggressive culture. But let me be clear, it is not Jewish ethnocentricity alone that causes hasbara culture. Insular ethnocentric orthodox communities aren’t trying to convert the wider culture to their understanding of the world.
And though related, “hasbara culture” is different than pro-Israeli “hasbara” everyone is familiar with. Hasbara is pro-Israeli spin. Hasbara is good public relations arguments in support of Israel. Hasbara is tactics. But Hasbara culture is different. Hasbara culture is a belief system about the world. The recent call by Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett for the pardon, if convicted, of Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier caught on video executing a prone and injured Palestinian, is useful in understanding the difference between hasbara and hasbara culture.
The narrative of victimhood and the politics of Jewish ethnocentricity cultivated by Netanyahu and Bennett, are part of the social construction of reality of hasbara culture. That is the unabashed Jewish tribalism that we see from Israel every day. It is being so ethnocentric they can’t even believe the Palestinians have any rights at all to their historic land and state. In hasbara culture every type of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is about Israel; is about “the Jews.” The tribal Bennett, the ethnocentric Bennett, “knows” Elor Azaria is a good Jewish boy, that he is one of “our children,” and that it’s a moral outrage that he is in prison for killing a Palestinian enemy. The language, “the words that work” as Frank Luntz put it in advising people how to defend Israel, used to justify a pardon of Azaria to a disbelieving world would be “hasbara.”
https://youtu.be/iYzVOlcENZ4
"Gaza-Israel border: Clases 'leave 16 Palestinians dead and hundreds injured'." That is a typical Mainstream Western television headline when Israeli soldiers start killing, with coldblooded precision, defenseless Palestinians. "Palestinian officials say," they would then add, "at least 16 people have been killed by Israeli forces and hundreds more wounded during protests at the Gaza-Israeli border ... The Israeli military said soldiers had opened fire after rioting."
Where did this particular noncommittal news prose come from, this language of equivocation, this pathological penchant for the passive voice, systemically compromising truth as you report it - what does diction of inbred prevarication mean, what would people around the globe reading these lines think had transpired on the "Gaza-Israel border" as BBC or CNN puts it?
It scarcely matters what did actually happen on that "border". What matters is what and how the self-designated honorary club member of "Western Media" says happened.
But what about the Truth instead of Israeli hasbara?
What did actually happen?
Who had lethal firepower at hand, who had bare bones and flesh exposed?
One of the few Palestinian journalists who could tell the world the truth of what happened, Yaser Murtaja, was targeted by an Israeli sharpshooter and deliberately murdered. So, the world is at the mercy of BBC or the New York Times, etc, to "say" what happened.
What is the distance, the difference, between what actually happened as Palestinians experienced it, walking like innocent gazelles in front of a gang of vicious human hunters, and what the BBC, or CNN, or New York Times, or Le Monde, etc, say what happened?
In their groundbreaking book, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the founding figures of Critical theory Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer devote a by now legendary chapter to what they called "Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception."
In this chapter, they investigate how advanced capitalist societies manufacture the social subjects as consumers of mass culture - as they are consumers of Starbucks coffee or MacDonald's hamburgers - which is to say their subjectivities are the creations of a culture industry, receptacles of a massive body of disinformation that do not just entertain and preoccupy them but, in fact, engineer them as passive receptacles of an ideological domination beyond their recognition or critique. They give them a sense of false autonomy of choice.
What today we call "Western Media" is the paramount example of Adorno and Horkheimer's insight, the production of "news" as perfect examples of commodity fetishism. Such news outlets as BBC, CNN, New York Times are brands under which this commodity that calls itself "Western Media" manufactures both a truth to be reckoned with and in effect the normative consciousness of the person who consumes that news and thinks herself informed. They may think themselves objective news outlets that occasionally feature or air a commercial for an airline or a washing detergent. But they are themselves a brand just like the other brands they advertise.
Allow me to explain.
