[R-G] A propaganda war can be disproportionate too

[Anthony Fenton]

ANALYSIS: A propaganda war can be disproportionate too
Posted January 8th, 2009
http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/5673-propaganda-war-can-be-disproportionate-too

MENASSAT's Saseen Kawzally looks at the propaganda war being waged  
during the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.

By SASEEN KAWZALLY

IDF YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT
A screenshot of the Israeli military's YouTube site launched during  
Operation Cast Lead.

Following the popular mantra "YouTube is today's television," the  
Israeli military has ventured into new territory by utilizing the  
Internet to wage a propaganda war to accompany its on-going war in the  
Gaza Strip.

Amid escalating casualties—700 total dead and rising—and as  
international condemnation of Israel's offensive mounts with each new  
day of bombing, Israel finds itself in urgent need to justify the  
apparent disproportionate use of force.

In the process, Israel has managed to brand practically all of Gaza's  
men as Hamas militants, thus making them legitimate military targets  
in the eyes of the world.

Using the same logic, any building described by Israel as "Hamas- 
associated" becomes a legitimate target as well, be it a mosque, a  
hospital, or even apartment blocks or schools.

This bombing then becomes acceptable regardless of the ensuing  
"collateral damage," a military euphemism for women, children and,  
yes, civilian men.

Is it any surprise then that the Israeli military became the first  
national army to set up an official YouTube channel, featuring its own  
military videos?

Various military spokesmen have said that the channel is meant to  
verify Israel's claims of surgical bombing accuracy and impeccable  
intelligence on targets.

As the Arab media beams horrific images of civilians, women and  
children and body parts scattered over bomb sites, the YouTube channel  
is meant to counter these "sensational" images—a target of official  
Israeli criticism.

The YouTube channel was set up by the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF)  
spokespersons unit on the second day of Israel's air campaign against  
Gaza. It promises to provide "documentation of the IDF's humane action  
and operational success in Operation Cast Lead."

'The blogosphere and new media are another war zone'
— Major Avital Leibovich, Israeli army spokeswoman

And the channel is attracting lots of visitors, with 14,000  
subscribers so far and 996,139 views of some 37 clips—most of them  
cockpit videos of Israeli air strikes on Gaza.

"The blogosphere and new media are another war zone," said Foreign  
Press Branch head Maj. Avital Leibovich at the launch of the channel.  
"We have to be relevant there."

BBC questions YouTube videos

But these efforts were almost immediately undermined and discredited  
by none other than the BBC.

In a January 5 BBC article titled "Propaganda war: Trusting what we  
see?" World Affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds questioned how we  
"see" videos taken from the air and how they are interpreted.

"Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared  
to show rockets being loaded onto a lorry. The truck and those close  
to it were then destroyed by a missile," Reynolds wrote.

"This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their  
strikes were and how well justified... The YouTube video has a large  
caption on it saying 'Grad missiles being loaded onto the Hamas  
vehicle.' As of Saturday morning UK time, more than 260,000 people had  
watched it."

But then the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem released  
testimony by a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur who claimed  
that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his  
workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop. Sanur—whose  
son was one of the eight people killed in the attack—denied any  
connection to Hamas militants or military activity.

"The incident shows how an apparently definitive piece of video can  
turn into something much more doubtful," said Reynolds.

"The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to achieve two main  
aims," he continued. "The first is to justify the air attacks. The  
second is to show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza."

No revision of the official Israeli story took place, and the video  
remains on YouTube.

Limiting coverage

Israel's efforts to convince the world that it is acting "humanely" in  
Gaza are helped along by its banning of the international media from  
the Gaza Strip, during and ahead of the latest offensive—under the  
cynical pretext of concern for the safety of foreign journalists.

The ban has left the job of reporting the situation in Gaza mainly to  
those Arab or international media who had correspondents on the ground  
before the offensive started.

But many of these media—including Al-Jazeera—had previously and  
routinely been branded by Israel as "Hamas associated." In fact, Al- 
Jazeera was banned from official Israeli press conferences and  
interviews with Israeli officials well ahead of Operation Cast Lead.

As far as the Arab media are concerned, Palestinian journalists have  
done a pretty good job of replacing the vacuum left by Israel's ban on  
foreign media.

