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Day 2 January, 2009

Entries 2 Total

Israel’s new propaganda unit: the National Information Directorate

Jan 2, ’09 2:54 PM

Nat­ur­ally, Zion­ism sees new media as “a new war zone”:

The body, known as the National Inform­a­tion Dir­ect­or­ate, was set up eight months ago fol­low­ing recom­mend­a­tions from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with has­bara — mean­ing, in Hebrew, “explan­a­tion”, and refer­ring vari­ously to inform­a­tion, spin, and propaganda.

One of the chal­lenges of Israel’s media offens­ive has been to counter the dis­turb­ing images of Gaza in the con­flict. “In the war of the pic­tures we lose, so you need to cor­rect, explain or bal­ance it in other ways,” said Aviv Shir-On, for­eign min­istry deputy director-general for pub­lic affairs. “Sup­port doesn’t mean the world is stand­ing behind us, but it does mean people under­stand what we are doing and why.

The has­bara dir­ect­ive also liaises over core mes­sages with bod­ies such as friend­ship leagues, Jew­ish com­munit­ies, blog­gers and back­ers using online net­works. Last week the dir­ect­or­ate star­ted a You­Tube chan­nel show­ing Israeli bomb­ings in the Gaza strip. “New media is a new war zone within the media — we are plan­ning to be rel­ev­ant there,” said Leibovich.

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The intellectual dishonesty of those who don’t speak out against Zionism

Jan 2, ’09 2:25 PM

It’s deplor­able the num­ber of people, mostly so-called “lib­er­als,” who choose to keep their mouths shut in the face of the scourge that is Zion­ism, some­thing Ron­nie Kas­rils, a South African politi­cian who was act­ive in the fight against apartheid from the 60’s onwards, described as “far worse” than apartheid South Africa.

Ima­gine what these same people would be say­ing, or doing, if their own coun­try had been unlaw­fully occu­pied and embar­goed for 60 years of relent­less oppres­sion and repres­sion, and all attempts at peace­ful change had been force­fully pre­ven­ted or scuttled.

And yet they don’t stay silent because they think Zion­ism is a just cause, surely; it’s clearly not. They stay silent because of 9/11 and the sub­sequent con­fla­tion of any Arab oppos­i­tion to West­ern dom­in­ance as ter­ror­ism. They stay silent because of the Jew­ish Holo­caust — some­thing the Arabs had noth­ing to do with — because they’re too scared of been tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism.

And mean­while we have aber­ra­tions like John Bolton — who have long torn up the les­sons of WWII—still run­ning around try­ing to start WWIII on the back of it all.

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