First, they were nominated for the Noble Peace Prize ...
Now this;
Argentina's Soccer Association cancels the friendly soccer match between Argentina and "Israel", planned to be held in occupied Jerusalem soon, in response to BDS
Image by Carlos Latuff
Argentina cancels football friendly with Israel in Jerusalem
The match was expected to be played at the Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem which was once home to a Palestinian village.
Argentina's national football team has cancelled an upcoming friendly match with Israel, Argentine news sources reported.
Argentinian sports website Minutouno reported on Tuesday that Saturday's game in Jerusalem had been "suspended" amid an "escalation of violence, threats and criticism" directed at captain 'Leo' Messi.
Argentina, a major contender to win the World Cupthis summer, has made four previous pre-World Cup visits to Israel since 1986.
The fixture between the two teams was set to be played in Jerusalem's Teddy Stadium on June 9, which is built on land that was once a Palestinian village that was destroyed in 1948.
Israeli media reported that in light of this latest development, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will speak to his Argentinian counterpart Mauricio Macri by telephone.
The ambassador of Palestine in Argentina, Husni Abdel Wahed, had expressed his opposition to the friendly.
"This match would be similar to us celebrating ... the occupation of Malvinas," he told Radio Cooperativa on Tuesday, referring to the Falkland Islands.
Abdel Wahed went on to say that the match was part of the celebrations of Israel's 70th anniversary since its establishment in 1948, after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their villages and lands by Zionist paramilitaries.
"For us, it is unacceptable to hold this game in Jerusalem because it is occupied territory, and it is painful to see that the team, which has the love and support of so many Palestinians and Arab citizens, support the violation of international law," he said.
'Nothing friendly about military occupation '
Last month, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement launched a campaign urging Argentina to pull out of the fixture.
"There is nothing 'friendly' about military occupation and apartheid," the movement said, which calls for an end to the occupation of Palestine, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and equal rights for Palestinians citizens of Israel.
"Don't play Israel until Palestinians' human rights are respected."
BDS criticised the fixture as "political", and accused Israeli officials of using it to cover up attacks on Palestinians "on and off the field".
As part of the campaign, Mohammed Khalil, a Palestinian footballer, directed a message towards Argentina's beloved forward Lionel Messi.
"I call on the Argentinian team and especially captain Lionel Messi - because he is very popular in Palestine, particularly in the Gaza Strip - to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and to boycott the scheduled game with Israel, which is occupying our land," Khalil said.
Khalil was shot by Israeli snipers on March 30, during the first Fridayprotests of Palestinians demonstrating east of Gaza, demanding their right to return.
He was shot in both of his legs, and one of his kneecaps had to be removed, putting an end to his footballing career.
Earlier this week, the head of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) Jibril Rajoub slammed the friendly as being opposite "a game of peace".
"The Israeli government is trying to give it political significance by insisting it be held in Jerusalem," Rajoub said.
After a few lines I wrote after the absurd fuss over Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents dinner, we have an interview on Israel. A country so frightened of the BDS movement that they will arrest anyone they even suspect of thinking about it.I do not recommend travel to there, whether invited or not.
I found the reaction to the comic at the White House Correspondents dinner patently absurd.It seems they have no idea what a comedian does, or perhaps they should have found an imitator of Henny Youngman or maybe they were intellectually capable of handling a Rodney Dangerfield.They were fortunate they had not invited Colbert or one of the late night hosts.They were fortunately there was no Lenny Bruce to invite and that Mort Sahl is past his prime.I think they should have known better, as Trump did, after Obama did his few lines on him at his last appearance.
When I say the reaction, I decided to go back wand write a few myself, off the top of my head, all within an hour or so, while I was on Twitter.I usually don't spend more than an hour there each day, but I think these were spaced a bit, mainly because after you send one out, several others are revealed from other people.Anyway, I think they are more or less in reverse order, and probably Pence already spoke at the NRA (I really don't follow his activity), and as they are not carefully crafted, please imagine a drum roll followed by a clash on the cymbals at the end of each one:
More
"When Pence visits the N.R.A., no guns will be allowed. Wouldn't he be safer if they simply gave him a gun too?
I'm reminded of a song written by Woodie Guthrie for Ledabelley, given to him and with no attribution: "Land of the brave; Home of the free - Don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie." Taj Mahal has a good version of this.It is pretty accurate even today.
People don't get the concept that a fetus is a parasite. Sort of like being a Republican.
Ok, then. Nothing on Kelley Ann Conway? She gives Anorexia a bad name. Maybe it's alternative anorexia?
