KabofestEver since broadcasts of white phosphorous being rained down on the children of Gaza were beamed around the globe last January, Israel has been working overtime to repair the unprecedented damage to its image around the world and provide further justifications for its occupation, ethnic cleansing and racism.
For Israel, propaganda-hasbara-has always been as integral as extreme violence to the formation and maintenance of the state. In fact, the two elements are intertwined; hasbara is needed to justify this extreme violence against the natives and continually portray it as purely defensive. That takes a hit when the world sees pictures of children with horrific white phosphorous burns or policemen murdered en masse at their graduation ceremonies, which is why the Zionist entity and its backers have attacked the Goldstone report (or more accurately, attacking Judge Goldstone himself)-it is the first internationally sanctioned report documenting Israeli violations of human rights and international law.
Aside from slandering those who expose its criminality, hasbara requires Israel to be proactive-hence the much documented propaganda effort in Haiti. The other tactic is to deflect attention; Iran’s nuclear ambitions are the biggest threat to world peace, but Israel’s stockpile of nuclear weapons is somehow benign.
Underlying the importance of propaganda to Israel, a former ambassador wrote a piece in Haaretzurl today claiming that hasbara is both intelligent and necessary. That is only true to those so heavily ingrained in ideologies incompatible with logic, such as Zionism. They need propaganda to explain the enormous damage and suffering they cause, and to justify such a blatantly outdated and supremacist philosophy, both to themselves and to the rest of the world.
The former ambassador, David Admon, shamelessly pushes the need for a state propaganda ministry. He mentions that he suggested this in the 70’s to Menachem Begin who compared Admon’s idea to the Nazi propaganda of Goebbels. Nevertheless, Admon presses on; to him, everything Israelis do must feed the improvement of the Zionist state’s image. In response to accusations that Israel used the Haiti disaster for propaganda purposes he counters “What is the alternative? To remain indifferent?” In Admon’s mindest, the alternative to not using a foreign disaster as a PR event is to do nothing at all.
Admon’s methods are as laughable as his call for an official propaganda ministry is dangerous. His claim that Jerusalem was never a Palestinian capital comes from a Thomas Cook guidebook in 1900-he calls it an ‘indisputably reliable source’- which states that Jews in the city outnumber Palestinians (it doesn’t suit hasbara purposes to point out that those Jews were actually Palestinian). It gets worse:
“Before I set out on my mission in Hungary I bought more than 100 copies of the book “The Case for Israel,” written by American lawyer Alan Dershowitz. I gave it out there to people in the administration, academics and ambassadors. The well-reasoned, fact-based book gave them an opportunity to understand the Israeli side better and to admire the State of Israel.”
Fact based? Again, Zionist propaganda fantasies necessitate some strange beliefs. With their distortions, half-truths and outright lies, Dershowitz’s books are a joke, but they play a major role in hasbara efforts. The man himself has been especially vocal in his criticism of those who dare to criticize Israel since the Gaza massacre; he was consulted as part of Israel’s response to the Goldstone report and yesterday publicly attacked Judge Goldstone as an ‘evil, evil man’ and a ‘traitor to the Jewish [because in the parlance of hasbara, Israeli equals Jewish] people’.
However, Judge Goldstone isn’t is a traitor to honesty and human rights-which is precisely what David Admon and his ilk want to replace with lies and distortions, wrapped up in a shinier façade known as hasbara.
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