Lies, damn lies, and hasbara fiction – now targeting young minds

By Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood shows how Israel’s international propaganda effort is well-organized and systematic, and includes courses and training manuals for propagandists, noting that, by contrast, its Arab adversaries are “lazy, shiftless, unresponsive and a closed shop”.

Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of sugar-coating and downright lying so that gullible audiences will easily swallow their poison.

Notice how everything Israelis dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

Propaganda manual and its students

A 116-page instruction manual, called the “2009 Global Language Dictionary”, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which describes itself as “non-partisan” on Twitter but elsewhere says it’s “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. Click here for an evaluation.

TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West.

And because God, the great real estate agent in the sky, gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivellers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and their contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

Here’s a sample slice of hasbara (i.e. pro-Israel propaganda) from the comments to a recent article I penned about the great American journalist Grace Halsell, who fought tirelessly for justice and did so much to expose the nonsense peddled by Christian-Zionism before she died in 2000:

Pad Dar Top Commenter There is no place called p-stine. My suggestion for p-stinian sympathizers is that you should visit, find out what it is REALLY like there without anyone from either side telling you. REALLY find out what you are supporting. Me thinks this reader [commenter later edited this to ‘writer’] has *NEVER* visited the place called pstine. But, you should. Israel is all over the Book of Revelation. There ARE, in fact, close to 300K Messianis and Christians in Israel. The word of GOD does NOT change, with or without Hagee. God plainly says to “bless” Israel. OF COURSE it matters if their government sticks and that should be reported. But, what this site and millions of others FAIL to do, is narrow it down TO the Israeli govt. But, you don’t, so everyone hates Israelis because of that. Very unfortunate. VISIT P-stine. Especially near S. ISRAEL, close to Sderot and Ashkelon, and WAKE THE HELL UP. There is NO American that I know that wants rockets shot at them on a DAILY basis. But, of course, GRACE (BAD name for an UN graceful person) you don’t report THAT.

In the back of my Bible there’s a map of “Palestine at the time of our saviour”. An earlier map of the same territory calls it Canaan. True, there’s also a map showing the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel which came to a sticky end in 597BC. If you click here you’ll see how the Jewish Virtual Library (part of The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise) has wiped Palestine off their modern-day map, so let’s hear no more about Hamas or Iran wanting to wipe Israel off the map.

There was even a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem for nearly 100 years, but we don’t make a big fuss about it.

In any case, who takes the scribblings of ancient scribes – the hasbara myth-makers of their time – without a very large pinch of salt?

Pad Dar gratuitously insults Grace when she’s not here to defend herself, and seems to be saying that Grace never visited the place called “Pstine”. Grace, in one of her own articles, says: “By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians. My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem.”

And this tribute to her in the Washington Report tells us:

In highly acclaimed books such as Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics, she described her young years as a Christian and trips to the Holy Land she later took, “disguised” as a follower, with televangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell. She revealed the unsavoury relationship between Falwell and right-wing Israeli leaders, reporting, for example, that the evangelical Falwell had been provided by Israel with an expensive private plane. And that, despite the fact that some 15 per cent of Palestinians are Christian, Falwell’s American Christian tour groups rarely saw or had the opportunity to talk to Middle East Christians.

Or was our hasbara commenter claiming I’ve never visited Palestine? If so, wrong again. The question is, has Pad Dar ever been there?

He/she talks of Sderot and rockets. The hasbara instruction manual has the following advice:

“Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Israelis claim 12,000 rockets were fired from Gaza in the eight years up to the start of Operation Cast Lead. But they never say how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza in the same period.

And they are careful not to mention that the township of Sderot, targeted by Gaza’s rockets and therefore a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime, is built on the ruins of an ethnically-cleansed Palestinian village called Najd, whose inhabitants were forced to flee by Jewish terrorists in May 1948. Najd wasn’t allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan – they stole it at gun-point.

There is no American that I know, or Briton, who would stand for being thrown out of his home by foreign thugs. So, if anyone needs to wake the hell up it’s you, Pad Dar! Get a grip on the facts.

Remember, too, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda, shown on my biblical map of Palestine, was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque. Of all the blood-baths, they say this was the biggest. Click here for lurid details.

Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. The others who survived the murderous onslaught were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.