Ann Coulter? She's just a comic version of Kelley Ann Conway.
Hey Brits, Donald Trump is coming to town. Fortunately, he sees and hears nothing except what's on Fox.
Mike Pence is the most notable Vice President since Agnew or Dan Quayle.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders will go down in history as the greatest Press Secretary since Scaramucci.
Why don't we see more of Kushner anymore? Well, he was coming between Donald and Ivanka.
Not gems, for sure, but I don't think they would have been welcome.
And now time for Israel:
Two U.S. human rights lawyers were detained Sunday for 14 hours at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport before being deported back to the United States. Columbia University's Katherine Franke and Center for Constitutional Rights executive director Vincent Warren were repeatedly questioned about their associations with groups critical of Israel. They were part of a delegation of American civil rights activists heading to Israel and Palestine to learn about the human rights situation and meet with local activists. They arrived back in New York City early Monday. This comes just days after Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Palestinian protesters and wounded hundreds more on Friday, when the soldiers and snipers opened fire during the Palestinians' weekly nonviolent protest near the Gaza border. On Saturday, a fourth protester died after succumbing to his wounds. The nonviolent protests demanding the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land began on March 30. Since then, the Israeli military has killed at least 42 Palestinians, including two journalists, and injured thousands more. For more, we speak with Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Katherine Franke, professor of law, gender and sexuality studies at Columbia University.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we turn now to Israel, where two U.S. human rights lawyers were detained Sunday for 14 hours at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, before being deported back to the United States. Columbia University's Katherine Franke and Center for Constitutional Rights president Vince Warren were repeatedly questioned about their associations with groups critical of Israel. They were part of a delegation of American civil rights activists heading to Israel to learn about the human rights situation and meet with local activists. They arrived back in New York City early Monday.
Earlier this year, Israel published a blacklist of 20 different organizations worldwide whose members are being banned from entering the country over their groups' support for BDS, the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Among the groups whose members are banned from entering Israel are Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, the American Friends Service Committee, American Muslims for Palestine, CodePink and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, as well as Palestinian solidarity groups in France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Chile and South Africa.
AMYGOODMAN: This comes just days after Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Palestinian protesters and wounded hundreds more on Friday, when the soldiers and snipers opened fire during the Palestinians' weekly nonviolent protest near the Gaza border. On Saturday, a fourth protester died after succumbing to his wounds. The nonviolent protest demanding the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land began on March 30th. Since then, the Israeli military has killed at least 42 Palestinians, including two journalists, and injured thousands more. No Israeli soldiers or civilians have been injured in the nonviolent protests. Israel's bloody crackdown has sparked international condemnation.
We're joined now by the two, I guess you could say, deportees. Vince Warren and Katherine Franke are here in our New York studio. Vince Warren, who was leading the delegation, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. And Katherine Franke is a professor of law, gender and sexuality studies at Columbia University. She's faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project and a member of the executive committee of the Center for Palestine Studies.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Vince, what happened? When did you fly into Israel?
VINCENTWARREN: We flew in Saturday evening. And we had a delegation of folks that were coming with us. And having done this before, getting into Israel—
AMYGOODMAN: You did this just a few years ago?
VINCENTWARREN: We did this first in 2016, where we actually brought legal academics and other folks that were in the legal field. This delegation was actually about black and brown thought leaders and civil rights leaders in the communities, people that had worked on Dakota Access pipeline, people that had been key in Ferguson and taken that fight to Geneva, folks that have been doing work in the South. So, we flew out on Saturday evening, and we arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday morning. And Sunday morning, that's when we found out, as we got the delegates through, that we found out that Katherine and I had been singled out to be detained.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, you were the first to be detained and questioned. Tell us what happened.
KATHERINEFRANKE: Well, the curious thing is, is that Vince and I had already been cleared through immigration, and we were waiting on the other side for the rest of the delegates to come through. And an immigration official comes out and drags the two of us back in. And at that point, I was interrogated for over an hour by the Israeli immigration officials, where they screamed at me, "You're lying! You're here to promote BDS in Palestine." And I said, "I'm not," which is—it's kind of ludicrous. You don't promote BDS in Palestine.
AMYGOODMAN: Explain BDS, very quickly.
KATHERINEFRANKE: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a movement that's grown from civil society actors in Palestine to the rest of the world as a form of action to protest the human rights violations of the—committed by the Israeli government. So BDS takes place elsewhere, not in Palestine.
