Amir Gissin runs what he calls "Israel's Explanation Department." Which is why it is surprising to hear him admit that many Israelis think "the whole problem is that we don't explain ourselves correctly."
Last week, as al-Jazeera launched an Arab view of the world into English-speaking homes worldwide, Gissin was a man under pressure.
At the David Bar Ilan conference on the media and the Middle East, he faced an audience of Israelis who were unhappy about the way the propaganda battle with Hezbollah was fought and lost during the war in Lebanon. They wanted to know how it could be done better next time, because most people in Israel seem to think there will be a next time with Hezbollah soon.
Gissin said the words of his English-speaking spokespeople could not compete with the power of the pictures of civilians killed in the Israeli attack on Lebanese towns like Qana. And the Israeli parliament will not spend the money on an Israeli counterpart to al-Jazeera.
But Gissin was not downhearted. He declared there to be a "war on the Web," in which Israel had a new weapon, a piece of computer software called the "Internet megaphone."
"During the war we had the opportunity to do some very nice things with the megaphone community," he said at the conference.
Among them, he claimed, was a role in getting an admission from Reuters that a photograph of damage to Beirut by a Lebanese photographer had been doctored to increase the amount of smoke in the picture. This was first spotted by American blogger Charles Johnson, who has won an award for "promoting Israel and Zionism."
POWER
To check out the power of the megaphone, I logged onto a Web site called Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) on the afternoon of Nov. 15. More than 25,000 registered users of the site have downloaded the megaphone software, which enables them to receive alerts asking them to get active online.
It did not take long for an alert to come through. Kim Howells, a British Foreign Office minister, had issued a press statement condemning that day's Palestinian rocket attack which killed an elderly Israeli and wounded other civilians. GIYUS wanted site users to "show your appreciation of the UK's response."
One click took me to a pre-prepared e-mail addressed to Howells, and a slot for me to personalize my comment. A test confirmed that the e-mail would arrive at his office, as if I had spotted his comments on a news Web site, in this case Yahoo, and sent it to him with a supporting message. In the e-mails, there would be no indication of the involvement of GIYUS, although Howells may have been suspicious that so many people around the world had read the same Yahoo story about him and decided to e-mail him.
The British Foreign Office confirms that e-mails were received on Nov. 15 but will not go into any more detail.
The most popular target of the online activists is the foreign media, especially the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the news organization which they love to hate.
Earlier this year I was a member of the independent panel set up by the BBC governors, the panel of 12 outsiders who regulate the corporation, to review the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We reported on the high number of e-mails we had received from outside the UK, mostly from North America, and the evidence of pressure group involvement.
A majority of e-mail correspondents thought that the BBC was anti-Israel. However, if the e-mails that could be identified as coming from outside of the UK were excluded, the opposite was true -- more people thought the BBC to be anti-Palestinian or pro-Israel.
The BBC has already had one encounter with GIYUS -- an attempt to influence the outcome of an online poll. BBC History Magazine noticed an upsurge in voting on whether Holocaust denial should be a criminal offense in Britain. But the closing date had already passed and the result had already been published, so the votes were invalid anyway.
success
GIYUS supporters claim success elsewhere in "balancing" an opinion poll on an Arabic Web site by turning a vote condemning Israel's attack in the Lebanon into an endorsement.
For some of Israel's supporters, a primary aim of their war on the Web is an attempt to discredit what they see as hostile foreign media reports, especially those containing iconic visual images.
One particular target has been Charles Enderlin, the respected French television correspondent, whose Palestinian cameraman filmed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura being shot and killed as his father tried to shield him at the start of the second intifada.
Enderlin accused Israeli troops of shooting and killing the boy. French supporters of Israel went online to claim the report was a distortion based on faked footage.
His network, France 2, responded with legal action and last month, in the first of four individual cases, a French court found the organizer of a self-styled media watchdog Web site guilty of libel.
Another online target has been the TV footage of bloodshed on a Gaza beach earlier this year. A Palestinian girl was seen screaming as she saw the bodies of dead family members killed by what Palestinians allege was Israeli shellfire. When I mentioned the impact of these pictures at last week's conference, members of the audience shouted "staged."
One person came up to me afterwards to suggest that the family had somehow died somewhere else and that later their bodies had been moved to the beach to be filmed. Where, for instance, was all the blood?
I pointed out that I had seen everything that the cameraman had shot and that some pictures were too gruesome to be shown.
It is clear the government of Israel wants to fight back against the impact of foreign media pictures like these. Amir Gissin talked last week of plans to get Israeli video onto sites like YouTube, which he said attracted opinion "shapers."
And his cousin Ra'anan Gissin, formerly Ariel Sharon's media adviser, has endorsed the idea of having picture power at the state's disposal, ready for future conflicts.
Referring to Israel's opponents, he put it in his usual direct way: "You need to shoot a picture before you shoot them."
Stewart Purvis is professor of television journalism at City University in London. He is a former chief executive and editor-in-chief of the news provider ITN.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry