Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?
The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press. Even the Jewish American community is uneasy about this one, in a way perhaps unparalelled since the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon and siege of Beirut. Jews for Peace in Los Angeles are actively protesting the Gaza atrocities, and newspaper articles from around the US on local protests held this weekend often mention mixed Arab-American and Jewish-American rallies.
If it is true that Americans are greeting Israeli talking points with more criticism this time, is it because we have been intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney and their stable of Neoconservatives?
Let's take some of the basic techniques of propaganda practiced by Bush and compare them to those deployed by the Israeli leadership in the past 8 days.
1. Deny it all.
Bushie Examples: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that there was massive looting in Iraq during April of 2003, alleging that CNN had one tape of a guy stealing a vase and kept looping it over and over again. "How many vases can they have?" he asked. In mid-summer 2003, Rumsfeld denied that there was a guerrilla war in Iraq, even though Jamie McIntyre of CNN was able to quote the Pentagon definition of guerrilla war, and it fit Iraq. Rumsfeld just replied, "No."
Cont'd/
Then there was Bush's insistence that "Brownie" had done a "heckuva job" in New Orleans after Katrina.
Kadima Examples: When French President Sarkozy requested a two-day halt in Israeli air strikes so that humanitarian aid could reach ordinary Gazans, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni replied, “there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.” The UN and others involved in humanitarian work in Gaza do not agree: ' the UN agency insisted it was desperate to get supplies into the enclave."The military incursion compounds the humanitarian crisis following more than a week of shelling and an 18-month long blockade of the territory," the UN humanitarian coordinatory said in a daily report. There was an "almost total blackout" across most of Gaza and land and mobile phone networks were also down because they depend on backup generators which had no fuel, the report said. All Gaza City hospitals have been without mains electricity for 48 hours and now rely on backup generators which the UN said were "close to collapse." The report said that "for the second consecutive day Israeli authorities have refused to allow an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) emergency medical team into Gaza" to help at the main Shifa hospital. The territory has been sealed off for more than two days. . . More than 510 Palestinians have already been killed in Israel's nine day old offensive on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which on Saturday was intensified with the launch of a massive ground operation. The UN said the tank fire and air attacks were preventing medical staff reaching hospitals and ambulances could not get to injured "because of continuous fire." The World Food Programme has coordinated emergency food deliveries into Gaza in recent months but the Israeli army said there was plenty of food in Gaza warehouses and that the territory's Hamas rulers had halted distribution.'
In line with Livni's Big Lie, the Israeli army said with a straight face that the reason the World Food Program doesn't send food into Gaza is because its warehouses there are "full."
2. Pretend that your main concern is for your own victims
Bushie examples: They refused to say that they "invaded" or "conquered" Iraq, always using the word "liberation" when they spoke of their war of aggression. Bush was not invading and occupying Iraq, he was liberating the long-suffering Iraqis. Richard Perle even maintained that they would be "grateful" for being "liberated." I.e., we're doing this to you for your own good.
The Bushies renamed the Iraqi guerrilla resistance to the US "anti-Iraqi forces." They even managed to get some clueless CNN anchors to report that "anti-Iraqi forces attacked US troops in the Triangle of Death today." The implication was that the US military and its allies were the pro-Iraqi forces.
Kadima: Livni said, "But Hamas is not our problem alone; it is also a problem for all the Palestinians in the region." I.e., Israel is bombing and attacking Gaza on behalf of the Palestinians to secure their welfare.
3. Demonizing the opponent, ad hominem arguments
Bushies: "Axis of Evil" (courtesy Neocon David Frum). Bush called Saddam a "threat" even if he had no weapons!. Saddam was intrinsically dangerous, ontologically dangerous; his danger to the US could not be divorced from his very being in existence. (How silly this all is is easily demonstrated by the Reagan and first Bush administration's active alliance with . . . Saddam.)
Israeli pundit: Confronting the depths of Hamas's evil.
Hamas won the elections for the Palestine Authority in January 2006 and formed a government; yet Livni objects even to speaking of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, because Hamas, she says, is just a terrorist organization. (It has engaged in terrorist tactics, just as Livni has committed state terror on a large scale, as with dropping a million cluster bombs on civilian areas of south Lebanon; but Hamas isn't "just" a terrorist organization, or Livni's bombing of policemen and the ministry of interior in Gaza would make no sense; she thinks it was the government of Gaza, obviously. Hamas has engaged in diplomacy, has called truces, etc. It is made up of human beings, not demons.)