Let us take the example of the BBC and see how it has branded itself as the measure of fact and truth - while systemically engaging in what Adorno and Horkheimer called "mass deception".
Let us begin by asking ourselves a simple question: Have the French or the British learned their lessons from their long and vicious history of colonialism during which they ravaged the earth and its inhabitants and its natural resources alike? Do they regret that history - do they look at people from Asia, Africa, or Latin America with a sense of guilt, remorse, or apology for their criminal atrocities?
You might say let bygone be bygone. What is done is done. Let's move forward. Fair enough. But has the "British" in the "British Broadcasting Corporation" (BBC) learned its lessons and regrets its atrocities or does it continue to flaunt the selfsame racist colonial attitudes, practices, and discourse of the British colonial conquest of India everywhere else. Just look at the manner BBC covers the Israeli conquest of Palestine and compare it with the colonial diction of their own conquest of India.
Two historic documents are today at the disposal of the world at large to see how the British attitude towards colonialism has remained constant and consistent: one is the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the other the manner - in both prose and the optics - in which the BBC today covers the Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine. They are identical in their treachery.
Today, the BBC is integral to the propaganda machinery of Israel - and the evidence for this is out there for the whole world to see anytime Israelis go on a rampage slaughtering Palestinians as they have been doing since March 30, when people of Gaza began commemorating their Land Day. The Israeli army began targeting and deliberately murdering Palestinians, as BBC and other specimen of the brand "Western Media" consistently softened the blow of this vicious massacre of defenseless people. The BBC made that crime against humanity - for which all the top politicians of the settler colony must be arrested and tried in a court of law - palatable, explainable, even justified.
The visual and verbal strategies of BBC, and Western Television in general, to serve Zionist hasbara for compromising the truth of what the Israelis have historically done and continue to do today are quite simple if not altogether crude and banal. They need to send their staff to get more advanced degrees in Newspeak. Their Newspeak is sophomoric and cliche.
Take a look at any of their coverage: First, show a close up of Palestinians' raised fists and open mouths and angry faces and raised flags - they are threatening, aren't they?: violent, dangerous, and menacing. Make sure the frame of your camera is quite tight. Don't ever open the frame to show Israeli sharpshooters nearby firing live ammunition at thousands of defenseless and unarmed civilians protesting the systemic theft of their homeland facilitated by British colonialism. That will defeat the purpose, expose the lie, and ruin the brand.
Then comes the most pernicious wordings - beginning with "clashes".
What "clashes?" Clashes between what two items?
"To clash" is to confront with demonstrably equal force - two swords clash, two punches clash, two armies clash - a live bullet does not "clash" with a defenseless body.
A bullet pierces through and wounds and kills (does not "clash" with) a body. By opting for "clashes", the mainstream media lies: It pretends there are two more or less identical elements, two armies, two opposing forces. There are no such things. On one side, there is a merciless army, armed to teeth by Barack Obama and all his predecessors and successors, on the other defenseless people. BBC and its European and American peers conceal that fact with the word "clashes"- and in plural no less.
Then comes the real gimmick: Use scare quotes: Put "leave 16 Palestinians dead and hundreds injured" in quotation marks to compromise its truth. Your own reporters on the scene are deaf, dumb, and blind - they don't see Palestinians are being killed and wounded by those Israeli sharpshooters - so attribute the "report" - not the truth - of their slaughter to Palestinian sources - that'll compromise the veritable power of the report. "They" say so many are killed or wounded - the BBC does not acknowledge the truth of these dispensable Palestinians being maimed and murdered.
Doubly, cast doubt on the truth - "Palestinian officials say" so many are wounded and killed - not BBC, or CNN, or NBC, or whatever - for BBC, CNN, the NYT keep their official reporting of facts only if Israelis are killed or wounded.
When it comes to the paralysing accusation of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, BBC is front and centre, bold and brave, but when it comes to the slaughter of defenseless Palestinians, the BBC's cameras and words stand right behind the Israeli soldiers, speaking and showing things from their point of view.
I single out the BBC because it is the most respected European channel, however, the British Broadcast company is not the only item in this brand of "Western Media." The New York Times is worse, the CNN worse than both of them together, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
"Western Media" is a brand, a gimmick, a commodity fetishism at the service of Zionist hasbara of systemic mass deception in "the West" itself and around the globe - and BBC is a paramount example of it.
This brand of "Western Media" has historically posited itself against state-controlled media across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which is indeed the stage for the systematic lies at the service of the ruling states. But that media is so blatantly vulgar in its falsehood that there is a healthy dose of public distrust of it. Most people do not believe what the official media says in Iran, Egypt, or Turkey. They read or watch those news sources with a robust dose of suspicion and distrust. The "Western Media" has falsely branded itself against that fact and created a fiction for its falsehood as truth. Dismantling that falsehood and exposing its pernicious lies, or what Adorno and Horkheimer rightly called "mass deception," is very easy.
The best and most formidable force against mass deception of the brand "Western Media" is simple truth-telling. Contrary to the liberal Zionist deceptive prose, the Palestinian predicament is not complicated at all. It is in fact very simple and it has a very simple solution. It is not the story of two peoples with two narratives. It is the story of one people with truth (Palestinians - Christians or Muslims) and another European settler colony (Zionists - liberal or hardcore) with wanton cruelty and violence.
Israel is the last powerful remnant of European colonialism. With astonishing charlatanism it banks on an entire history of Jewish dispossession and Jewish suffering in order to dispossess and cause suffering on Palestinians, steal their land, build a garrison state and put it at the disposal of the continued colonial and imperial interest of Euro-American imperialism.
That is the simple fact, the simple truth, read it once a day and you are immune to all the mass deception of "Western Media".
The Zionists do whatever they please to Palestinians - stealing their land, bulldozing their homes, uprooting their olive trees, coldbloodedly murdering them - and if anyone dares to utter a word against their war crimes and crimes against humanity they and their Zionist fifth columns in the US and Europe start screaming "anti-Semitism" at them - and because anti-Semitism is a European disease deeply rooted in Europe's history, Europeans shut up when they are called anti-Semites.
But the world at large could not care less about this false accusation. We will fight anti-Semitism, we will fight Islamophobia, and we will fight racism, and above all we will fight colonialism and its last bastion Zionism. We will not be silent. We will bear witness to the historic justice of the Palestinian cause. Zionists are murderous thieves. They are stealing Palestine in the bright daylight and they are murdering Palestinians right in front of the world's incredulous eyes.
Hasbara can do all its gimmickry to compromise the truth. But the world is watching. The world is vigilant. Palestinian national liberation as best and most beautifully demonstrated in the global BDS movement and now in the Great March of Return will move on and will triumph over the hasbara of the racist and corrupt Zionist ideology - and Western mainstream media will be bystanders in that beautiful feast of truth.
PALESTINA
The November 12 botched Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip is delineating Tel Aviv’s failure to utilize its army as a tool to achieve Palestinian political concessions.
Now that the Palestinian popular resistance has gone global through the exponential rise and growing success of the Boycott Movement, the Israeli government is fighting two desperate wars.
Following the Gaza attack, Palestinians responded by showering the Israeli southern border with rockets and carried out a precise operation targeting an Israeli army bus.
As Palestinians marched in celebration of pushing the Israeli army out of their besieged region, the fragile political order in Israel, long-managed by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was quickly unraveling.
Two days after the Israeli attack on Gaza, Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, quit in protest of Netanyahu’s ‘surrender’ to the Palestinian Resistance.
Israeli leaders are in a precarious situation. Untamed violence comes at a price of international condemnation and a Palestinian response that is bolder and more strategic each time.
However, failing to teach Gaza its proverbial ‘lesson’ is viewed as an act of surrender by opportunistic Israeli politicians.
