Israel, Gaza and the propaganda war

[editor]

Interesting piece on the BBC site:

Israel has tried to take the initiative in the propaganda war over Gaza but, in one important instance, its version has been seriously challenged.

The incident raises the question of how to interpret video taken from the air.

Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared to show rockets being loaded onto a truck. The truck and those close to it were then destroyed by a missile.

This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their strikes were and how well justified. A special unit it has set up to coordinate its informational plan put the video onto YouTube as part of its effort to use modern means of communications to get Israel's case across.

The YouTube video has a large caption on it saying "Grad missiles being loaded onto the Hamas vehicle." As of Saturday morning UK time, more than 260,000 people had watched it.

Different version

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

This workshop had been damaged when a building next door was bombed by the Israelis and he was afraid of looters, he said.

Metal workshop owner Ahmed Sanur [photo courtesy of B'Tselem
Ahmed Sanur is challenging Israel's claim that rockets were targeted

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem put Mr Sanur's account on its website, together with a photograph of burned out oxygen cylinders.

Mr Sanur said that eight people, one of them his son, had been killed. He subsequently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: "These were not Hamas, they were our children... They were not Grad missiles.".

The Israeli response was that the "materiel" was being taken from a site that had stored weapons. The video remains on You Tube.

Video and more info: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7809371.stm

 

[dessiato]

Which version is true will be difficult to prove one way or the other. The tragedy is that this is a war that might have been avoided in the first place. Many innocent people will die in both Gaza and Israel, lies will be told by both sides. Mistakes are made during times of war, one of the first casualties is truth.

 

[FiFi]

Who was it who said
"The first casualty of war is the truth" ?

It certainly seems like it in this case.

 

[hipipol]

Not surprised

There seems to be a huge effort at subverting the web - the Wiki page for Dir Yassin has definately been doctored with contentious crap - equally that for the King david Hotel bombing during the Brit manadate - makes no mention of the first aid station being in the hotel, nor the first bomb nearby.
Clever chaps but they have overlooked the possibilty that it may in fact backfire on them when the lies are exposed.

 

[Wolveryeti]

The Israeli PR machine takes lying to new dimensions. Lucky I guess their shitty relationship with the truth is a perfect bedfellow for the nonexistent editorial integrity that characterises most of the US media.

Israel: "There is no humanitarian disaster in Gaza"

UN: "Um, guys..."

 

[tangentlama]

Israel can't bring about peace and tranquility on the border by destroying the Gazan infrastructure. Israel can't bring peace and tranquility by lying about the threat they face in order to justify their excessive militarial solution to what should be a civilian solution. Israel can't keep making extra-judicial killings on men declared guilty-in-absentia without presenting their evidence in civil courts. Israel can't keep on taking Palestinian property using suspect laws. Israel can't keep on denying justice to those Palestinians they pushed out in territorial gains in 1948 and 1967.

These barefaced lies continue - what about some justice for those Palestinians who were driven into Gaza from villages that were destroyed in 1947/48. DO dwellers in Sderot not place any of their fear due to the very territory they live in haven been taken some 60 years ago from the people who now fire rockets at them? Why no justice for the Palestinians? Why ignore the request to continue ceasefire with border open so Gaza's economy can recover. Where is recompense for stolen lands and homes?

I've been looking into these 'Grads' that the Palestinians are supposed to have. The Grad is actually a full truck-mounted system, the BM-21. While it is hypothetically *possible* there are Grads in Gaza because Egypt makes and uses them, the chances of a truck mounted rocket system being able to fire and even once escape Israeli airborne counter battery is minimal, IMO.

This is a Grad. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=p-lGwyySrwY If the Gazans had these then Sderot would be halfway to rubble by now.

Also, Katyusha, which seems to get bandied about all over the place is a generic term which is applied to anything from crude home made rockets through to Russian, Iranian etc built missiles.

I'm sure you know all this, being a services man, but I thought I'd point it out on the thread.

Anyway, someone needs to do a bit of research into the myths that are propogated about these rockets. Suggesting they are 'Grads' or 'Katyushas' - and that they are therefore foreign supplied and more sophisticated - seems like spin to me
http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=8536807&highlight=grad#post8536807

 

[frogwoman]

I saw some bonkers article in the Jerusalem Post saying that Hamas might have nukes

 

[tangentlama]

On BBC news, a livestream just played of an Israeli spokesman who is claiming that Hamas seized power from the PA in the Gaza strip. There was no mention of elections or the US sponsored arming of Fatah warlord Dahlan in an attempt to seize power from the elected Hamas in the Gaza strip.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

On BBC news, a livestream just played of an Israeli spokesman who is claiming that Hamas seized power from the PA in the Gaza strip. There was no mention of elections or the US sponsored arming of Fatah warlord Dahlan in an attempt to seize power from the elected Hamas in the Gaza strip.

Mark Regev by any chance?

He's just been on Al Jazeera English saying that the UN and everyone else agrees that there's no humanitarian crisis, and the UN and its granny all say that Hamas broke the ceasefire and the ground incursion is defensive etc etc etc etc etc

He has doublespeak off to a fine art that man.