4. Repetition of simple slogans until they become accepted as true
Bushie examples: There are so many I don't know where to start. But the repeated innuendo that Saddam Hussein was operationally connection to the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the US is the big example. The assertion that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" (itself a propaganda phrase intended to suggest nukes) was made over and over again, and Bush, Rice, andothers constantly used "mushroom cloud" and other nuclear imagery for Iraq.
Kadima: Israeli leaders have repeated over and over again that they "had no choice" but to attack Gaza. But of course they had a choice. They had negotiated before, they could have negotiated again. Assertions that the Palestinians walked away from the 2000 Camp David negotiations, that Israel is involved in a "peace process", that the colonies in the West Bank can't be moved back to Israel, all of these are constantly repeated.
5. Use of half-truths
Bushie examples: Bush would boast that 2/3s of the al-Qaeda leadership had been killed or captured, without mentioning that many in its upper echelons, like, oh, Osama Bin Laden had not. Or he slammed the Democrats who had voted against his illegal war of aggression as "not supporting liberation."
Kadima examples: Israelis point to thousands of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel, without mentioning that no Israelis had been killed by them during the truce stretching from mid-June, 2008 until December 26. That is, the prelude to the most violent Israeli attack on Gaza since 1967 was . . . not a single Israeli death at the hands of Hamas in the preceding half-year. And in 8 years, Hamas had killed about 15 Israelis with those home made rockets, during which time the Israelis had killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly 1000 of them minors. The rockets were small, handmade affairs for the most part and most landed uselessly. Some did damage to property and a few wounded or killed people. That would be a legitimate assertion. But the quotation of "thousands" of rockets is a half-truth and intentionally misleading.
Another half-truth is that Israel is involved in a "peace process" or supports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact it has gone on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank and making Palestinian lives miserable and colonizing them.
Then there are other techniques such as 6) appeal to fear and 7) appeal to prejudice. Apologists for the attack on Gaza depict Gazans as murderous, jihadi, homophobic, sharia-wielding fanatics, in a word, Muslims, and therefore of course their lives don't matter. Sound familiar?
Having been treated to these propaganda techniques repeatedly and continuously for 8 years, the US public can suddenly hear the similarity in the assertions of Israeli officialdom and its supporters.
Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the Jabotinsky/ Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.
By the way, since Tzipi Livni admitted Sunday that her government is resisting a diplomatic solution to Gaza and wants to keep the war going as long as possible, and that one impediment is "the pictures coming out of Gaza"-- i.e. of dead children and civilians and ordinary policemen, I'll just put in this link for those with a tough stomach. Not for the squeamish (and not an endorsement of the site). Here is another one; same caveats
Thanks to Lefty Coaster for the Kos Diary on yesterday's IC posting.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/05/2009 12:27:00 AM
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29 Comments:
Another interesting, and more comical, claim is that the Gazans are suffering because of Hamas, and that the West Bank people live in peace and prosperity because Abbas is a good boy and does what he is told.
But the Gazans successfully forced the Israeli troops and settlers out in 2005, and the West Bank is infested with both. They routinely go on the rampage; control all movement; prevent farmers from harvesting; and even try to lynch women and children.
The Palestineans know that the ugly and corrupt world will not help them. Quite the opposite in fact: it helps their occupiers and tormentors. They have to rely and themselves and make life hell for the Israelis who are desecrating their soil until they give up, as they did in Gaza 2005.
The YouTube videos, posted by adycousins, of the London protest of Saturday 3 January 2009 should prove inspiring to the readers of this page. This link to Mr Ken Livingstone's address will lead the interested to other related links.
I draw attention to the fact that the speech by Ms Sarah Teather (MP for Brent East and Liberal Democrat's Shadow Housing Minister) contains a very useful practical suggestion for all of us to follow; we could write to, e.g., our Congressmen/women demanding their unequivocal call for ending this carnage.
BF.
I am sure that there are members of the jewish community that consider the current operations as wrong since these are no doubt heinous war crimes but I feel that the uneasiness you mention is only because they are afraid of a stalemate end to the current operations as was the case in 2006 with operations against Hezbollah. The number of jewish people in America who are actually concerned about the Palestinians is much fewer....
I blame the media for an absolutely lopsides reporting on this whole conflict where the aggressors (Israel) are being humanized and the oppressed are a faceless, nameless entity lumped together into Hamas.
While I think you use the term "atrocities" too lightly and in a partisan manner (and no, I am not comfortable with "collateral damage either), the parrallels are interesting, and maybe you have a point. For me personally, though, Bush's forgeign policy revealed the bankruptcy of seeing security merely in terms of force. It ignored the importance of public diplomacy, which is a huge problem in my opinion. Russia does the same thing. Israel is playing a pretty good public relations game; however, its current incursion is working against it. It needs to keep its actions swift, so that the headlines of the inevitable civilian deaths and suffering do not dominate the world media for too long.