While Israel is experiencing such limitations on the traditional battlefield, which it once completely dominated, its war against the global Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is surely a lost battle.
Israel has a poor track record in confronting civil society-based mobilization. Despite the vulnerability of Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation, it took the Israeli government and military seven long years to pacify the popular Intifada, the uprising of 1987. Even then, the jury is still out on what truly ended the popular revolt.
It should be accepted that a global Intifada is much more difficult to suppress, or even contain.
Yet, when Israel began sensing the growing danger of BDS – which was officially launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005 – it responded with the same superfluous and predictable pattern: arrests, violence and a torrent of laws that criminalize dissent at home, while unleashing an international campaign of intimidation and smearing of boycott activists and organizations.
That achieved little, aside from garnering BDS more attention and international solidarity.
The war on the Movement took a serious turn last year when Netanyahu’s government dedicated a largesse of about $72 million to defeat the civil society-led Campaign.
Utilizing the ever-willing US government to boost its anti-BDS tactics, Tel Aviv feels assured that its counter-BDS efforts in the US is off to a promising start. However, it is only recently that Israel has begun to formulate the wider European component of its global strategy.
In a two-day conference in Brussels earlier this month, Israeli officials and their European supporters unleashed their broader European anti-BDS Campaign.
Organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA) and the Europe Israel Public Affairs group (EIPA), the November 6-7 conference was fully supported by the Israeli government, featuring right-wing Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Ze’ev Elkin.
Under the usual pretext of addressing the danger of anti-Semitism in Europe, attendees deliberately conflated racism and any criticism of Israel, of its military Occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.
The EJA Annual Conference has raised Israel’s manipulation of the term ‘anti-Semitism’ to a whole new level, as it drafted a text that will purportedly be presented to prospective members of the European Parliament (MEPs), demanding their signature before running in next May’s élections.
Those who decline to sign – or worse, repudiate the Israeli initiative – are likely to find themselves fending off accusations of racism and anti-Semitism.
This was certainly not the first conference of its kind.
The anti-BDS euphoria that has swept Israel in recent years, yielded several crowded and passionate conferences in luxurious hotels, where Israeli officials openly threatened BDS activists, such as Omar Barghouti. Barghouti was warned by a top Israeli official in a 2016 conference in Jerusalem of “civil assassination” for his role in the organization of the Movement.
In March 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed the Anti-BDS Travel Ban, which requires the Interior Minister to deny entry to the country to any foreign national who “knowingly issued a public call to boycott the state of Israel.”
Since the ban went into effect, many BDS supporters have been detained, deported and barred from entering the country.
While Israel has demonstrated its ability to galvanize self-serving US and other European politicians to support its cause, there is no evidence that the BDS Movement is being quelled or is, in any way, weakening.
On the contrary, the Israeli strategy has raised the ire of many activists, civil society and civil rights groups, angered by Israel’s attempt at subverting freedom of speech in western countries.
Only recently, Leeds University in the UK has joined many other campuses around the world in divesting from Israel.
The tide is, indeed, turning.
Decades of Zionist indoctrination also failed, not only in reversing the vastly changing public opinion on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and rights, but even in preserving the once solid pro-Israel sentiment among young Jews, most notably in the US.
For BDS supporters, however, every Israeli strategy presents an opportunity to raise awareness of Palestinian rights and to mobilize civil society around the world against Israeli occupation and racism.
BDS’ success is attributed to the very reason why Israel is failing to counter its efforts: it is a disciplined model of a popular, civil resistance that is based on engagement, open debate and democratic choices, while grounded in international and humanitarian law.
Israel’s ‘war-chest’ will run dry in the end, for no amount of money could have saved the racist, Apartheid regime in South Africa when it came tumbling down decades ago.
Needless to say, $72 million will not turn the tide in favor of Apartheid Israel, nor will it change the course of history that can only belong to the people who are unrelenting on achieving their long-coveted freedom.
BRASIL
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