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January 10, 2009
Richard Silverstein of the Guardian reports on Israel's foreign ministry attempts to turn the tide of public opinion, which hasn't been going its way recently.
Now, we know that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is orchestrating propaganda efforts designed to flood news websites with pro-Israel arguments and information.
A reader of my blog has received the following email which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a pro-Israel "media volunteer" also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments:
Damn those pesky blog readers and their wicked email-sharing ways.
Over at LP commenter Marks says:
When both sides in this conflict tell such blatant falsehoods so often, they lose credibility....I put it that the situation is now one that there are two sides so deep into propaganda and with almost no credible independent commentary, that the rest of us have no choice but to give it up as a bad job.
True enough, but it's not as though the two sides and their friends in the media are the only sources any more.
Medecins sans frontieres and the ICRC are more likely to be trustworthy sources than politically motivated organisations of any description.
The Israeli propaganda attempt is interesting on a few levels.
It's another (dodgy?) attempt by a government body to make use of web 2.0 - Propaganda 2.0, as MB calls it, that fails to understand how these things work or anticipate unwanted consequences like a blog reader passing an email on to a widely read publication.
It obviously seeks to influence public opinion by creating the impression that it has more public support than it does.
World governments are still patient with Israel's justified operation in Gaza. The [sic] public opinion, on the other hand, is impatient, to say the least. This gap will soon close – it always does.
It is our goal to shift the public opinion, as conveyed in the internet; avoiding, or at least minimising, sanctions by world leaders. We need to buy the IDF enough time to achieve its goals.
The suggestion here is that internet comment reading members of the public will be influenced by the opinions of other commenters, rather than media which is not cooperating. "We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media."
If they're under the impression that commenters on this issue can be swayed by commenters on the other side, they haven't been paying attention. And as commenter OneTooMany on the Silverstein piece points out, "The dead speak louder than spam."
The campaign offers participants a series of dot point talking points, which another commenter, AverageJosph, at Silverstein's points out is also a mistake.
I remember this tactic backfiring on a CIF thread during the Israel/Lebanon War. The first two comments on the thread by two different pro-Israel posters were completely identical, the lazy buggers had just cut'n'pasted the talking points without bothering to individualise them.
Oops.
We're in interesting times when the old communications channels have so obviously broken and the various powers that be are having trouble figuring out how the new ones work. It's just so much harder to maintain the illusion that people are sheep when they have the opportunity to speak.
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I will never forget the problems zionist flying squad trolls attacking Margo Kingston's Web Diary caused, trying to scotch debate on issues like the Intifada, Iraq and the visit to Australia of Palestinian Dr.Hanan Ashrawi, for the awarding of a Peace prize a few years ago.
Its an odd thing tho'. The crude and outrageous antics of the pro Zionist lobby often prove counter productive, because Mittel-European Jewish culture is steeped in the intellectual tradition typified by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Sontag and so many others. The most robust and well-informed debating opponent for the trolls turned out to be Antony Loewenstein, who ended up writing the book "My Israel Question", that questioned so much of the spin and revisionist "history" offered up by the Saluszinsky clones.