Israel has lost. No matter how many Palestinian women and children Israel kills. No matter how bush pimps for them. They'll still be around but they have lost.
Well done Professor; this is first time I have seen the Bush methodology for creating an alternate reality documented. Perhaps this will help some people who still believe in what he say or said that he and his colleagues were lying to us for 8 years.
Excellent list, but I might only add "Signal complicity by remaining silent" to the list of techniques used by the Bush administration to foster an attitude of complacence and general distraction in the body politic. Since the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began on December 27, President Bush has issued only one public statement on the matter, an easily-ignored Saturday morning radio address, in which - inevitably - the Palestinians are all but blamed for provoking the Israeli incursion, with no calls for Israeli restraint. The White House press office found time to issue a statement mourning the death of a Bush family cat, India, but for all intents and purposes, has avoided comment on this Middle East time bomb. What kind of message does that send the greater world?
Some famous guy with a stove-pipe hat and a beard once said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time..."
Some more recent guy who still is President said "Fooled me... Can't get fooled again!"
"Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?"
No; the Israelis ruined it for themselves, just insuring there would be help from Bush and Obama and the Republican and Democratic neocons. the terrible immorality is Israel's doing as well as that of American leaders surely including Obama and Democratic legislators.
Prof. Cole mostly discusses technical questions of great interest to the Joseph Goebbels School of Globoterrorism and Public Diplomacy, but not so interesting to me. Still, he does seem to run off the rails a little in his own terms. He started out, I thought, to show that his Five Pillars of Propaganda --
A. Deny it all!
B. Pretend that your main concern is for your own victims! [Sc. rather than for yourself]
C. Demonize the opponent with ad hominem arguments!
D. Repeat simple slogans until they become accepted as true!
E. Use half-truths!
have not been as effective for the Spinsters of Israël as they used to be. Instead of doing so, however, he documents that dubyapologists and the Rancho Crawford cowpokers themselves have used the same panoply to advance or defend their aggression into the former al-‘Iráq. That is not the same project, because a zillion different causes, good and bad, successful and catastrophic, have relied on these techniques. Indeed, apart from adhering strictly to accuracy and reality, there would be no tools left for the agitprop artist to work with should these old faithfuls ever be banned. If Prof. Cole wanted to argue that the human race has somehow "come of age" lately ŕ la the Rev. Bonhoffer and does not often fall for such shoddy stuff any longer, I might be tempted to doubt the balance of his mind, but at least the form of his argument would make sense.
Instead we seem to have something like this: "The Bushies used sub-par propaganda methods and failed to persuade, THEREFORE the Israëlis, who are using the same methods at the moment, are bound to fail to persuade soon or later too." That is a happy thought and I am all for it coming to pass, but if there is even half a smidgen of demonstration of its truth or inevitability here, I cannot find it. Furthermore, the Pangloss-Pollyanna-Marybakereddy side of JC is showing again, because "failed to persuade" is at best a partisan judgment, and at worst an objective error. It is no secret that Team Aggression thinks they won in ex-‘Iráq, not only on the ground but in the hearts of the Homelanders as well: have they not convinced everybody with an open mind that the Ever-Victorious Surge of ’07™ has proved beyond all doubtin’ that they were right to aggress all along?
It would not be pleasant if the underlying Colean analogy works out more closely than he draws it, with the politicians of the Tel Avîv statelet left presiding over a large can of wriggling worms in Occupied Palestine, which they nevertheless profess to view as a placid pastoral scene of pacification, perhaps featuring Gaza-the-Model on the model of Iraq-the-Model, tra-lal-la!
(For some reason that radiant vision reminds me of Senator Aiken of VT, if one can suppose him to have unilaterally and preëmptively declared an American victory in Indochina -- and then not have left the building. But God knows best.)
Happy days.
The most basic parallel lies may be these:
Iraq - 'anyone who opposes the war on Iraq opposes the fight against terror'
Gaza- 'anyone who opposes the attack on Gaza doesn't want to stop Hamas rockets'
ref : “If it is true that Americans are greeting Israeli talking points with more criticism... [then] is it because we have been [so] intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney [et al prop-agenda / narrative-driven not news-driven media]...?”
You make an excellent point today, Juan. Perhaps another way we could express this learning process, apparent: “If American society is indeed a consumer culture, then are they learning to recognize the difference between when they are being taught or told something, and when they are being sold something?”
