HR: What could the Israeli government add to all this?
MG: The Israeli government can add a new, more action-oriented dimension to the battle against the anti-Israel media. This can only work efficiently if Israel sets up a counter-propaganda agency as previously mentioned. In my book I describe its possible structure and activities in some detail. Such a counter-propaganda agency would oversee the entire battlefield of hate mongering against Israel.
The media constitute one important propaganda front against Israel. A national counter-propaganda agency would be able to follow all major media outlets. It would work systematically and with perseverance. It would advise to the government on how to deal with hostile media. And last but far from least it would have money available for exhaustive battles against specific deliberately fraudulent media.
HR: What do you mean by systematic approach?
MG: The counter-propaganda agency as I have described it in the book would consist of three main departments. The first one deals with research. In the media field it would collect, at the beginning of its activities, all the material available on media bias against Israel. Then it would study the information available to analyze the ways media cheat. That would include the media landscape in individual countries, specific anti-Israeli media there as well as individual journalists. A databank would be set up with systematic information on hostile media and journalists. The agency would also study the methodologies developed in the course of the years to fight media bias.
A second department of the agency would consistently monitor developments. One branch would follow specific hate activities such as the Nazification of Israel and BDS worldwide. Another branch would follow hate-mongering in Israel of specific perpetrator categories such as media, academics, NGOs, trade unions, anti-Israeli churches and so on. A third branch would be country specialists. These would be following incitement against Israel and anti-Semitism in specific countries of which they would know the language.
A third branch of the counter-propaganda agency would deal with activities. Let me take as an example a country like Norway. I have written a book and many articles on the widespread anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic hatred there. If there were a counter-propaganda agency it would have seen years ago to it that many in the world would have been informed about how the third largest daily Dagbladet over the years has Nazified Israel. One aspect of this are some of the caricatures it published. They were drawn by the cartoonist Finn Graff who has shown previous Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert as Nazis and compared Gaza to the German Buchenwald concentration camp. Yet King Harald V of Norway has awarded Graf in 2007 the Royal St Olavs Order, the highest honor of the country. When that happened, one could have easily drawn attention internationally to how the King awards a major Holocaust distorter.
Actions should not only be limited toward foreign media. There is a Norwegian caucus in the Senate and Congress. There are American Jewish organizations who could have approached some of these caucus members and said ‘isn’t what the King has done scandalous? Why do you want to be associated with such a country?’ Then U.S. Senator Sam Brownback wrote a most revealing letter to the Norwegian ambassador in Washington on the misbehavior of King Harald V and government ministers in 2010. The Jewish media gave no attention to it. Better organization on the Jewish and Israeli side then could have created an international scandal on the basis of this letter.
What I am saying here about effective action is not something I have invented. A few years later, the King gave a similar order to a Norwegian Muslim convert Trond Ali Linstad, who had regularly incited against Israel. He made the list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center of perpetrators of major anti-Semitic incidents in 2012. The protest in Norway itself and elsewhere forced the King to send a messenger to Linstad take the medal back.
Yet after his Linstad award had boomeranged King Harald V did it again. He gave the order of St Olav to Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, two Norwegian doctors who are Hamas promoters. There was no significant protest.
Once the agency has established a database and monitors the ongoing situation, one finally gets a detailed overview of the anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli battlefield. That would be similar to how the Israeli Minister of Defense and the top brass of the Israeli army have a detailed overview of the military battlefield, or like the heads of the intelligence services have an overview of the intelligence battlefield. There is no private organization in the media-watch field with anywhere near the money to prepare such an overview.
HR: Your second factor is perseverance. Can you explain that a bit better?
MG: The media watch organizations do not have the funds to follow a newspaper or a journalist for years. I have heard through the grapevine that Asserson’s studies greatly irritated the BBC because they realized that what he wrote about their anti-Israeli bias was not only true, but also fairly detailed. What was even worse, he pointed out that they were breaching the contract they have with the British government which is the basis of their monopoly.
However, Asserson’s work was done years ago. The counter-propaganda agency could have monitored the BBC’s broadcasting ongoing according to his methodology all these years. It seems to me that it would have been virtually impossible for the BBC to continue its bias against Israel in such a crude way as Asserson described. The more so as a huge amount of money the BBC receives due to its monopoly position could be at risk.
