Comment posted, damage done
Internet pages are fighting ring where Israel supporters try to ward off millions of pro-Palestinian posters. In hectic, viral world of talkbacks, every photo is replied, every reply is commented on, every comment has minute-long shelf life before it is challenged by rivals
On July 11, the Middle East made headlines in Italy again. Not one missile fell in Israeli territory, nor was a terrorist killed in Gaza. Still, for 24 hours, one feature did not escape the headlines on the La Repubblica website, one of the two most popular news sources in the country: “Israeli soldiers,” the website reported with a video, “arrested a five-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank for throwing rocks.” The IDF maintained that the boy was merely detained and then released back to his parents, but many Italian surfers saw enough to unholster.
“They should be annihilated,” surfer Fabrizio posted on the La Repubblica Facebook page, which attracts over 1.2 million readers. “Hitler should come back and destroy you, dirty fascists,” surfer Salvino added. Surfer Fabio posted “Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Germans did to them,” while surfer Terry posted a response reading “these are the Nazis of the third millennium, but because they have money and American friends, the Palestinians are the ones seen as terrorists.” A particularly active poster named Viviana wrote: “Israel is a murderous country! It’s committing an unprecedented ethnic cleansing! Poor Palestinians.”
Some 600 comments pile on the website; bold, poisonous, at times succinct and often not. Suddenly, someone raises a challenge. “What are you talking about?” Ehud wards off Viviana in fluent Italian. “Ethnic cleansing? Daily injury of women and children? Do you have proof or are you just firing slander? Remember reality is not black and white, and that one must always study things before taking such a stark stand.” A Palestinian named Mussa replies: “Ehud, why doesn’t Israel restore the ’67 lines instead of building in settlements, considering Palestinians have acknowledged its existence? Under what right did Israel take away my country?”
“Mussa,” Ehud replies politely, “before we can talk about borders, one real development must occur — the realization of both nations that the country will have to be shared. I’m afraid that realization has not yet taken place. Hamas crying out against Israel’s existence and Israel building new settlements both testify to that.”
Ehud Assoulin is a 26-year-old from Ramat Hasharon who has been living and studying in Rome for the past four years. “I started posting comments in Italian for Israel during Operation Cast Lead,” he said, “when Italian media was turbulent, and I saw an array of media distortions and prejudice about Israel. It made me angry on the simplest and most moral level and I felt that I couldn’t stay indifferent.”
Since then, unusual news regarding Israel set him at the computer screen: “My goal is to make Italians think and go past the ordinary and simplistic patters they are mostly captive in, to make them realize that in reality things are much more complex.”
Assoulin is one of many Israelis, Jews and Zionists abroad who take part in the most informal and quiet hasbara war in recent years: The war of comment posters.
Dubbed “Talkbacks” in Hebrew, comments first appeared in the bottom of news websites, where they were carefully screened for swear words and racism, but recently they’ve wandered to the news Facbook pages, which attracts hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers. There, under a full name and without masks, anything goes.
Now, in the Israeli-Palestinian battle for world opinion, comments are an unusual battlefield: They are the only arena in virtual space that creates a direct, real-time and active conflict between Israel’s supporters and its opponents. Here, cleaver illustrations of missiles or a screen caption of a mother shielding her children from missiles will not do; in the neurotic world of talkbacks, every photo has a reply, every reply has a comment, and every comment has a minute-long shelf life before it too is debunked by rivals. Which truth will eventually win – the Israeli one or the Palestinian one? Much of it depends on comment posters’ perseverance and their devotion to the battle of the minds.
4% write, 30% read
Dr. Tzvi Reich from the Department of Communication in Ben-Gurion University took part in a thorough international study where Internet surfing and comment posting habits were studied on 24 leading news websites in the world, from the US to France, from Germany to Estonia. He said the comment posters’ ability to control discourse compared to their size in the population is simply enormous. Studies in the world and in Israel, he said, show that only 4%-7% of news website surfers post comments, and a much larger percent reads them: 30%-40% of surfers.
“A small group of comment posters who are skilled and devoted can monopolize an article, such as a political item in Israel, and appear as a majority, or at least larger than it is,” he said. It is clear to him that comments posted on news websites have psychological effects as well: “A surfer can read a comment on an article and understand they’re in the minority and feel bad about it, like they’re on the wrong side.”
That is the exact reason why some try to show surfers “the right side”. Avishai Bitton, a 24-year-old student from Rishon Lezion, is another Israeli web warrior. As a child, he came to Israel from New York, where he lived right across from the UN Headquarters. During his military service, a while after the operation in Gaza in 2009, he went to visit family in the US and passed by a pro-Palestinian rally in the Big Apple. The chasm between the signs reading “Israel is a murderer” and his experiences as a soldier in the most moral army in the world, as he continuously calls it, jolted him. Since then, he has been there: Morning, noon, night, whenever is needed. Coffee on the table, laptop in his hands, looking for virtual battles around the world.
