A glimpse into a powerful hasbara organization

The Times of Israel recently ran a story offering readers a glimpse into a powerful, and quite effective, hasbara organization operating in the heart of Washington, DC. The Israel Project, which has a $7.5 million annual budget, "is passionately committed to Israel and the Jewish people," according to associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who was quoted in the article.

Josh Block is a frenetic, sharp-tongued, non-stop PR machine with a preternatural ability to spit out facts and figures that bolster the case of the Jewish State. Since 2012 he has been the president and CEO of The Israel Project, a Washington, DC-based pro-Israel organization that has grown to mirror his personality: it is a fast-paced, single-minded war room pumping out pro-Israel memes, fighting Israel’s detractors in cyberspace, conducting polling and research, and helping to arm what Block calls “a pro-Israel social media army."

To equip this virtual militia, The Israel Project has a rapid response team dedicated to producing infographics, videos, and other shareable products that are suited to modern channels of communications. During Israel’s summer 2014 war in Gaza, its infographics, like the Timeline of Hamas Terror, were ubiquitous across social media platforms.

Block says the rise of social media and online journalism in the past decade has transformed the way influence in Washington is wielded and the pro-Israel community has been too slow to respond.

“A decade ago, the megaphone to the people was the press,” he says. “But nowadays, the people are the press. Users of social media are not just consumers of information – they’re producers.”

Block says the anti-Israel community is taking advantage of this “transparency revolution” more quickly, and in a more sophisticated way, than Israel’s defenders.

“Israel’s detractors have built a very sophisticated ecosystem that produces an echo chamber effect,” he says. “They’ve built a system that can build and sustain a meme – a group of ideas that become a cultural fact. For example, how does something so false and ridiculous like the idea that Israel is an apartheid state become something that the US Secretary of State uses as a lazy aphorism?”

The way it works, he says, is that the interconnected “self-referential network” of anti-Israel bloggers introduces a piece of information online, and then moves it across the system closer to the mainstream, where it will get “laundered” by the UN, an NGO, or think tank. Eventually, Block says, even the most vile and absurd accusations against Israel will be considered legitimate discourse.

In Washington parlance, it’s called “framing the narrative.”

Public relations guru Steve Rabinowitz knows how to frame a narrative. A former communications staffer in the Bill Clinton White House, Rabinowitz is a veteran PR consultant with past ties to liberal groups like J-Street and the Reform movement. His current clients include many of America’s leading Jewish organizations.

“The pro-Israel community has been very successful at lobbying and politics,” Rabinowitz says. “We’ve made great investments in think tanks and organizations that promote Jewish identity and continuity, but we’ve dramatically underappreciated and underinvested in the tools and infrastructure necessary to win the war of ideas in the digital age. The ground is shifting under our feet and if we’re too slow adapting to the new ways of fighting the war of ideas, we cannot win.”

This focus on winning the war of ideas in the digital space is why TIME Magazine called The Israel Project “Israel’s most effective media advocacy organization.” [...]

Later in the article, Block brags that his organization has "affected over 100 stories in The New York Times this year, 99 in the Washington Post, and 75 in the Associated Press."

I know I'm basically repeating myself at this point, but I'd like to make a couple points about this revealing article.

First off, can anyone deny the immense power and influence the organized Jewish community has in America today? The Jews essentially have a lock on American politics and mass media. Even the mildest criticism of the Jewish state of Israel is hysterically denounced as "anti-Semitism," with armies of hasbara trolls and agents spewing the pro-Israel line. Jewish and other pro-Israel propagandists are regularly featured on television and radio news programs, published in online and print news reports, and dominate the Op-Ed columns appearing in the most influential news outlets in both the traditional print media as well as the more modern, online-based news media. No one dares to even discuss, let alone mention, the power and influence of the organized Jewish community, as opposed to the Jewish state of Israel, in mainstream, polite (i.e., politically correct) society. Criticism of the Jewish state of Israel has appeared, in very limited, watered down manifestations, in the mainstream mass media, simply due to the blatant and egregious war crimes and barbaric military campaigns the Israelis have committed and carried out in recent years.

Secondly, notice that, once again, we have a high profile Jew openly admitting that the "pro-Israel community has been very successful at lobbying and politics," as Steve Rabinowitz states in the article. He goes on to explain that the organized Jewish community has "made great investments in think tanks and organizations that promote Jewish identity and continuity," and emphasizes the need for the Jews to adapt to the digital age to maintain their monopoly on the political and historical discourse in America (and the wider Western world for that matter). If I, or anyone else, were to state the obvious - that Jews have "been very successful at lobbying and politics" in America - we would be denounced as "hateful anti-Semitic bigots."

Finally, the hypocrisy and double standards of the organized Jewish community is simply astounding. They openly organize, quite successfully, to promote their racial interests, which includes the interests of a foreign state. They work with, encourage, and finance other "minorities" - who are fast becoming a majority in America and the Western world - to organize to advance their particular racial interests. However, Whites are not allowed to organize along racial lines, let alone identify with their racial heritage (at least politically), as that would be "racist" and "hateful."

How these basic facts can go unnoticed by the masses still amazes me.

http://www.therealistreport.com/2015/01/a-glimpse-into-powerful-hasbara.html