But in any event, that's not what the delegation was about. We were there to witness and testify to the kinds of human rights violations we were seeing there, not to engage in any BDS-related activity.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, they actually showed you, on a cellphone, some right-wing site about you?
KATHERINEFRANKE: They did. They did. After he said, "Aren't you here to promote BDS in Palestine?" and I said, "Absolutely not," he held up his phone, where they had googled me. And there are these right-wing trolling sites that have all sorts of false things that say I'm committed to the destruction of Israel, I'm anti-Semitic, I hate Jews, I want to kill Jews. None of that is true. And he said, "See! You're lying! You're lying to me because you're here to promote BDS in Palestine!" And I said, "I'm absolutely not here to do that. We're here as tourists"—political tourists, to be sure, but tourists. And at that point, two other guys started yelling at me that I was a liar and that they were going to deport me and ban me permanently, for life, from entering Israel.
AMYGOODMAN: So, how long were you held for?
KATHERINEFRANKE: Fourteen hours.
AMYGOODMAN: How long were you questioned?
KATHERINEFRANKE: About an hour.
AMYGOODMAN: Of that time.
KATHERINEFRANKE: Mm-hmm.
AMYGOODMAN: And did they tell you then, "We are deporting you"?
KATHERINEFRANKE: He said he was deporting me. And then, later, he came back out and said, "Well, if you tell me more about your delegation and about the other people in the delegation"—basically give them intelligence about the other people in the delegation—"I'll think about not deporting you." And I said, "I've told you the truth about everything." And then he started in again about how I was lying.
VINCENTWARREN: And that's actually where my interrogation picked up, because after they interrogated Katherine, they pointed to Katherine and said, "Why are you traveling with someone who's the head of the BDS movement in the United States?" which is—you know, it's ridiculous. But then they also were asking me a lot of questions about who was on the delegation, where were they going, that sort of thing. So they were really trolling for information. And part of the thing that's important is that, in these spaces, you really shouldn't and can't give information about where the delegation is going, because we want to keep those people safe, and we want them—and as well as the people that they're visiting with. And, you know, there are 20 or 30 different organizations, both Palestinian and Israeli, that they were looking at.
They moved us to a secure detention area. We were separated. I was taken in a van to a cell, an immigration detention cell, where I was held for about four-and-a-half hours in that cell, before Katherine and I were reunited. Interestingly enough, virtually everybody in that cell other than myself was Ukrainian and Russian. And so, my Russian is not that good, so I didn't really communicate, other than in sign language, but I communicated enough to know that some of those folks had been there for three days and didn't know when they were going to be going home. And so, my takeaway from this was, this is the type of things that people trying to immigrate into a country like Israel or the United States have to deal with all the time. And as horrible as it was to be there for a number of hours and to be questioned, we have to be mindful that in the immigration fights this is happening to people all over the place. This is not a sort of a temporary transaction. This is a real incursion, I think, into liberty and dignity, just for people who want to be able to transit and to live their lives.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of your deportation, did it get any coverage in the Israeli press at all?
VINCENTWARREN: Well, we're getting inquiries now from the Israeli press, and so I think they're interested in, I guess, hearing our side of the story. I'm sure some of them already have their side of the story. But we're starting to get inquiries into that, as well.
AMYGOODMAN: And how are you—are you planning to challenge this deportation?
VINCENTWARREN: Well, we're looking into it, because it was—as Katherine mentioned, it was totally untrue. It was based on all of these lies and conclusions. So, we—I think we're looking into what we can do about that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It also, though, Katherine, does seem to signal the increasing desperation of the Israeli government in trying to stop the BDS movement, doesn't it, to some degree?
KATHERINEFRANKE: Well, they pride themselves as being, supposedly, the only democracy in the Middle East. But they're a democracy, supposedly, that represses free speech within Israel itself, within the West Bank, and punishes civil rights defenders or human rights defenders like ourselves, by not letting us come and witness what's going on there. That, to me, doesn't sound like a democracy.
You know, the curious thing is, as we're sitting in detention, and, actually, while I was being interrogated, the president of Columbia University walked right by us. He was leaving the country while we were in the airport. He didn't know we were there, so it's not that he shunned me in any way. But Columbia University is planning on or thinking about opening up a global center in Tel Aviv—a center that faculty and students at Columbia University cannot visit, myself most prominently now. Part of why I was in—
AMYGOODMAN: This is Lee Bollinger, walked by?
KATHERINEFRANKE: Lee Bollinger.
AMYGOODMAN: Were you able to say hello to him? Did you see him?