“There isn’t a day when I don’t visit an international news website,” he says. “Some days the world is merciful and focuses on Syria and I can sleep. But you find yourself awake at night, and it’s not just due to empathizing with the State, it’s because of wanting justice. You write ten lines in a comment just so you can go to bed at night and say, ‘I did what I could, I showed the other side of the story as much as possible.’ There were days when I spent 12-14 hours in front of news site. I got up in the morning, I sat at the computer; and only went to sleep when I could no longer write.”
Comment posters, he knows well, are cruel. Next to legitimate criticism about Israel, in the bottom of the world’s news websites, he and his peers have seen the most blatant of lies. When surfers see a Palestinian’s body, they start chanting lies: That the Israelis drink Arabs’ blood and rape women at checkpoints.
They share experiences from their latest visit to the Gaza Strip and talk about Israeli soldiers who torture children for fun while drinking and laughing. It is unclear how many of them know that other than in special operations, there have been no Israeli soldiers in Gaza for eight years. It does not matter: Comment posted, damage done. Bitton tries to beat them with words and images: Strives to expose hasbara lies by the other side, prove commenters’ ignorance, and raise questions that could dent their absolute faith.
“When you’re fluent in a language and know local customs, it gives you another perspective,” he said. “Surfers think, here is a person who is from my country and is out there and telling us what he’s experienced. Knowing Americans, for example, I don’t comment on a news item the same on the Republican Fox News website as I do on the liberal CNN website. I can appeal to emotion on Fox News since its surfers are predisposed to support Israel, CNN’s liberal readers need more logic and data. They want to know how and why; you have to show them less familiar angles.”
‘Like teaching cows to read’
The comment war suggests that maybe we do not suffer from a persecution complex; that maybe Israel is covered not proportionally to its size. Dr. Reich said that editors of news websites around the globe who took part in his study all said one issue makes their comment system spin more than any other: “Editors all over the world, from the Washington Post, from the Guardian, from Die Welt, from La Figaro, all talk about an influx of comments on any item related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“In the comments for any item, the discourse deteriorates to hate speech. Website editors described the experiences saying,’you posted an item about the Mideast? You won’t get any sleep.’ They map out organized pro-Palestinian and Palestinian communities on one side, and pro-Jewish or Jewish communities on the other, that fight between them and ravage any new item published.”
But Israelis and Jewish communities in the Diaspora are not alone in the fight. “The majority of the people writing pro-Israel talkbacks are not Jewish,” said Philip Fabian, a 32-year-old German from Berlin. “I never started to write pro-Israeli talkbacks consciously. I am a classic news-junkie, and the internet contributed a lot in developing my political conscience, starting in the post 9/11 world and the Intifada of the last decade. It made me realize the obvious shortcomings of mainstream media news outlets, especially when it comes to Israel.”
The experience he describes sounds thoroughly Israeli: “With many people, after discussing and repeating the same things again and again, you realize that you are in a loop with no way out, and you know that trying to explain Israel or anti-Semitism to them is like trying to teach a cow how to read. But sometimes, you realize some people start to change bit by bit, because they admit to themselves that you are right in some points, or because they get a point of view on things that they haven’t encountered before.”
His comment activism came at a cost: “At times, the urge to argue about Israel was very strong, and it became an extremely time-consuming activity,” he said. “I wouldn’t let go of an online argument, even late at night or even during work time, and I lost a few friends who thought I was obsessed, but I don’t regret it. Advocating for Israel introduced me to new friends.”
The most skilled comment posters know to characterize other comment posters according to their land, and describe Latin America as one of the most problematic zones for Israel: “There’s a horrible knowledge base there,” a senior comment poster said, “Sometimes people write about Israel like they used to talk about the world being flat, showing false data and ‘facts’ that make us cry and laugh simultaneously.”
Trying to set the record straight is Nissim Tarrab, a 20-year-old fromVenezuela who is studying for his bachelor in communication in Israel. Every day he logs on to the biggest Spanish news sites: From papers of his own country, to the Argentinean Clarin and the Spanish El Pais.
“There have been a lot of changes in Latin America recently, and common financial interests with Arab countries cause South American countries to side with the Palestinians,” he said. “From there it sometimes looks like Israel is a dictatorship where Arabs have no rights. I read the news in Spanish every day, and when I find a story that sheds a negative and unjustified light on Israel, I’m moved to clarify the situation based on facts.