Who was responsible for this act of infamy? Answer: Israel’s great “hero”, Moshe Dayan, who later became defence minister and foreign minister.

Next time you touch down at Ben Gurion airport, Pad Dar, you should kiss the ground and say, “Hi Palestine, nice to see you again.” Israel has no right to it at all – it was stolen in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages. Is this how the great real estate agent in the sky hands over the keys to the old kingdom?

I have also received another gem from somebody calling themselves “Michelle”:

Your remarks about “Israel occupying the Holy Land” reflects an embarrassingly ignorance of the facts. Israel is the Holy Land, established 3,000 years ago by the Jewish people, verified by the archaeological record and Biblical and Quranic texts, in which Israel appears 2,500 times. Jesus Christ is called the King of Israel in the New Testament and an entire chapter in the Quran is devoted to “Bani Isra’il” – “The Children of Israel”. Your so-called palestinians are merely illegal Arab interlopers, most of whom invaded Israel in the early to mid-20th century. The most common “palestinian” surname is al-Masri, “the Egyptian”. In fact, Jews are the only indigenous nation ever established in Israel over the course of the last 3,000 years.

Fact or hasbara fiction, Michelle? Are you by any chance another one of the hundreds of cyber-scribblers hired and trained by the Tel Aviv lie machine?

Meet the hasbara experts

The Israel Project among other things offers students a Media Fellowship with nine of weeks training and a stipend of 2,500 US dollars. One of the fellowships is in Web Advocacy and Outreach under Brandon Gray, who has former connections with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) campaign training institute in Washington. The tasks it covers include:

Online pro-Israel advocacy by updating TIP’s Twitter and Facebook accounts

Posting TIP videos on Facebook and YouTube

Monitoring anti-Israel websites and news outlets.

TIP’s “David Project” is designed to

educate and prepare college students to assume leadership roles and support their efforts to deliver Israel programmes and events to thousands of students on their campuses. Our ground-breaking Israel education curricula and our unique programmes are present in more than 130 Jewish high schools and middle schools, laying a foundation for pro-Israel attitudes and advocacy in college and beyond.

Sinister. Imagine the situation in, say, five years’ time. The Arabs and Iranians, and specifically the Palestinians, set their face against media training and communications long ago. They are amateurs, and in the case of the Palestinians not even that. Lazy, shiftless, unresponsive and a closed shop. Writers like me have no access, receive no support. Why do we bother? Good question. It now has more to do with resisting the tide of Zionism that swamps our own country.

TIP’s executive director, Marcus Sheff, served in the Israeli army for 25 years – “the world’s most moral army”. Did he dream that one up, by any chance? He was a prominent spokesperson for the Israeli military during the second Intifada and the Lebanon war. Today, he trains senior Israeli army officers in media skills.

Josh Block is chief executive officer and president of TIP, and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. He’s dead against the Palestinians gaining statehood and wrote in Politico that the Obama administration and Congress were right to stand against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and must vigorously lobby other countries, large and small, to join in pressing the Palestinian Authority to call it off. If Palestinians go ahead it would undermine the quest for peace and risk anti-Israel terrorism.

Block says another reason for opposing the Palestinian move is that “recognition of this Palestinian government would be the recognition of a terrorist state – given the Hamas-Fatah unity pact…”

There are the legal reasons too, he says. “These underscore that the fictional Palestinian state conjured up for the United Nations doesn’t meet international law standards…”

Screamingly funny, that, considering that Israeli law falls well short.

“…And it doesn’t have defined territory… Perhaps most important, it would be a terrorist ‘state’, ruled by Hamas, which the EU, the United States, Japan, Canada and other countries have designated as a terrorist organization.”

The article simply oozes hasbara. Block throws in other reasons such as economic stability and political institutions, reliance on 1 billion dollars from donor states and another 1.5 billion dollars in tax revenue collected [but often withheld] by the Israeli government, and how “the Palestinian Authority is in the midst of a financial crisis”.

Those things, of course, couldn’t have anything to do with the illegal occupation and strangulation of the West Bank and the illegal blockade of Gaza by Block’s nice friends, could it?

And isn’t Israel in receipt of billions of American tax dollars disguised as aid?

No prizes for guessing that Block is the former spokesman for AIPAC.