Sometimes pure logic overwhelms the base instinct of well-wrought words; e.g., "ISRAEL does not target civilians." If this is true, and 1/3 of GAZA Palestinian KIA+WIA are children, and one-half of that remainder are 'non-combatant' women & men, then either Israeli "targeting" is incompetent, or it is corrupt, being a collective punishment after all ~ obvious by their own, unambiguous casualty metrics ~ this real history writ being sold as some entirely different story, wrought.
(What is astounding to this writer is how the majority of political leaders in the U.S. have yet to recognize, themselves ~ just how preposterous these kinds of Talking Points now sound to the ears of their own electorate: is our government learning? :)
In UK & Europe, consumers have been boycotting the occupation for some time now. Here in N America, I find less evidence of it (except for the highly commendable divestment programs of the United and Presbyterian churches). It will do nothing to stop the current carnage, but will "encourage" a long-term solution.
Time to begin the boycott in N America. Start with:
Motorola
Citigroup
Additional suggestions are welcome.
Juan, I'm no fan of Bush.
I find what he did in Iraq (along with the backing of Mr Blair) quite astonishing in it's arrogancy (and total lack of any insight or even basic understanding of the Middle East politics, culture and people - which has now give us a hornets nest in Afghanistan/Pakistan too) but would ask you - does that mean Israel should sit idly by until Hamas do get hold of rockets that can kill thousands as soon as they are able?
What Government in it's right mind can possibly sit by and allow it's citizens to be rocketed day and night?
For the Israeli's the phrase "Catch 22" is what springs to mind as ever.
Thanks,
Ollie
Another common propaganda ploy is to claim that Hamas is responsible for civilians killed by Israeli bombs and rockets because Hamas used the civilians as "shields." "We targeted the head of Hamas but it was not our fault we killed his ten children and 50 others who lived in his building." This is the same propaganda nonsense used by US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This letter:
EU must hold Israel to its agreements
has been signed by a number of prominent individuals in the UK (a good number of them of the Jewish heritage) and published in today's The Guardian. For the interested who reside in the UK, if they so wish they could sign one or several of the relevant petitions that are already on The official site of the Prime Minister's Office; please type, say, Gaza, in the search box of this page, and you will be presented with a list of related petitions to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. If desired, one can write one's own petition (too many petitions will however distract attention).
BF.
BUSH'S PARTING GIFT TO OBAMA - SCORCHED EARTH POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
President Bush is the first American President to openly talk about a two state solution in the Middle East. But beyond that him and his Secretary of State Condi Rice have done everything to destroy the Middle East peace process.
Bill Clinton left him a fairly advanced peace process, but GWB took an axe and crushed it. First, by declaring the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat a terrorist and then unleashing Ariel Sharon on the Palestinians. The same Ariel Sharon who was wanted in a European court on terrorism charge for instigating and killing of over one thousand innocent men, women and children in Sabira and Shatilla camps in Lebanon.
It seems that Bush and Sharon's policy was to weaken Palestinians to such an extent that a planted Palestinian leader, Mahmood Abbas would accept whatever peace agreement was offered to him. But that was doomed to failure. Israel continues to fight and has not only suffered humiliation but also lost invincibility at the hands of a rag tag Hizbollah.
And now, when it seemed that Israelis had started talking peace and King Abdullah's peace plan and when a new U.S. President was about to be sworn in with much hope for Middle East peace, President Bush & Condi Rice have encouraged Israel to attack Gaza and possibly destroy all chances of peace.
A majority of American public and many Jews around the world (who otherwise support Israel) have shown anger and disgust at Gaza attacks and are refusing to buy Bush Administration's rhetoric. It seems that the World and Americans cannot be rid of George W. Bush soon enough. Even in the dying days of his Presidency he is hell bent on causing death and destruction and leaving behind a scorched Middle East.
Maybe what is needed to emphasize the asymmetry of the suffering is a simple box score. It would be a numbers only presentation of killed and wounded on each side with a breakout for men, women, children. and militants, i.e. Hamas and Israeli soldiers.
The box score, being a very compact form of information could be disseminated rather quickly to a large population.
If the 100 Palestinians to 1 Israeli kill ratio doesn't cause remorse among the populace, then at least we'll know who we are, and what we are.
Israel has lost the PR game only temporarily! The pro-Israeli US media knows that they can criticize israel now, and some are actually doing it(in a very tempered manner)----but everybody in Tel Aviv and in the editorial press rooms in Atlanta and New York know one thing------when the bombs have stopped falling on Gaza and the bodies of Palestinian civilians are buried the story will also be buried. One or two months after the bombs finish falling , regardless of how many civilians have died the press will move on and rarely if ever talk about Gaza and the 2009 israeli blitzkrieg. Forget! Forget!