“It’s often frustrating, and some comment posters are not worth the debate. We got used to anti-Semitic remarks glorifying Hitler and denying the holocaust, but I’ll never forget seeing comment posters who justified the Fogel family massacre, who said that Palestinians experience that everyday. I was shocked, I couldn’t understand it.”
A lost cause in the comment war is the Arab arena, but even there, it turns out, there are those who maintain the wellbeing of Zionism. A few Arab Israelis who were part of hasbara efforts during various wars refused to be interviewed, but young Saudi Hussein, resident of Riyadh, is proud of his work. He started posting comments supporting Israel four years ago.
“I admit that I used to hate Israel because of the propaganda in the Arab and Muslim world,” he said, “And I even thought any dialogue with Israelis is treason. But as time passed, my opinions changed, and the Israelis I talk to helped me see the facts.” Hussein saves Israel’s face on Arab websites and on Facebook. More than once, he said, he has received hateful comments from extreme Islamists, as he calls them, who were enraged about his support of Israel’s existence and about negative comments he made regarding Hamas and Hezbollah.
“I write that I’m a good friend of Israel and Israelis and I’m proud of it,” Hussein said. His Saudi friends are aware of his odd hobby, and he said some support him and some do not care. He is not afraid of the Saudi regime, either: “I know the red lines in my country. If you attack religious symbols like Muhammad, you’re in trouble, but if you praise Israel – there’s nothing to worry about. Many Saudis support peace with Israel, and many famous Saudi individuals, like the manager of Al-Arabiya, said wonderful things about it without anything happening.”
Hussein’s work, naturally, is especially difficult: “Lies in the Arab media are many and big, and anything negative relates to Israel. The latest lie is of course by Assad supporters, who accuse Israel of aiding Jihadists in Syria. To those who call Israel a criminal I explain that Arabs in Israel live a much better life than Arabs in Egypt,Lebanon, Syria or Jordan, and that Israel is a democratic country that doesn’t discriminate. I emphasize that Israel must blockade Gaza to protect itself from terror organizations, and that food and medicine are always being sent to the Gaza Strip.”
But it works the other way, as well. The Israeli army of comment posters is made up of idealists driven by a sense of calling who want to prove the world wrong, but some of them say they themselves sometimes are faced with complex reality, and enemy comments seed doubts in them. Some incidents are hard to justify, some killing is avoidable, and sometimes they too are convinced that Israelis can do more for peace.
“I’m generally very convicted of the importance of Zionist work,” said Assoulin, “So there isn’t a comment poster who made me question the idea that Israel is based on, but such massive exposure to opposite opinions has made me see the reality in a more balanced way. I also don’t rush to justify everything Israel does. When soldiers in the West Bank detained the five-year-old, I clarified in my comments that I think the soldiers were wrong, and focused on explaining the context, the fact that what happened was a detainment and a slap on the wrist, not an arrest, and that it’s not a game of good vs. bad.” Many comment posters also say that the building in the settlements is an action they find difficult to explain.
Copy-paste hatred
The most successful attempt to raise an army of comment posters was during Operation Cast Lead, when the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya started a round-the-clock “war room”, where 1,600 multilingual students, mostly foreign students who were studying in Israel at the time, commented on major news websites. Three teams focused on posting comments to websites in 34 languages and 61 countries, and reached, they estimate, 20 million computer screens. Other than comments in English, Spanish and Russian, they made sure to leave pro-Israeli comments on websites in Georgia, Turkey, South Korea and other arenas not considered “classic”, all in the country’s native tongue.
Avishai Bitton at IDC online comments war room
“The idea we worked by was that we are not official representatives of the country, but simple people writing about our personal feelings living under fire, and that’s how we achieved what we did,” said Yarden Ben-Yosef, who started the war room. “I remember that on a news site in Denmark, comment posters promoted an anti-Israeli protest, and our posters developed a dialogue with them and showed them, in Danish, the Hamas Charter that calls to destroy Israel and links to Hamas summer camps that teach Palestinian children hate. Remarkably, a comment poster who was so active in promoting the protest suddenly admitted he never saw those things before.”
The problem is, comment posters say, that on regular, days Israel doesn’t hold an army of commenters. During a military operation, a force like that may be started ad hoc, but the comment war is a long-term war and it is daily events — from the killing of terrorists depicted as innocent citizens to releasing Palestinian murderers depicted as “political prisoners” — that keep it in motion. World opinion, therefore, continues to form in the war between the wars.
IDC comment war room (Photo: Oren Kochavi)
Firing online comments in 34 languages to 61 countries (Photo: Oren Kochavi)
Four years ago, it was said that the Foreign Ministry was starting a division of paid comment posters to increase Israeli presence online, but the idea never took off. The Foreign Ministry explained that not only questions of cost went into the process, but questions of morals and reliability. A country that pays people, regardless of their opinion, to market it to the world, guised as independent surfers, is playing a very dangerous game.
