Asa Winstanley

My colleague David Sheen was assaulted by the mob at a recent “Death to the Arabs” rally in Tel Aviv, for the crime of trying to film it.

Israel also of course habitually blames Palestinians for their own deaths – in wars started by Israel. In a transparent case of psychological projection, Israel blames Palestinian civilian deaths on the (imaginary) use of “human shields” by Palestinian resistance fighters.

In reality, civilians are killed because of Israel’s habit of bombing, shelling and destroying entire civilian neighbourhoods. And, in fact, as is well documented by human rights groups, it is Israel that uses Palestinian victims as human shields.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Don’t be fooled by Israel’s propaganda usage of terminology such as “targeting elimination”. The CIA too, used to invoke such double-speak.

Of black leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, COINTELPRO documents notoriously threatened that “through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them”.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

A recurring theme of this column has been Israeli propaganda. More specifically, I have looked at some of the ways in which Israeli government entities, and Israeli corporations like to over-value and exaggerate their impact on the world and their effectiveness against their enemies.

In a way, one can understand why they do this. And there is nothing unique about it. All states and most combatants in wars engage in psychological operations against their enemies.

During the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, it seemed that every time the US and its allies engaged in a bombing we’d hear about a “top leader” in al-Qaida or other armed groups being offed. This even reached the stage where some armed enemies of the US have been declared dead more than once – a phenomenon the excellent American journalist Jeremy Scahill has written about many times. Clearly propaganda and exageration was at work in some of these cases.

Israeli psi-ops have taken some rather unique and disturbing forms, however.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

For the last decade, a central plank of Israel’s strategy to combat its global critics has been something it terms “lawfare” – using courts around the world to attack, defame, silence and intimidate its enemies.

Since Israel is addicted to real life war, it’s no surprise to find that even its diplomats and ambassadors are seemingly unable to think and act in terms other than purely military ones (most of them are former soldiers after all). Take its response to the BDS campaign – the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it respects Palestinian human rights.

A reporter for liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, on a recent visit to the Israeli embassy in London, noted a map that was “like the war room of a brigade on the Lebanese border.” This map showed the “front” (another military term) which consists of “the main campuses, the deployment of pro-Israel activists and the location of the ‘enemy forces.’”

Amongst such “enemy forces” are those well-known dastardly anti-Semitic hate-mongers: peaceful campaigners, academic critical of Israel (many of them Jewish) and university students.

Just this week the new Israeli ambassador Mark Regev visited the SOAS campus, in a low-key meeting with university director Valerie Amos. This prompted noisy protests by students, who objected to Regev’s presence on campus and to top-management’s coddling of this high-profile apologist for Israeli war crimes.

Read more over at MEMO.

The carnival of reaction that is the preposterously over long US presidential election period rolls on and on. The Republican candidates seem to be doing their best to outdo each other to find out who can will the most terrible people around.

Religious fanaticism and the legacy of the Tea Party movement have united to bring some very dangerous extremism to the fore. His rallies have become rabble-rousing hate-fests focused on scapegoating sections of those society already most marginalised and discriminated against. Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from the US is the most infamous example.

While there’s no doubt that fear mongering and race-baiting have played an important part in gathering Trump’s bases of support, an important long article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling StoneFebruary noted that those racist themes “comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.”

Read more over at MEMO.

At a cyberwar forum in Tel Aviv in January, it came out that Israel has allocated almost $26 million in this year’s budget to fight the ever-growing movement to boycott, divest from and sanctions Israel – BDS for short.

An Associated Press report on the event quoted one high Israeli official as saying that she wanted “to create a community of fighters” against BDS in the online world.

That little snippet of cyber-sabre-rattling came from Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs (the former chief military censor of the press in Israel). The head of this ministry is Gilad Erdan, last year crowned the “BDS minister” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Read more over at MEMO.