Just email marketing – blog

Something is happening there that he or she should be aware of before it goes public.

WINNING THE MEDIA WAR
Twitter, YouTube, blogs – Israel has proved a master of networking. Shame it’s being used to promote a bloody conflict

* Rachel Shabi
-guardian.co.uk, Saturday 10 January 2009 15.00 GMT

One of the things that annoyed Israel about the second Lebanon war was that it ended prematurely – without a clean Israeli victory against Hezbollah. The Jewish state considered that this, in part, was the result of a lily-livered international community balking at the sight of more than 1,000 civilian deaths – not to mention the devastation of Lebanese infrastructure – and deciding that enough was enough. Consequently, one of the recommendations of an Israeli committee investigating the war was that Israel set up an information/propaganda coordination body, to keep those pesky liberals on message even when bloody images of the victims of Israeli assaults were relayed across world media.

Israel’s war on Gaza was the first time we saw the “hasbara” directive in action. A body set up to spin (or “explain”, if you like) the country’s justifications for the war, it tightly coordinated key messages and worked on so many levels – mainstream media as well as diplomatic channels, friendship leagues, YouTube, Twitter and the blogosphere – that the effect was epidemic. It got world media repeating the Israeli government’s core messages practically verbatim. Those messages boil down to, and I’m paraphrasing here: “Hamas is a vile terrorist group; they started it, and you must support Israel’s defensive war because we’re civilised, just like you.” For just one glimmer of the success rate, check how many of the US media talking heads collated by the Daily Show use the Israeli government’s own analogy to explain the assaults on Gaza.

Palestinians didn’t stand a chance against such coordination. Media monitors chastised the disproportionate use of Israel spokespeople over Palestinian ones in coverage of the assault. Campaigners gloomily forwarded emails with the message: “What we’re up against.” One email comprised a “language guide” issued by the Israel Project, advising supporters of how best to describe Hamas’s “Iran-backed war on Israel”. Another came from (or was forwarded by) an Israeli overseas mission, urging supporters to vote in a German newspaper’s online poll on Gaza. The email warned that the longer the conflict continued, “more people here will be overwhelmed with mercy for poor Hamasnikkim”. (For more on this, see here.)

Indeed, that’s a core discussion within the Israeli media: how long have we got before the world forces us to stop? Reports, especially in the first week, comprised interviews with Israeli correspondents in Europe and the US commenting on how well the media had swallowed the Israeli message.

While Israeli PR is strong and strategic, Palestinian PR is hopeless. The rift between the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza means that there are no clear messages and no real capacity to counter Israeli officials. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian MP and former information minister, holds this to be as a result of incompetence and a lack of political clarity. He says that Hamas don’t know how to do media, while the PA “did not behave as it should, as a representative of all the Palestinian people. Their messages were either absent, weak or delayed”. He laments the continued split between Fatah and Hamas. “They don’t realise that in such a moment of crisis when their people are being slaughtered, they have to rise above it.”

Palestinian commentators point to an obvious imbalance: Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the start of the war, effectively pulling the blinds over events within the strip. But Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib says there is another factor at play in the overall media skew. “Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages, Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida,” he says. As a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel – because it fits the “us or them” binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.

What all this shows us is how well Israel understands how western media works, how best to utilise its blind spots and prejudices. Israel clearly has the vision, the networking capacity and the resources to use world media to full effect. If I were the marketing manager of an ailing global product, I’d be taking notes. And we can only wonder what such talents could achieve if only the end goal were really peace, not war.

[For the article with refernces, sources and further links, please see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/gaza-israel-media]
Give_me_truth, its easy man. if you don’t want to read paragraphs of ‘horse sh*t’, don’t bother answering.

Unless you’re real desperate for those two yahoo points.
Tony B, there’s no such thing as a ‘palestinian agency’ (showing your total lack of knowledge), but there is MOSAD.

And in any debate, when one side leaves the intellectual arenca and merely watersown their arguments to pure unintellectual ranting and personal accusations, then it is a sign of their demise.

And Tony, just as Y!A is for questions its also for answers, and you’ve failed to answer mine…
Kimimela, it doesnt seem like these israelis have better things to do:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article693911.ece

And this email has beent sent out:

“Dear friends,

We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it’s a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment.

I was asked by the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange a network of volunteers, who are willing to contribute to this effort. If you’re up to it you will receive a daily messages & media package as well as targets.

If you wish to participate, please respond to this email.”

[see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/09/israel-foreign-ministry-media for more].
Also, kimimela, Rachel Shabi was born and lives in Israel (so its not just you and you’re ‘2 years in intifada-ridden israel’! See http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/rachelshabi)

As for those pictures we never see of Israeli racism and hatred, then that’s exactly because of the Israeli media war Im talking about (thank you for proving me right).

Which is why you don’t see recent pics like this in mainstream media:

http://portail.islamboutique.fr/gaza2008/

Which is why Israel has placed illegal restrictions on journalists entering gaza.

hich is why we don’t see reports of Israeli racism like these pictures and reports show:

http://www.ccun.org/Editorials/2007/October%20articles/Photo%20Gallery%20Israeli%20Occupation%20of%20Palestine.htm

http://ccun.org/News/2007/October/19%20n/Illegal%20Israeli%20settlers%20attacks%20on%20Palestinians%20in%20Hebron%20include%20beatings,%20property%20damage,%20throwing%20of%20stones,%20eggs,%20and%20even%20bottles%20of%20urine.htm

And you and other pro-zionist supporters all just prove what rachel was saying:

“”Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages, Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida,” he says. As a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel – because it fits the “us or them” binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.”"

And like Tony B and other pro-Israeli posters, you adequately fit these characterisitcs of ‘disinformationalists’:

http://thegreendragon.ning.com/group/greendragonanswers/forum/topics/eight-traits-of-the

and rkanjil, you’re accusations against of ‘hamas-is=to-blame’ and ‘its hamas’ fault we’re killing women and children’ have all been heard before and exposed as mere propaganda in line with Israeli PR:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

These Israeli attrocities and crimes were all done hundreds of times before with the same excuse, which even Israeli generals have exposede as a ‘bluff’:

Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972:
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.”

And I’ve never seen Hamas using ‘human shields’, but here’s a pic of Israelis chaining palestinian kids to their vehicles as shields:

http://www.ccun.org/Editorials/2007/October%20articles/Photo%20Gallery%20Israeli%20Occupation%20of%20Palestine.htm