HR: You speak of money as a major issue?
MG: First of all there is the cost of the ongoing operations of the counter-propaganda agency. According to my rough estimates — after consulting some other experts — it might require perhaps 250 million dollars per year, to operate such an organization. It would have hundreds of employees with knowledge in specific fields and many people who know languages.
On specific problem cases among the anti-Israeli media, the agency might be prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch a detailed study and afterwards an ongoing fight. Government-owned or government-sponsored media organizations could become priority targets. Not always that money would have to come from the Israeli government or the counter-propaganda agency itself. One could also interest other organizations, or wealthy individuals, to sponsor it. Of course the $250 million wouldn’t be spent on media alone. The agency would also have to deal with many others such as Muslim countries, Muslims in the western world, academics, hate-mongering trade unions and their executives, anti-Semitic church leaders, NGOs and so on.
HR: The final question: what would the main actions of the counter-propaganda agency be?
MG: Sophistication will come over time. Some things will have to be developed by trial and error. However, once you have a database on journalists you can do many things. An interesting example may be found in the writings of Matti Friedman, formerly of the Associated Press in Israel. In August 2014, he analyzed the AP’s anti-Israel bias in detail, which he experienced first-hand during his work for them. In his words: “Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported,” at the rate of a story every two days over a seven-week period, more than the number of similarly critical stories about the Palestinians, moderates and extremists, over three years.[1]
AP bureau chief in Israel at the time, Steve Gutkin, gave a lame response on a local Indian website which he was running. The AP bias against Israel has been documented for many years. As far back as 2001, this press agency was one of the recipients of HonestReporting’s Dishonest Reporter Awards. One example of AP bias happened when a Palestinian sniper murdered a ten-month-old Jewish baby in Hebron. The AP headline writers gave the article the title: “Jewish toddler dies in West Bank.” They made no mention in the article of who perpetrated the murder, or even that it was a murder. From the headline the baby could have died of natural causes or as the result of an accident. HonestReporting gave additional examples of the press agency’s biased reporting at the time. Later that year American journalist Jeff Helmreich wrote a detailed analysis of how the AP had embellished Yasser Arafat’s Al-Nakba speech in May of that year by reporting it incorrectly.
Over the last 15 years, AP’s biased anti-Israel reporting has most probably done this country considerable damage in the international arena. If a counter-propaganda agency had been in existence over this time period, monitoring, regulating and placing sanctions on biased reporters where necessary, the picture would be different today.
It is possible to investigate significantly anti-Israel media systematically, and to search for other journalists who are willing to expose the bias of their previous employers. I am working on one such case in Europe, and I know of another potential case of a retired journalist from an important American media outlet. Once you start doing this systematically, it can become a major threat to media with a demonstrated bias against Israel.
One of the basic principles in the counter-propaganda field is that most people are cowards. If you can expose a couple of journalists who reported on Israel’s 2014 Protective Edge campaign as crooks because they did not report that Hamas used civilians as human shields, you frighten hundreds of others. Many journalists are still worried about their reputations.
In 2007 I exposed a Dutch journalist’s manipulations. Conny Mus, who is no longer alive, was the head of the Foreign Press Association in Israel for many years. He was proud that he was the first Western journalist who had interviewed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. He said that he could ask him any questions he wanted. I published that he hadn’t asked the most logical question – what about the promotion of genocide of the Jews as mentioned in the Hamas Charter?
If there had been a counter-propaganda agency, it wouldn’t have been difficult to cause Mus to lose his position as head of the Foreign Press Association or alternatively, to expose the fact that this Association was headed by a so-called journalist who deliberately omitted essential facts. You cannot do this effectively on an incidental basis because the media are indeed very powerful. Once you have a database on journalists, the agency’s perseverance can do much more.
I have only given a few comments here, but there are many more in my book. And with the greater sophistication of the counter propaganda agency, as it develops, it will discover additional methods to expose media frauds. It is late in the game, but not too late.
[sc:graybox ]Manfred Gerstenfeld’s book, The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism, was published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and RVP Press. It can be acquired from Amazon and in Israel, from the JCPA.
[1] http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide
Featured image: CC BY-SA Honestreporting.com