Al Jazeera has been reporting exhaustively on the Israeli siege of  
Gaza for the past eight months, and Lebanon's NEW TV's reporting from  
Gaza has been outstanding.

It is fair to conclude then that only the "western" media, and thus  
public opinion in the West, are feeling the impact of Israel's control  
over the flow of information—both on the Internet and in the  
mainstream media—which was probably Israel's goal in the first place.

'Online war, online resistance"

If there is obvious disproportion in the number of victims caused by  
either side, the Palestinian side is equally at a disadvantage in the  
online war being waged by Israel over Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian hackers did hack or deface some 300 Israeli websites  
in the first 48-hours of the attack on Gaza, but such efforts paled in  
comparison to the influence of the official Israeli message that was  
being delivered through the mainstream media.

Facing battalions of public relations experts and lobbyists with  
almost endless financial and technological resources, pro-Palestinian  
hackers are firing "virtual Qassam rockets" into a predominantly pro- 
Israeli cyber-world, and they are having about as much effect as the  
real Qassam rockets being fired at Israel by Hamas.

Hamas' Media Warfare Division, a branch of the Al-Qufs Brigade,  
claimed in a statement that is was able to hack and take over several  
Israeli websites, posting pictures of Palestinian leaders and  
resistance videos there to replace the Israeli narrative.

But Israel's Ynet news website, one of the sites hit by the pro- 
Palestinian hackers, was dismissive about the Palestinian cyber-war  
efforts.

"Website defacement of this nature requires only basic programming  
know-how and usually boils down to changing the main page—a file easy  
to reconstruct.”

A more sophisticated and elaborate internet attack was claimed by a  
Moroccan hackers group calling itself Team Evil.

Team Evil hacked into DomainTheNet's registration system server,  
effectively hijacking various prominent domain names like ynetnews.com  
and Bank Discount, and rerouted visitors to a page condemning Israel,  
and showing images of children killed in Gaza bombings, as well as  
images of Abu-Ghraib prisoners being tortured. Team Evil has  
previously hacked other Israeli brands such as Cellcom, Shilav and  
BlueSquare.

If Hamas' own cyber-warfare is the equivalent of a Qassam rocket, then  
the Moroccan initiative was the virtual Grad rocket attack.

Preemptive strike

Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the  
University of Alabama at Birmingham, was the first to use the term  
"Propaganda war" on his blog referring to cyber-actions taken by both  
sides of the conflict, in support of their fighting on the ground.

The objective here is limiting and hindering "third party" media  
coverage of the war.

The assumption is Israel's credibility on the international scene  
should be enough for people to believe its official story. But the  
numbers and images are not playing in their favor, a sad fact, when it  
takes high civilian casualties to cast doubts on to the veracity of  
Israeli claims.

Still, the widening ground offensive is making it harder for Israel to  
maintain the moral high ground.

In an article published on New Year’s Eve at Times Online, Lucy  
Bannerman cites a pro-Israeli lobbyist as saying, "The problem is that  
the numbers are not very flattering."

"The Jewish state is mindful of the public relations disaster of the  
34-day offensive during the Lebanon war of 2006 and took one early  
measure to avoid a repeat," Bannerman wrote. "The Israelis have  
prevented foreign journalists from entering and reporting from Gaza,  
thereby limiting the scope of the coverage from the Palestinian side."

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States decided to  
embed journalists with the troops. Israel, it seems, has decided to  
embed the entire Western public opinion—controlling most of the  
narrative while labeling the Arabic and much of the English-speaking  
press as naturally biased, partial, or even out right propagandistic  
for the other side.

Those who choose to believe sanitized media releases such as Israel's  
Youtube channel, will continue to do so.

But remember to draw from the experience of the U.S.-led occupation of  
Iraq. In the five years of war, it turns out that the U.S. also needed  
to sanitize the effects of war to galvanize public opinion around what  
has clearly been a public relations nightmare.

Thus, the media faces a historic moment of truth concerning its duties  
and responsibilities—reporting on behalf of the more than 700  
Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, as much as on behalf of the ten  
Israelis, seven soldiers and three civilians, killed by Hamas.