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.
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