KATHERINEFRANKE: No, I didn't see him. I heard about it afterwards, when I got home, that he was traveling through the airport the same time we were there. I would like to think that Lee would have reached out, had he known I was there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: "That's one of my employees."
KATHERINEFRANKE: Yeah. He's a—he's a good person.
But part of what I had planned to do while I was in Israel was visit with graduate students, both in Haifa and in Ramallah, who actually can't come to Columbia right now to work with me, because they can't get—the one in Ramallah cannot get a permit—
AMYGOODMAN: In the West Bank.
KATHERINEFRANKE: —from the Israelis to visit the United States. And so, I can't work with my own graduate students because of this ban and because of the enormous travel restrictions that are placed on Palestinians.
AMYGOODMAN: So, in January, Israel published a list of 20 international groups, many of them affiliated with the BDS movement, that are banned from entering the country. Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan, whose office published the list, said that the list signaled that Israel has shifted, quote, "from defense to offense." He went on to say, "Boycott organizations need to know that Israel will act against them and will not allow [them] to enter its territory in order to harm its citizens." Professor Franke, can you respond?
KATHERINEFRANKE: Well, the curious thing is, in deciding about who they ought to let in and who they shouldn't let in and what their security interests are, the security personnel of the Israeli government have assigned to private, right-wing, unreliable trolls the job of deciding who is a security risk and who isn't. That's the folks that they googled when they held up the phone to me and said, "Look, you're committed to the destruction of the state of Israel." Right? So, it's actually a kind of hack way to be doing their own security project, by allowing these websites to decide who to admit and who not to admit. But it's quite clear that they are very worried about a peaceful mode of resistance, which is the boycott movement, and they've really ratcheted up the ways in which they're excluding people from entering.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Vince, I wanted to ask you. Interestingly, those who remember the boycott and divestment movement against the South African white minority regime, even the South African government didn't go to this kind of extreme for people who were opposed to its policies.
VINCENTWARREN: No, that's definitely true. I really cut my political teeth in college, and I was one of the leaders in my college to get the school to divest from, you know, holdings in South Africa. But you're right. I mean, the political situation was a little bit different, because there was also not only a divestment movement, but there was also—people were not traveling to the country, at least officially, to get in. I'm sure that if they had been, that the South African government might have taken this role.
But what is interesting about Israel is that it is a fluid situation. I think it has also captured the international attention the way that South Africa has. And I think the big challenge now in the information age, which we didn't have back in 1980-something, is how do we stay in touch and support the work that's happening on the ground from a place like the United States, which would include also working, in country, with students and with activists, to make sure that, if nothing else, the actual stories get out to the international community.
AMYGOODMAN: I mean, we're talking about a moment now of severe crisis, not that in recent years it hasn't been, but in Gaza. Since March 30th, this massive, nonviolent, ongoing protest at the wall between Israel and Gaza, nonviolent protesters gunned down by the Israeli military, more than 40 of them at this point, two journalists, Palestinian journalists, as we described the picture of—showing the picture of one of them with a very clear "PRESS" sign on him, these protests continuing up through May 15th, the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba, when they were, so many, hundreds of thousands of them, were expelled. Were you planning to go to Gaza?
VINCENTWARREN: No, we were not planning to go to Gaza, and mostly because you can't get into Gaza, number one. Number two, that these—the delegation were people that had not been to the region before, mostly, and so we were looking primarily to have them interact with folks in Israel and in the West Bank, but outside of Gaza.
But I will say that it is an absolute crisis that's going on. And even—even in places like the West Bank and in parts of Jerusalem, which doesn't even approach the horror that's happening in Gaza, it is an extraordinary situation. This would have been my second time going. And I have to say, the first time that I went, I was expecting really bad things, but I was not prepared—I was not prepared for the level of structural targeting and racial profiling that is happening in that region. It is mind-boggling. And that's why we were trying to bring people to the delegation, because people need to see this for themselves. They can't read about it on Facebook. They can't look at these websites that are characterizing it. They have to see for themselves.
AMYGOODMAN: And certainly, it's astounding the lack of coverage of what's happening in Gaza right now by the corporate media here in the United States.
KATHERINEFRANKE: It is astounding, yes.
AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there. Vince Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Katherine Franke, professor at Columbia University, law professor. That does it for our show. Both deported from Israel this weekend.
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An example of idiocy above and our media, even reliable parts of it.
I recently saw a restored version of Lawrence of Arabia, and a quote from Anthony Quinn seemed to be appropriate for Trump:"You are a fool.Thank your God he gave you the face to match!"