 

[TheDave]

The level of polish of the propaganda on some of the news channels gave the game away for me. It was obvious they had been prepared for a charm offensive a long time before any military action was taking place. They were all ready to regurgitate the same bullshit to anyone who would listen.

 

[Dravinian]

The level of polish of the propaganda on some of the news channels gave the game away for me. It was obvious they had been prepared for a charm offensive a long time before any military action was taking place. They were all ready to regurgitate the same bullshit to anyone who would listen.

Hardly surprising is it really.

At the end of the day if Hamas the elected leaders of the area can't stop rockets being fired into Israel then they need to realise that there is a price to pay for that.

You can't sit there firing rockets at people and expect no retaliation.

The complaints are the usual complaints made and are just as ignorable as they always are.

Stop firing rockets at Israel and the attack will end, pretty straight forward.

 

[elbows]

An earlier BBC article that discusses the present conflict in broader terms, but goes on to discuss the media propaganda battle and its importance:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7804113.stm

 

[editor]

An earlier BBC article that discusses the present conflict in broader terms, but goes on to discuss the media propaganda battle and its importance:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7804113.stm

Interesting article:

The war in Gaza, like so many conflicts in the world today, is a fight between the strong and the weak.
Strategists call it asymmetric warfare.
In wars like this the weak side knows it has no chance of defeating the strong one in a stand-up, knock-down fight.
So, it uses what it can to magnify the power that it has, and to concentrate it on what it perceives to be a soft spot.

 

[Spion]

Hardly surprising is it really.

At the end of the day if Israel holds 1.5m people under siege then they need to realise that there is a price to pay for that.

You can't sit there strangling the life out of a territory of 1.5 million people and expect no retaliation.

The complaints are the usual complaints made and are just as ignorable as they always are.

Lift the siege of Gaza and the attacks will end, pretty straight forward.

There, corrected for you

 

[elbows]

Yeah aysmmetric warfare has been discussed a little in the media in the past, applies to most of the wars we and the USA have fought in recent decades, including the war on terror. Rumsfeld was good at drawing attention to this stuff, by repeatedly expressing disgust at the media for helping the enemy in various ways (such as reporting on US attrocities). Or his classic attemts to dismiss post war Iraqi looting as 'it was just repeat footage of one Iraqi stealing a vase'.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

There, corrected for you

Heh good fix.

 

[tangentlama]

Lies about the US orchestrated coup by Fatah warlord Dahlan

Mark Regev by any chance?

He's just been on Al Jazeera English saying that the UN and everyone else agrees that there's no humanitarian crisis, and the UN and its granny all say that Hamas broke the ceasefire and the ground incursion is defensive etc etc etc etc etc

He has doublespeak off to a fine art that man.

Regev is now on BBC News channel.

Regev says there is no humanitarian crisis, so best thing is to find links to prove him wrong and post them here.

Re. the lies about the US orchestrated Coup, see "Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move" by Tony Karon.
http://tonykaron.com/2007/05/15/palestinian-pinochet-making-his-move/

There’s something a little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy.

The Fatah gunmen who are reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government and provoked the latest fighting may profess fealty to President Abbas, but it’s not from him that they get their orders. The leader to whom they answer is Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington’s anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet. And while Dahlan is formally subordinate to Abbas, whom he supposedly serves as National Security Adviser, nobody believes that Dahlan answers to Abbas — in fact, it was suggested at the time that Abbas appointed Dahlan only under pressure from Washington, which was irked by the Palestinian Authority president’s decision to join a unity government with Hamas.

If Dahlan takes orders from anyone at all, it’s certainly not from Abbas. Abbas has long recognized the democratic legitimacy and popularity of Hamas, and embraced the reality that no peace process is possible unless the Islamists are given the place in the Palestinian power structure that their popular support necessitates. He has always favored negotiation and cooperation with Hamas — much to the exasperation of the Bush Administration, and also of the Fatah warlords whose power of patronage was threatened by the Hamas election victory — and could see the logic of the unity government proposed by the Saudis even when Washington couldn’t. Indeed, as the indispensable Robert Malley and Hussein Agha note, nothing has hurt Abbas’s political standing as much as the misguided efforts of Washington to boost his standing in the hope of undermining the elected Hamas government.

Needless to say, only an Administration as deluded about its ability to reorder Arab political realities in line with its own fantasies — and also, frankly, as utterly contemptuous of Arab life and of Arab democracy, empty sloganizing notwithstanding — as the current one has proved to be could imagine that
the Palestinians could be starved, battered and manipulated into choosing a Washington-approved political leadership. Yet, that’s exactly what the U.S. has attempted to do ever since Hamas won the last Palestinian election, imposing a financial and economic chokehold on an already distressed population, pouring money and arms into the forces under Dahlan’s control, and eventually adapting itself to funnel monies only through Abbas, as if casting in him in the role of a kind of Quisling-provider would somehow burnish his appeal among Palestinian voters. (As I said, their contempt for Arab intelligence knows no bounds. )

<snip about the Fatah warlord Dahlan>

Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the Hamas government. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House, Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and Dahlan.