“Even in the hasbara war, not all means are ‘kosher’, let alone if we consider ourselves to be the good side,” said Foreign Ministry’s Department of Digital Diplomacy Director Yoram Morad. “I’ve heard of programs that can flood pages with pro-Israeli messages, we could open fictitious profiles, but beyond the fact that such deceit is easily exposed these days — it’s just not the way.” Although comments are the only arena of direct conflict, the Foreign Ministry believes they are of less importance than viral posts on Facebook and Twitter or presence in the radio, television and printed press.
The keyboard fighters attest almost unanimously that in the visibility fight on comment pages, the Israeli defeat is absolute; according to numbers alone, we are David all over again, and the Arabs – Goliath. Israel is a melting pot with a huge potential of bilingual and multilingual comment posters, but in certain countries in the world, blue-and-white comments that question the news report itself or the comments on it, are mere isles in a sea of pro-Palestinian reproach.
Yarden Ben-Yosef said that in this war, numbers matter as much as words. “Even if the most intelligent writer writes a comment rich with data and historical facts, no one will read it because it’s too long. Ten pro-Palestinian comments that simply say “murderers” or another emotional word will win the battle for the readers hearts and on public opinion, and we should strive to balance the playing field, numbers-wise.”
Avishai Bitton disagrees with him. He calls those comments “copy-paste hatred” and in that game, if you ask him, we lost before the starting shot was even fired. A billion and a half Muslims sprinkled with anti-Israeli European sentiment leave no room for several dozens of millions of Israel-supporting Jews and Christians. “I don’t deny the fact that when the layman reader sees that about 90% of comments slander Israel they tend to adopt the position, but I think we shouldn’t focus on those readers, since it’s a lost cause. We should focus on intelligent readers who are genuinely interested in the conflict, who in 10 or 20 years will be leaders in their countries. It’s better to lose a thousand students on a campus in the US but gain the sympathy of one honors student of international relations, the one who will one day be a UN diplomat and have much more impact on our fate.”
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem believes that institutional focus on comments is unrealistic, and the strategy of “pressure on the whole field” (investing in relations with pro-Israeli organizations, universities and key communities abroad) is the right way to create meaningful hasbara leverage, which will vicariously move the wheels of pro-Israeli comment posts. Until then, they’re relying heavily on independent initiative.
“We won’t find four million state workers who will post comments,” said Morad, “and that’s why Israelis need to understand that in that area, things depend on them much more than on the government. We can each do something, even if it’s educating two surfers, and the ministry’s job is to make sure there are no Israelis who wish to join the effort and find they have no one to turn to for tools and information.”
Roi Kais contributed to this report
Vinnie Said:
I don’t engage in that type of activity,but I do have ways of promoting Jews and Israel.
@ honeybee:
I use what works depending on the audience. I’ve been at this for a while. How about you?
My pro-Israel letters to the editor of the local paper over more than ten years were so effective that the local Arabs got me banned from publication. Members of the local Jewish community still thank me for them, even though I have not been published – under my own name, at least – in two years.
At any rate, I’m surely not as long winded as some others around here…
@ Vinnie:
Excellent, then you know long-winded intellectual argument don’t work. Israel’s advance in ag,water usage, and irrigation methods go a lot farther.
@ yamit82:
I replied to you at length but it simply disappeared. Spam filter? Don’t know why. Hope Ted finds it and posts it.
In case he doesn’t, ultra condensed, I’ll just say for now that one should not confuse the idea of an “unwinnable war” with an “unwinnable strategy”. Johnson/MacNamara were employing a strategy that could not win, out of fear that doing otherwise would provoke WW3 with Russia and/or China.
Nixon correctly reckoned that Russia and China would not go to the mat with the U.S. over Vietnam. He launched an air campaign that “took off the gloves” in a manner that combat leaders in the field, like Robin Olds, had urged Johnson to do, in vain, years earlier. This got North Vietnam to the peace table…but since we no longer had the troops on the ground to make it stick, it didn’t.
If we had launched something like Linebacker I/II in the wake of our battlefield victory pushing back the Tet Offensive – when we shattered the Viet Cong as a viable force in the south – we could have got a peace deal and enforced it with the half million troops we had on the ground at that time.
Cheers…
@ honeybee:
I live in “middle earth”, too. Ohio, to be precise.
Spent today at a local fair, helping out in the booth of a Tea Party-affiliated outfit. I know very well how Israel is perceived by many here in our shared locale of middle earth. That’s why I consider this “hearts and minds” war for Israel worth fighting in these parts.