Now, about Palestine and our mind control at work here:
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. As we continue our conversation, we go now to an excerpt of—we are speaking with Roger Waters, the famous British musician, founding member of the iconic rock band Pink Floyd, Waters the narrator of the recent documentary titled The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States.
ROGERWATERS: Over the course of 51 days, the Israeli military dropped nearly 20,000 tons of explosive on Gaza, a densely populated area the size of Philadelphia, killing over 2,000 Palestinians and wounding tens of thousands more. The overwhelming majority of these casualties were civilians.
HAMISHMACDONALD: This strip of land is being bombarded from the air, sea and land.
DIANAMAGNAY: Israel launched at least 160 strikes on the Gaza Strip.
RICHARDENGEL: And there's one less hospital in Gaza now. Israel today flattened Wafa Hospital.
ROGERWATERS: The sheer scale of the attacks sparked outrage and condemnation around the world.
MARKBROOME: Israel's month-long pounding of Gaza has shocked many people around the world. Mass demonstrations have been held in many of the world's major cities.
ROGERWATERS: But in the United States, the story was different. Polls show the American people holding firm in their support for Israel.
ANDERSONCOOPER: This is the latest CNN/ORC poll of Americans, shows 57 percent of those polled say Israel's action in Gaza is justified, 34 percent say unjustified.
ROGERWATERS: These numbers were striking, but they weren't new. Over the course of a conflict in which Palestinian casualties have far outnumbered Israeli casualties, the American people have consistently shown far more sympathy for Israelis than for Palestinians.
PETERHART: It's very difficult to divorce public opinion on any question from the media coverage that people rely on to form opinions. And I think the most prevalent lesson from looking at the coverage is that the coverage tends to see this conflict from the Israeli side.
AMYGOODMAN: That last voice, Peter Hart, the National Coalition Against Censorship. That a clip from the film The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States, narrated by our guest, Roger Waters, the musician.
Well, on Wednesday, Nermeen Shaikh and I interviewed Roger Waters and Sut Jhally, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, which produced the documentary. I asked Sut Jhally why he chose to make the film.
SUTJHALLY: Well, it started, actually, quite a while ago, and the reason for it is that American public opinion is so far outside the bounds of world opinion when it comes to—when it comes to Israel. As we talked before, I mean, the moment you start—you break—you start to talk about this, there's an attempt to silence you. So you're actually not allowed to—you're not allowed to talk about it. And then, actually, once you do talk about it, you realize that Americans have a very warped sense of the conflict. I mean, I learned this from my own students, as well as from public opinion polls, that most Americans think that, in fact, it's the Palestinians who are illegally occupying someone else's land in the Middle East.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, talk about legally—talk about what in fact is happening in the Middle East.
SUTJHALLY: Well, it's such a clear kind of instance of, you know, colonization. We've just had 50 years of occupation, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and, until recently, of Gaza. And that's actually very, very clear, because there's also this instant—Americans think it's so complicated. That's actually—when I talk to my students, they always say it's too complicated. And I just actually explain to them, you know, in a few sentences, that this actually is a very, very simple conflict. And what—and when the conflict is that simple, what you have to do is you have to make it more complicated. And that's the function of public relations.
And so, that's what we focus on. We focus on the public relations campaign in the United States to essentially confuse the American public about what was going on, so there will be no pressure coming from the public on this. And in that sense, you know—and we say this in the film—the occupation of Palestine also depends upon an occupation of American public opinion, that unless the American government is aboard with this and acts as a protector of Israel, then that occupation is not possible.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Let's turn to another clip from The Occupation of the American Mind, featuring our guest, Sut Jhally.
SUTJHALLY: Israel can saturate the media with its spokespeople, but there's still the problem of massive Palestinian casualties showing up on television screens. You can't make those images go away. An Israeli official actually said, "In the war of pictures, we lose. So you need to correct, explain or balance it in other ways."
Here, again, the Luntz document spells out which talking points have been most effective in spinning the brutal reality of Palestinian casualties. He says the first thing the pro-Israeli spokespeople should do is to express empathy for the innocent victims.
DANGILLERMAN: Unfortunately, innocents do get hurt. And we—we really grieve that.
PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU: We're sad for every civilian casualty.
MICHAELOREN: The entire situation is tragic.
SUTJHALLY: Once you've done that, Luntz says, you also have to get people to empathize with Israelis, by describing what life is like for them living in constant fear of Hamas rocket attacks. So, again and again, we hear the focus-tested phrase that the rockets are raining down on Israel.
