Big Sticks and Small Carrots

I was going to write this post earlier today but after making a start on it, I decided to take a break and try again later. There’s been a development since then so this is a slightly updated version.

The starting point is this article.

Israel backed by army of cyber-soldiers

WHILE Israel fights Hezbollah with tanks and aircraft, its supporters are campaigning on the internet.

Israel’s Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.

It’s an interesting read.

After reading it, I also found a website called GIYUS. It seems to be exactly the sort of thing that article was referring too; it’s a coordinated attempt to direct and encourage supporters of Israel to contribute to relevant forums, chatrooms and the like. It also highlights articles which might be useful to the cause. They’ve got a flashy tool you can download which runs on your desktop and automatically alerts subscribers to relevant material. It’s called “Megaphone”, an apt name for a tool designed to amplify a particular point of view.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a group of like minded people getting together in a coordinated campaign to influence public opinion. (I have a feeling that many of the subscribers to GIYUS wouldn’t see it that way if a Muslim group was doing something similar but never mind that now.)

But this seems to me to be a bit more than that. I was going to link to their blog to prove the point but, curiously, the post in question has now been deleted. As I started writing this earlier, I do have the URL for the post so you can see what the title was if you click on the link. “Ceasefire survey”? So what was that all about then?

Well, being the cynical soul that I am, I also happened to take a screenshot of the post just in case it disappeared. Here we go:

Click and click again for a bigger more readable version.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, this wasn’t so much an attempt to influence public opinion as it was an attempt to distort the results of an online opinion poll hosted by Yahoo (UK and Ireland). The initial result, which seems to tie in roughly with other polls on the subject, showed that 69% of respondents believed the UK government should support an immediate ceasefire with 28% against. Twelve hours after GIYUS issued their call to their keyboard warriors, the poll showed that 48% supported the immediate ceasefire and 50% were against. And they were so happy about this that they couldn’t help having a little boast about it (although they have now apparently had a change of heart about the wisdom of the boasting).

So next time you read someone suggesting that the Israeli government encourages coordinated efforts to amplify pro-Israel voices on the interwebs, perhaps you shouldn’t dismiss the idea as the ranting of an unhinged conspiraloon. The tin-foil hatter just might have a point.

By the way, the Yahoo poll is in the right sidebar of this page (at the moment anyway) if you want to vote. It’s up to you how you vote, of course.

(Both GIYUS and the Times article originally via the comments to this post from Sadiq Khan on CiF. Call for him to resign please Mr Khan. If you don’t, you’ll just end up looking like an insincere windbag.)

Tags: News, Politics, Israel, Lebanon

Did you see that the government has produced a leaflet on the constitution designed to educate schoolchildren? I’m no expert on the constitution but I’m willing to take the word of David Starkey when he says it’s “full of howling errors“.

According to the leaflet, the British Armed Forces are part of the Executive.

He probably thinks that’s about right. The arse.

Tags: News, Politics, Tony Blair

Salon: The “hiding among civilians” myth (via)

Israel claims it’s justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn’t trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths — the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far — on “terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.

Read the rest

I can’t say for sure how accurate that report is but I can reiterate what Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, head of Israel’s Northern Command, said at the start of the conflict.

Israel called Wednesday’s abductions an act of war, and Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, head of Israel’s Northern Command, said he has “comprehensive plans” to battle Hezbollah throughout Lebanon, not just in its southern stronghold.

“This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon,” Adam said. “Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate — not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts.”

International law makes clear that warring parties must make a clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants. It is not acceptable to target a civilian population even if they are sympathetic to one side in the conflict.

So, just as it is unacceptable to target Israeli civilians who support their government’s conduct in this conflict or members of Olmert’s Kadima party, it is equally unacceptable to target non-combatant supporters of Hezbollah.

Major General Adam has explicitly stated that Israel will not abide by that convention in this assault on Lebanon. “Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate”.

And if that doesn’t convince you that Israel is operating outside of international law, with the support of Bush and Blair, remember that Israel’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, told Israel’s Channel 10, “If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”

How very civilised. Just as well our standards are so much higher than those of the Muslim barbarians…

Tags: News, Politics, Israel, Lebanon

As anyone who follows the various comment threads on the subject will know, those who support Israel’s current assault on Lebanon often suggest that criticisms of Israel are completely disproportionate. “People are dying in far greater numbers in Iraq or in DR Congo,” they argue. “Why don’t you write about that instead of picking on the tiny beseiged state of Israel?”

It’s easy to dismiss these comments as a cynical attempt to change the subject but I don’t think that’s what it is in most cases. Having read an unhealthy number of threads on this over the last two weeks, it seems clear to me that many Israelis and their supporters genuinely don’t understand why people in the UK are so exercised by what’s happening.

So I thought I’d try to explain something of my own position on the subject. What’s happened today is a perfect illustration of it but we’ll get to that shortly.

Before that, I should say that I do not deny that there are some moronic anti-semites out there and they’re making more noise than usual at the moment. This is reprehensible. From what I can gather, they are a small minority, certainly in this country. That’s not to excuse their racist views, of course, but I do not believe that the majority of criticims of Israel’s current activities are motivated by anti-semitism as is sometimes claimed.

So why all the fuss? For me, this report says it all.

‘World backs Lebanon offensive’

Israel says diplomats’ decision not to call for a halt to its Lebanon offensive at a Middle East summit has given it the green light to continue.

“We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world… to continue the operation,” Justice Minister Haim Ramon said.

His comments came ahead of an Israeli cabinet meeting to decide whether to intensify the military offensive.

Despite the fact that the participants in the Rome conference vowed to work towards a sustainable truce with the “utmost urgency”, the Justice Minister is essentially correct. By refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire, the international community has implicitly given Israel the green light to continue to impose collective punishment on the people of Lebanon.

But really, it wasn’t the international community as such which gave this green light. As the front page of the Independent showed so very clearly last week, it’s actually the governments’ of the United Kingdom and the United States who are enabling Israel to continue its assault on Lebanon. And our special friends, the US government, are also busy sending shipments of armaments to Israel to aid them in their devastating attack.

But I believe that Israel’s actions are both morally wrong and dangerously counter-productive. When my government supports such actions, implicitly or explicitly, I’m going to say something about it. In my own tiny way, I hope to add to the pressure which might make them change their approach. That’s what democracy is all about.

The tragedy is that the British government actually could exert some inflence here through the special relationship chain which runs from the UK to the US to Israel. But they are not doing so. This is, I believe, a disgrace and a large part of the reason why I write about the current conflict.

Of course, this doesn’t explain why I should make more noise about this than about Iraq, which my own government is in up to its neck. But as regular readers will know, I’m hardly silent on that subject.

Tags: News, Politics, Israel, Lebanon