@ yamit82:
You wrote:
“Nam was a war that should never have been fought with American direct involvement. There was a French interest and a British interest but no American interest other than to back her Western alliance colonial allies. For America such a conflict with no real war aims other than to protect an artificial French colonial puppet government was backing as America has so often backed the wrong geopolitical horse.”
We reached a critical decision point in direct involvement with the battle of Ap Bac in ’63. In the wake of this event, I agree that it would have been a reasonable choice to tell our S. Vietnamese allies: ‘We’ll provide you with weapons and training, but if you can’t cut it, too bad for you’. From there, we could have promptly re-set our anti-communist defense perimeter in that region at the Thai border, who in fact was – and still is – a reliable and solid ally.
But, we didn’t. We saw this as a re-play of the Korean war, and in most ways, it actually was…except for the far superior tactics of the North Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese regime was no more or less legitimate than the South Korean regime we defended successfully in the early 50s; Syngman Rhee was a dictator and they remained a repressive dictatorship for decades after that war. But look at how things have turned out today. I don’t think anyone can argue that we backed the “wrong horse” then, and that things are anything but far better today for U.S. regional interests, and for the interests of the West and for tens of millions of Korean nationals that we intervened there, then if we had not. Who would have been the “right” horse to back in Vietnam, once we were in? The North Vietnamese communists?? Look at how things have turned out there. They come begging for trade and investment from their former mortal foes, because they can’t put together a coherent economy by themselves to save their lives. Ironically, I understand they are even courting Israel heavily nowadays…
You wrote:
“…it became apparent early on that the war was un-winnable.”
To whom? On what grounds?
Johnson and MacNamara engaged in a strategy that could not win, but that did not mean that the war could not be won. We should not confuse the two. They micromanaged the war and pulled our punches in a manner that violated every principle of military common sense. They were afraid that if they did otherwise, they would provoke WW3 with Russia and/or China. In addition to what was done to us by North Vietnamese subterfuge, Johnson squandered U.S. national will, blood, and treasure with this strategy.
Nixon correctly estimated that the Russians and Chinese would not go to the mat with us over Vietnam. He did the very things combat leaders in the field, such as Robin Olds, had advised Johnson to do years earlier, but that Johnson refused to do. Nixon launched an all-out air campaign in ’72 that indeed brought about a peace agreement…but only after Nixon, under enormous public pressure following Johnson’s squandering, had withdrawn most of our ground forces.
Point being, had we launched something like Linebacker 1 and Linebacker II on the heels of the Tet Offensive – when we still had half a million guys on the ground, and we had just shattered the Viet Cong in the South – we could have bombed the North to a peace agreement as we did four years later…but made it stick with the forces on the ground to do so.
You wrote:
“Because of American wealth and technological superiority she can bring massive destruction to any conflict but can not win any ground campaign against any determined indigenous foe.”
You mean like Germany and Japan?
We can win when we are sure of what we want to do, why we want to do it, and how we’re going to do it.
Finally, in my earlier post above I didn’t argue one way or the other as to whether or not it is reasonable or legitimate for Israel’s adversaries to use the media/PR tactics that they do, that are modeled on those used by the North Vietnamese against the U.S. I only say that they are doing it, it is effective, and it cannot be simply ignored. It has to be addressed in some way. But on the topic of the “legitimacy” of such tactics in Israel’s case, I would say that they are not, as a large part of what they do is aimed at stoking the fires of Jew hatred wherever they can, around the world. That is simply evil and I will never, ever forgive the bastards for that. One might turn your argument around; the level of Jew hatred in the world today would not be anywhere near the levels that it is, were it not for the Vietnam-style tactics used by Israel’s adversaries.
But it is a vicious cycle; they feed on one another. I still agree with you that the media/PR war waged on Israel would not get nearly as far without indigenous anti-Semitism to work with as a kind of “raw material”. I’ve often likened what they do to a passive night vision device; taking ambient light (i.e., ‘ambient’ anti-Semitism) and magnifying it many times, in order to target a particular objective (i.e., Israel). But I don’t believe they always have this “raw material” to work with, and there are many in the interested publics and/or in governing elites who are not predisposed to hate Jews or Israel, who are not so vulnerable to this. Non-Moslem East Asians – e.g., Koreans, Singaporeans, Chinese – are practically philo-Semitic. America, whatever our problems, is probably the least anti-Semitic of the Western countries, and there is a lot of pro-Israel sentiment at the street level here. We are not wasting our time fighting the media/PR war, depending on the venue.
Of course, in the face of implacable anti-Semite Israel basher types, the only option is to defeat them; convincing them of anything is out of the question. With them, punishment, fear and demoralization are the only endgames worth pursuing with them. No argument there.
@ yamit82:
. Dear Yamit 82,my condolences on the death of your IDF soldier. In all our arguements we all to often forget the very real price of Jewish freedom.