Seeing the disastrous implications of the U.S. policy, the Saudis appeared to have put the kibosh on Abrams’ coup plan by drawing Abbas into a unity government with Hamas. And as Mark Perry at Conflict Forum detailed in an excellent analysis Dahlan was just about the only thing that the U.S. had going for it in terms of resisting the move towards a unity government. Although his fretting and sulking in Mecca couldn’t prevent the deal, the U.S. appears to have helped him fight back afterwards by ensuring that he was appointed national security adviser, a move calculated to provoke Hamas, whose leaders tend to view Dahlan as little more than a torturer and a de facto enforcer for Israel.

 

[Dan U]

there is a good bit in the book Flat Earth News about the Israeli propaganda machine.

 

[tangentlama]

A Truth

Truth

Though the ins-and-outs of Israeli grievances and strategic considerations are endlessly examined, there is virtually no debate over whether the U.S. should continue to play such an active, one-sided role in this dispute. It`s the American taxpayer, with their incredibly consequential yet never-debated multi-billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, who are vital in funding this costly Israeli assault on Gaza. Just as was true for Israel`s bombing of Lebanon, it`s American bombs that -- with the whole world watching -- are blowing up children and mosques, along with Hamas militants, in Gaza. And it`s the American veto power that, time and again, blocks any U.N. action to stop these wars.
http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=30935

 

[untethered]

The Israeli PR machine takes lying to new dimensions.

Whereas Hamas spokesmen give a fair and balanced account of events which is scrupulously accurate at all times, thank goodness.

 

[tangentlama]

Moving along, what other misrepresentations of truth (i.e. LIES) have we heard through the media ?

 

[albionism]

It seems Youtube have disabled commenting on the said vid, so millions can
watch the bullshit but not say it's bullshit.

 

[untethered]

It seems Youtube have disabled commenting on the said vid, so millions can
watch the b- but not say it's b-.

You can't say it there. You can say it anywhere else.

 

[tangentlama]

It seems Youtube have disabled commenting on the said vid, so millions can
watch the bullshit but not say it's bullshit.

Someone has been copying the IAF videos of them committing war crimes. Occupiers are not allowed to make targeted assassinations.

I'm watching the other videos that the Israeli Air Force made of the the war crime they were asked to commit by their military command/government and a few others of Israeli leaders trying to explain their actions to the rest of world: http://uk.youtube.com/user/boazgu

 

[Kid_Eternity]

It seems Youtube have disabled commenting on the said vid, so millions can
watch the bullshit but not say it's bullshit.

Not YouTube but the owner of the account the video was uploaded too.

 

[tangentlama]

Not YouTube but the owner of the account the video was uploaded too.

I don't want to view from an IDF/IAF run youtube page.

Here's another misrepresentation from Netanyahu to an American audience.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=B_A2zWuQ7dk&feature=channel

Who wants to help me address Netanyahu's claims ?
I can't do it alone.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I saw some bonkers article in the Jerusalem Post saying that Hamas might have nukes

Well, it stands to reason that HAMAS don't have any tanks and planes to defend themselves with because they spunked their arms budget on nukes, surely?

 

[Dravinian]

There, corrected for you

Changes nothing.

Cept we now get to argue what came first the chicken or the egg?

I don't really care, Israel have been clear, stop firing rockets we stop bombing you....they still firing rockets.

Now until they stop doing that, then I see no reason to offer up any sympathy. Once they stopped firing and israel continues to bomb them, which is likely, then I will, with everyone else here, condemn them for that.

 

[hipipol]

I can imagine people weeping themselves to sleep so upset are they that you dont sympathise Dravinian

 

[MikeMcc]

Regev is now on BBC News channel.

Regev says there is no humanitarian crisis, so best thing is to find links to prove him wrong and post them here.

Re. the lies about the US orchestrated Coup, see "Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move" by Tony Karon.
http://tonykaron.com/2007/05/15/palestinian-pinochet-making-his-move/

Like this one from the normally Israeli-friendly IHT:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/02/news/ML-Israel-UN-Gaza.php

Inhabitants in the Gaza Strip are facing a serious health and food crisis seven days into an Israeli bombing campaign, despite an increase in humanitarian shipments, U.N. officials said on Friday.
The U.N. also estimates that at least 100 civilians — many of them women and children — were among the 400 people killed so far by airstrikes, said Maxwell Gaylard, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinians Territories. He said 2,000 people have been wounded.
"There is a critical emergency right now in the Gaza Strip right now as we speak," said Gaylard. "It is true supplies have been going into the strip, in fact possibly more than in previous weeks, but at the same time there are critical gaps."
He explained that crucial wheat grain for bread was not being shipped into the area in sufficient quantities and there was not enough industrial fuel oil to run the power plant.
Power outages are lasting 16 hours at a time and running water is only available every five to seven days, according to the U.N.