Modernity cuts through Israeli Propaganda
If there is anything at all to be glad about this week, it’s that the Israeli Propaganda Machine (IPM) has been completely discredited, in spite of the ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza (an action determined illegal by Israel’s own Supreme Court). Much of this has to do with some advances in New Media. A good indication of Israel’s PR failure at containing shameful news is the eminently absorbing Facebook News Feed. If you have any pro-Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, European, sane, or nice friends, your News Feed is at this point most probably chock full of indignant status updates and disturbing images of Gaza’s victims, its injured, its destroyed infrastructure, and other moving expressions of protest and rage. What with the ballooning size of Facebook and its ever more dense interconnectivity, it will prove difficult for even the most ardent Zionuts to find shelter from the rhetorical assault careening through the Face-sphere. With only the BBC and Al-Jazeera (among major news outlets) maintaining reporting offices in Gaza prior to the ban, Facebook has become an increasingly rich repository of incriminating images– not found anywhere else– posted by Gaza residents, then their family members, and then flowing on outwards via their friends. To borrow from the gay bald French thinker Foucault, a “discourse” is forming… a discourse that is its own agent and operates according to a principle of power which resides in all places at all times, animated by an electrical charge with the potential to strike unpredictably. In Foucault’s analysis as well in the case of Gaza, the spread of information is impossible to control. And Thank God for that.
After the initial struggle of sparking the fire, that is, of getting people talking, the fire grew larger according to its own logic, with the Israeli forest rangers in over their heads trying to contain a 21-st century media inferno while only equipped with unconvincing and disingenuous PR spots which, rather than win over the world to their side, make them sound as honest as car salesmen at Rent-a-Wreck.
Trouble is, there have been increasing reports among Facebook users of censorship when it comes to pro-Palestine speech, as Global Voices Online has highlighted. It would be wise for Facebook and its dapper young entrepreneurs to think long and hard about whether they want to be on the right side of Internet History and make good on the promise of total freedom of information. If the claims of censorship are true, I really wonder what kind of arbitration or peer-review processes are at work. If the average, hypothetical Facebook Peer is an Ivy-educated, latte-sipping liberal who gets squeamish when the word “Israel” gets too close to the word “terror”, the people who are down with Palestine are in for an uphill battle. Thank God Facebook is now popular in other countries with other languages and better politics: Livre du Visage, Gesicht Buch, كتاب الوجه, pick your favorite.
Thanks to video phones (check out Beyoncé’s), Youtube, Skype, and media translation services like Mosaic on Link TV and AlJazeera English, official Israeli narratives of “righteous” destruction are being subverted. As in this very telling BBC exposé of a big, fat lie when the IDF claimed to have successfully targeted militants: instead of destroying Hamas rockets, harmless oxygen tanks had been blown up. Does this mis-recognition of weapons of mass destruction sound at all familiar? An Associated Press story about the Media War and Youtube appears to highlight the same incident but inexplicably neglects to mention that the Israeli version of events has been debunked by the BBC.
Thankfully now, a typical statement from Israel’s Defense Ministry like “IDF strike takes out militant leader” can be laid bare in all its erroneous glory, so that the real meaning comes out: “US-funded F-16 drops megaton bomb on apartment building, killing 22 women and children as well as Hamas garbage collector”. The IDF public relations strategy of spewing and spitting the word “Hamas” almost as many times as the word “Terror” (both of which are assassinated a hundred times over by the Israeli accent) ceases to be so convincing. There should be drinking games based on these words if that suggestion weren’t so sad. The Khamas Tekhor opekhation khefuses to khelent and will give up khockets for lent, three Khamas schoolgirls, four tekhokhist donkey carts, five Khamas Falafels! Whoops I’m drunk…
thanks for the smiles al fannaan. i found out you know a friend of mine by the way.
programmer craig, YOU are a war crime, you can suck it
thanks for the smiles al fannaan. i found out you know a friend of mine by the way.
programmer craig, YOU are a war crime, you can suck it
thanks for the smiles al fannaan. i found out you know a friend of mine by the way.
programmer craig, YOU are a war crime, you can suck it
thanks for the smiles al fannaan. i found out you know a friend of mine by the way.
programmer craig, YOU are a war crime, you can suck it
with a view towards what exactly?
To stopping the rocket fire.
that’s the end of your story?
Yes.
keep the bombs coming?
As long as the rockets are, yes.
and what about that occupation and settlement building over in the part of Palestine still illegally occupied?
I don’t accept the premise of your question.
do you think that could have anything to do with this entire mess?
No, I think your talk of “occupation” is a pretext for waging war on Jews, as explicitly called for in the Hamas charter and by every Palestinian religious and cultural leader who has ever spoken on the subject.
Thank you for holding on to your manners.
and what about that occupation and settlement building over in the part of Palestine still illegally occupied?
“I don’t accept the premise of your question.”
and with that, anon, you show how, of course, you can always be right…because reality, history, and the facts don’t matter when it’s not convenient for you. manners be damned – you are a fucking fool.
and with that, Alfy, you show how, of course, you can always be right…because reality, history, and the facts don’t matter when it’s not convenient for you. manners be damned – you are a fucking fool.
The only people who support Israel are:
1) The Ignorant
2) The Bigoted
I have news for the bigoted leading the ignorant – the world won’t remain ignorant forever.
When I was 20, I had to go to a library to look up the Balfour Declaration, and actually read it. I had to go to library to read resolution 181 and 194, and I had to go to a library to find out who Count Bernadotte was, what the King David Hotel bombing was, and to know what the Irgun was.
It’s all on the internet now. You will not win this battle with your propaganda, it will fall apart in the face of truth. Apartheid fell thanks to the likes of Ronnie Kasrils, Zionism will likewise collapse and be relegated forever to the trashbin of history where Apartheid, the KKK, and Nazism belong.
You can’t keep a lie going forever, not in this day and age. You can try, and try as hard as you will, you filthy bigots will fail.