@ Vinnie:
What you say is pertanent, as long as you don’t beat your audience to death with words [ a tendencey of Jews]. But, here in the “middle earth” between the Hudson River and Death Valley, “actions speak louder then words”. Israelis are seen as “can do people” ,this and the ability to recite biblical verses,from memory, works out here. And, of course our famous sense of humor!!!!!!!Darlin.
comment to vinnie blocked by spam filter
Vinnie Said:
Nam was a war that should never have been fought with American direct involvement. There was a French interest and a British interest but no American interest other than to back her Western alliance colonial allies. For America such a conflict with no real war aims other than to protect an artificial French colonial puppet government was backing as America has so often backed the wrong geopolitical horse. Americans whether influenced by radical reds or other social/political critics should not have expected the support of the American people not because of the morality or immorality of the war, but because it became apparent early on that the war was un-winnable, Americans usually back and support winners not losers. The financial costs, the high casualty levels that included many draftees as opposed to today’s general apathy towards casualties in a professional military. Finally the negative and often violent impact on the internal American political and social fabric.
Because of American wealth and technological superiority she can bring massive destruction to any conflict but can not win any ground campaign against any determined indigenous foe.
In asymmetrical warfare it is reasonable and legitimate for the weaker side to use whatever tactic that helps to equalize their weaker position.
Today in the forum of world public opinion what asymmetrical tactics can you bring to the fight to equalize the playing field?
Verbal argument or any argument will have little to no impact on those with an already honed predisposition to hate Jews and Israel. Anti Israel sentiments and attitudes would not exist on today’s levels if they did not have an already fertile field to plow and sow.
In Israel’s current position I recommend the following axiom : “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both…” Niccolo Machiavelli
Learn from Jacob Schiff what a single individual Jew with determination, money and power is capable of.
During the Russo-Japanese War, in 1904 and 1905, in perhaps his most famous financial action, Schiff, again through Kuhn, Loeb & Co., extended a critical series of loans to the Empire of Japan, in the amount of $200 million. He was willing to extend this loan due, in part, to his belief that gold is not as important as national effort and desire, in helping win a war, and due to the apparent underdog status of Japan at the time; no European nation had yet been defeated by a non-European nation in a modern, full-scale war. It is quite likely Schiff also saw this loan as a means of avenging, on behalf of the Jewish people, the anti-Semitic actions of the Tsarist regime, specifically the then-recent pogroms in Kishinev.
This loan attracted worldwide attention, and had major consequences. Japan won the war, thanks in large part to the purchase of munitions made possible by Schiff’s loan. Some within the Japanese leadership took this as evidence of the power of Jews all around the world, of their loyalty to one another, and as proof of the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic Tsarist forgery. In 1905, Schiff was awarded the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure; in 1907 he was honored with the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, which represents the second highest of eight classes associated with the award. Schiff was the first foreigner to have been personally awarded the Order by Emperor Meiji in the Imperial Palace. Schiff was also invited to a private audience in 1904 with King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.
In addition to his famous loan to Japan, Schiff financed loans to many other nations, including those that would come to comprise the Central Powers. When World War I finally did break out, he used his reputation and influence to urge President Woodrow Wilson, and others, to put an end to the war as quickly as possible, even without an Allied victory. He feared for the lives of his family, back in Germany, but also for the future of his adopted land. He engineered loans to France, and other nations for humanitarian purposes, and spoke out against submarine warfare.
Schiff made sure none of the funds from his loans ever went to Russia, which continued to severely oppress the Jewish people. When the Tsar’s government fell in 1917, Schiff believed that the oppression of Jews would end. He formally repealed the impediments within his firm against lending to Russia
yamit82 Said:
Hhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmm I’ll tell dweller to be very carefull,expecially in a darken movie theater!!!
What Israel does – versus what anybody says – is of course, of primary importance. Dealing with Iran’s nuke weapons program is the obvious issue of this sort facing Israel in this moment (in close competition with the matter of telling Obama/Kerry where to stick their ‘peace negotiations’ with the thugs of the PA). There is no question but that there could be a furious international reaction against Israel for doing what needs to be done to stop Iran, particularly from Obama, and the fear of this is what stopped Netanyahu in September of 2012, allegedly. It is a damned shame that it did.
But we can’t dismiss the importance of psychological warfare, and that is really the subtext of this article.
Consider what happened to the U.S. in Vietnam. We really should have won that war. We had every advantage over our adversaries, as these things were traditionally measured; we had them outgunned in every way. We didn’t win because the North Vietnamese communists, by manipulating public debate here in the U.S. through their activism on U.S. campuses and the news media, destroyed the will of the U.S. public to fight. What they “said” – however subversively, in a very skillful and calculated manner – determined what we “did”…and “didn’t do”…and we lost.