Than Wolf Blitzer and Christianne Amanpour can move on to more politically correct bad guys like the Serbs, the Russians, the Palestinians, etc, etc. The Israelis will apologize and youll never hear about it again.
Orwellian America
Nobody is talking about what happened on November 4th in Gaza. That was the day the cease fire broke down. The whole world missed it because we were all watching the election. But the fact remains the cease fire had held for five months before that date, and that was the day it was broken.
Bombing playgrounds and schoolyards constitutes crimes against humanity. I smell Neoconservatives behind much of this, supporting Israel's actions and even promoting them. Michael Goldfarb, a leading Neocon and big noise in McCain's campaign, has indicated he thinks such actions are necessary to get Hamas to surrender. How easy it is to spew such inhuman garbage, when you sit in an office, dressed in your expensive suit, and surround yourself with other like-minded rattlesnakes, coiled and hissing. Anyone, in or out of uniform, who refers to innocent civilian deaths as necessary or as collateral damage is a damned sociopath, and deserves to be imprisoned. They have lost any humanity they might once have had. They are dangerous to the rest of us. Neocons are enamoured of torture, war, destruction and greed. They are toxic; and their influence is a Pandora's Box of horrors. The current crop in charge in Israel will find no sympathy from much of the world. As a country, founded in part, as a mea culpa for the Holocaust, they, more than anyone, should not be slaughtering innocent children. I am no fan of Hamas; or any other group promoting death and destruction. But, killing children solves nothing. And, Neoconservative support for it shows how morally bereft this horrible ideology has become. They seem to think it makes them appear to be "Tough Guys." Their souls are as shriveled as their cahunas.
"They have to rely and themselves and make life hell for the Israelis who are desecrating their soil until they give up, as they did in Gaza 2005."
But they didn't give up in Gaza, they just changed tactics. Instead of trying to control Gaza from the inside, they controlled it from the outside. Conditions in Gaza did not improve after the Israeli "withdrawal" because Israelis still held sovereignty over it by their absolute control of the borders (including the border with Egypt), the airspace, and the waterways. And they were always free to send their missiles and bombs and soldiers into Gaza to remind Gazans that they can destroy their infrastructure and shed their blood and kill their children any time they like.
"It needs to keep its actions swift, so that the headlines of the inevitable civilian deaths and suffering do not dominate the world media for too long."
You don't have the slightest clue how utterly, inhumanly sick that is, do you?
And by the way, the only thing wrong with the use of the word atrocity in this situation is that it is just too bloody mild.
"does that mean Israel should sit idly by until Hamas do get hold of rockets that can kill thousands as soon as they are able?"
What part of the lesson around the fact that Hamas kept the cease fire better than Israel did has not gotten through to you? And what part of the lesson around the fact that Hamas kept the ceasefire even though ISRAEL NOT ONLY RENIGED ON ITS OBLIGATION UNDER THE CEASE FIRE AGREEMENT TO LIFT THE SIEGE, IT ACTUALLY TIGHTENED IT?
And what makes you think that terrorizing and killing Palestinian children is going to win Palestinian parents' hearts and minds?
PS "What Government in it's right mind can possibly sit by and allow it's citizens to be rocketed day and night?"
Evidently, you expect the Palestinian government do do exactly that. No, that is wrong. You expect the Palestinian government to sit by and allow its citizens to be slaughtered day and night at the rate of tens if not hundreds per day.
what to boycott? how about products created to have both civilian and military applications, which are sold to Israel to arm it? you know - like the Roomba robot which also can be used as a drone to search houses...in fact sometimes a domestic application is just a convenient and promotional cover for the true military nature ... do they use Roomba technology in Gaza as they did in Iraq ? ... and don't go telling me it saves lives...we have not even begun to take on the system, pals
I suspect that the Bush administration's hope is that the violence, seen by the Muslim world if not by us, will provoke a reaction from Iran, providing an excuse to instigate a nuclear attack. Then they could effectively dump WWIII in Obama's lap.
During Charlie Rose's interview of Bob Simon (CBS News) last night (1-8-2008) Simon used the term apartheid several times while discussing the Palestinian situation. Simon has covered Israel for decades and lived in Tel Aviv ten years. He is most definitely NOT a MSM apologist for Israel.
the terrible immorality is Israel's doing as well as that of American leaders surely including Obama and Democratic legislators.But the Gazans successfully forced the Israeli troops and settlers out in 2005, and the West Bank is infested with both.
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