Yasser Arafat traveled to Hanoi in the late 60s in order to glean tactics from them in defeating a materially more powerful foe. Nguyen Vo Giap – North Vietnam’s military mastermind, and as cunning a military leader as any nation has ever produced – produced advice on this topic that was translated into Arabic and widely circulated throughout the Arab world subsequent to this.
Everything that was done to the U.S. in Vietnam is being done to Israel today: terrorism, child warriors, combatants dressed as civilians, combatants hiding behind civilians in order to get the latter killed for propaganda value, along with manipulation of public debate through subversion of authoritative venues of the same. Only in Israel’s case, this has been going on for a far longer period of time, and this effort is incomparably better financed and organized.
We can’t hope to match the bad guys in numbers. There are tens of millions of Arabs and other assorted rabid foaming at the mouth anti-Israel Moslems with nothing better to do than to get paid for sitting at a computer all day, surfing the web, looking for places to post against Israel. But we have to keep the arguments out there for people to see. When the policies that support our enemies are shown to be bankrupt, despite our smaller numbers, what we say will have greater currency. And this can influence what others do – rather than simply say – that impact on the fortunes of Israel.
honeybee Said:
I can multitask quite well, even better than that when motivated.
@ mar55:
Don’t ruin Yamit 82’s fun, he fight to more then to love.
mar55 Said:
Already his head is to big.
mar55 Said:
Safer then Chicago or a USA military base!!!!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
siesta time,been up since four,I shall dream of you!!!!!!!! Buenos suenos
ArnoldHarris Said:
Some swimn
yamit82 Said:
Convince me!!!!!!!!!!! Sugar
honeybee Said:
Never say never. 😛
ArnoldHarris Said:
I listen to every word he writes,like Moses come down from the Mountain. BUT [AND BIG BUT]I WOULD NEVER SIT NEXT TO HIM IN A DARKEN MOVIE THEATER.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ArnoldHarris Said:
In the days of the underground struggle against the British, Eldad was one of the leaders of the Lohame Herut Israel. (Stern Group). Since the establishment of the State of Israel, his powerful pen had been lashing out against certain government policies and against unhealthy phenomena in Israeli society.
Eldad, whose original [family] name was Schieb was born in Podvolochisk, Galicia in 1910.
In 1944, while attempting to escape arrest by the British police, he suffered a serious back injury. Encased in a cast he was held at the prison of Jerusalem and at the Latrun detention camp. While he was brought to a Jerusalem hospital to have his cast removed, Lohame Herut Israel soldiers dramatically freed him.
After the establishment of the State of Israel, Eldad launched a monthly publication he named “Sulam” (Ladder), in which he sharply criticized Israeli government policies and advocated the establishment of a new “Malkhut Yisrael” (Kingdom of Israel) – through the liberation of the entire Land of Israel as defined in the Bible.
His articles criticizing the Israeli government angered David Ben-Gurion so much that he ordered the ministry of Education and Culture to fire Eldad from his post as a high school teacher. Eldad was not going to take his dismissal lying down, even if it came from the prime Minister. He took his case to Israel’s Supreme Court and won,
Eldad contributed to a wide variety of newspapers and periodicals.
Eldad, was also a great orator, was active in the “Movement for the Entire Land of Israel,” which opposes any retreat of the Israel Defense Forces from the liberated territories. He was one of the movement’s most dynamic spokesmen.
@ yamit82:
Well done, Yamit. The Dr Israel Eldad from whom I learned the basics of practical Zionism and whose steel-trap brain beat me at chess whenever I took him on in his Rechavia apartment on early pre-Shabat afternoons, never claimed to be a Tora scholar. And I freely admit that I don;t know enough about formal religious Judaism to be able to tell the difference when comparing the works of Tora scholarship. But what Eldad has cited here is nothing less than the complete answer regarding what has long been the problematic influence of weak-minded Jews who prefer the comforts of slavery to the hardships of independence.
Honeybee, listen to this guy. Regarding Jewish nationalism, he’s the real McCoy.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ the phoenix:
@ honeybee:
From Latma
cheer up!!
One who believes is not afraid
“Israel is a murderous country! It’s committing an unprecedented ethnic cleansing! Poor Palestinians.”
Actually, I sincerely hope that “Viviana”, in her fluent and passionate Italian blog-site prose, is correct in regard to Israeli ethnic cleansing of millions of Arabs. Because, as should be self-evident, no society can equally comprise more than one nation, and no government can for long keep the peace over any multi-national state. Go ask the surviving government leaders of former Jugoslavija, former Czechoslovakia, former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or present-day Belgium, Spain. Canada, Iraq, Turkey, Syria.
In interests of truth, I must add to that list my own country, the United States of America. The Pledge of Allegiance refrain refers to “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” But ask just about any African-American whether he or she feels truly included in that one nation. Or ask most of us here how we feel about scores of millions of Spanish-speaking Mexicans walking across our southern border in expectations of yet another US government amnesty in regard to awarding them residential status.
I try to remain consistent and logical in all my comments on Israpundit or elsewhere. Which means that I sincerely hope that Israel will grow into a Jewish state comprising by late this century some 25 million members of the Jewish nation. But I also think that while a large number of non-Jews can be allowed residential status in the Jewish state, that full citizenship can be granted solely to Jews. Israel, in order to assure long-term survival, can and must expand its borders, and I am not merely referring to the Jordan valley or the rest of Judea and Samaria, but also to the lands east of the Jordan River and most if not all of the Sinai peninsula. But that does not and cannot imply that Israel should extend full citizenship to any except a relatively small number of Arabs. The rest should be granted local autonomy under control of their local hamulas (extended family Arab clans).
All things considered, the destiny of the Jewish nation and the Jewish state shall never and must never be surrendered to the opinion of the non-Jewish goyim. Long ago, haShem mandated that as so. Let us sustain that rule.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ yamit82:
Victoria Toensig is on Fox now.
@ yamit82:
Whom ever pays the piper calls the dance.
Does Israel Benefit from US Foreign Aid?
As the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, Zionism has historically held as its basic aspiration the achievement of political independence for the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland.
Because a nation cannot be both dependent and independent at the same time, accepting money from the United States has essentially placed Israel in a situation of dependency that has critically eroded the Jewish state’s sovereignty.
@ yamit82:
I attended a small ag school [with a large Arab student body] I was the lone voice of Israel in debates,in a very male world,sharped my teeth. Or as Tex says” gave you the balls you wern’t born with”.
@ the phoenix:
Thanks great video.
And you also, Yamit 82.
What is Jewish Zionism? – From Bar Kochva to Yigal Yadin
UC Berkeley’s Israel Liberation Week
Israel Liberation Week Hofstra U
CuriousAmerican Said:
Only one women’s opinion,but in this world, there are never enough Yamit 82s.
@ yamit82:
http://youtu.be/2EUQxbTe8pA
Comment #2 in moderation
CuriousAmerican Said:
First of all I don’t accept there are a lot like myself otherwise there would be no sufferance for those like you.
I believe what we do is more effective than what we say. If what we say does not conform to what we do or should do then words will not have any desired effect and even the converse of what is desired. Jews have lost their commonality of purpose and everyone seems to have a different message. That does not lend itself to effective Hasbara.
Secondly I am not an advocate of organized Hasbara. Jews must turn inward not outward. Out there, there is nothing for us.
Parshat Chukat
by Dr. Israel Eldad
“The People wanted water. They wanted to drink back then, when Miriam sang and danced, and now again they want to drink after Miriam dies. A generation may come and go, but the desert remains the desert and the flesh remains the flesh. Thirst is not a sin, but this complaint is: Why did you take us out of Egypt?
The memory of the Exodus from Egypt will never leave the hearts of the People. Yet the complaint is again heard: Why did you take us out of Egypt?
We hear that there’s no bread and there’s no water, and still again, like a refrain:
Why did you take us out of Egypt?
The desert is terrible, the thirst unbearable, the manna is too light. They can’t wait until someone will come and tell them the midrash about the manna tasting “whatever you like.” And even if the manna tasted like a cookie dipped in honey, they’d still get sick of honey after 40 years.
“Why did you take us out of Egypt” is a slave’s question. But wait: does this mean that forty years of education were for n aught? All of this was a waste of time? If they still have no faith in God and continue to complain, if they will sin at Ba’al Peor just like with the Golden Calf, wasn’t it all a waste?
And within 40 years, you can raise a new generation that won’t be afraid of the Egyptian slavemasters or of enemies in Canaan; and this generation was indeed raised in the desert!
The incident at Mei Merivah, with Moshe hitting the rock, was a watershed between the two generations.
The problem with Hasbarists is that they are often easy to spot. The run from a playbook.
For ex: A common response is that the Palestinians have 22 other Arab countries they can go to.
In reality, the other 22 Arab countries have signed the Casablanca Protocol, and refuse to naturalize them. So NO! the Palestinians do not have 22 other Arab countries they can go to.
When this is pointed out to them, they get furious; often falsely labelling one.
Hasbara is NOT subtle; and needs coaching in persuasion. They are too heavy-handed. They are often spotted in a few minutes, and called out. This is not effective propaganda.
They have too many Yamit82s and not enough Teds.