MICHAELOREN: We have thousands of rockets raining down on our civilians.
HILLARYCLINTON: Rockets were raining down on Israel.
NORMANSOLOMON: Any advertising executive will tell you the essence of propaganda is repetition.
GRETAVANSUSTEREN: Rockets raining down on southern Israel.
FOXNEWSANCHOR: Rockets raining down on Israel.
NEWSANCHOR: Well, Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli border towns.
SUTJHALLY: Then, Luntz tells PR spokespeople to turn the tables and ask the American people, "What would you do?"
PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU: So what would you do in the United States?
RONDERMER: Will you imagine what America would do if it were facing a similar threat?
NACHMANSHAI: We always try to ask you the question we ask ourselves: What will you do?
PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU: What would you do?
MARKREGEV: What would you do, if more than 3,000 rockets had been fired on your cities?
SEANHANNITY: What would you do? Three thousand rockets.
MARKREGEV: What would you do, if terrorists were tunneling under your frontier?
SEANHANNITY: What would you do if three kids are kidnapped because of a tunnel network?
YOUSEFMUNAYYER: What sort of question is this? Of course, anybody would act to defend themselves against unprovoked aggression. But it is a question that is completely devoid of any context. What drives a society to a point where, after multiple devastating wars, they continue to resist with these most feeble methods? They don't want you to ask that question. They don't want you to ask what is behind this, what's the history here, who are these people, where did they come from, why are they so desperate. No, they want you to understand Israeli behavior. Israeli behavior is always characterized as a reaction to unprovoked violence.
NERMEENSHAIKH: So that's an excerpt from The Occupation of the American Mind. And the last voice was Yousef Munayyer of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. We also heard from Norman Solomon. And this is another excerpt from the documentary.
ROGERWATERS: Two years after the Lebanon invasion, the American Jewish Congress sponsored a conference in Jerusalem to devise a formal public relations strategy, known in Hebrew as hasbara. Participants included PR and advertising executives, media specialists, journalists and leaders of major Jewish groups. According to a brochure from the congress, "No single event brought home the need for a more effective hasbara, or information program, more persuasively than the 1982 war in Lebanon and the events that followed." As one conference participant put it, "Israel is no longer perceived to be 'little David,' but Goliath steamrolling across the map."
The primary aim of the conference was to develop strategies to spin unpopular Israeli policies and to counter negative press coverage by shaping the media frame in advance. "News doesn't just jump into a camera," a conference delegate said. "It's directed, it's managed, it's made accessible." Israel-based advertising executive Martin Fenton would put it in even more blunt terms: "'Propaganda' is not a dirty word," he said. "Face it: We are in the game of changing people's minds, of making them think differently. To accomplish that, we need propaganda."
The conference was chaired by U.S. advertising executive Carl Spielvogel, the legendary ad man who created the highly acclaimed Miller Lite beer ads in the 1970s.
SUTJHALLY: The choice of Spielvogel makes perfect sense. He's known as a master of image inversion and rebranding. The ad man responsible for transforming Miller Lite, which had been viewed before as a woman's beer, into a manly beer the tough guys would drink.
MAN IN BAR 1: But the best part is that it tastes so great.
MAN IN BAR 2: The best part is, it's less filling.
MAN IN BAR 1: Nah, tastes great!
MAN IN BAR 2: Less filling!
SUTJHALLY: His job with Israel would require the same kind of rebranding, only in the opposite direction: to help soften the image of a country that's coming to be seen as a bully. So he recommends creating a Cabinet post dedicated exclusively to explaining policy, whose job would not be setting policy, but presenting it in the most attractive way to the rest of the world.
NORMONSOLOMON: Classic PR is to say the problem is not the policy, it's the presentation. When the policies are so reprehensible that many people become critical, rather than acknowledge there's anything wrong with the policy, there's a doubling down on the PR effort.
NERMEENSHAIKH: So that was another clip from The Occupation of the American Mind. And that last voice was Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the film, of course, narrated by our guest, Roger Waters. But, Sut Jhally, I want to ask you about these clips, the way in which the Israeli state, working with different media organizations, has changed, as you argue, American public opinion, or swayed it in this way to be sympathetic only to the Israeli side. Now, this strategy of hasbara, the attempt to influence U.S. public opinion, Israeli supporters argue that such initiatives are attempted by practically all countries in the world, they all have lobbying firms in the U.S. What is it that distinguishes hasbara from the propaganda, in fact, that's attempted by every country attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy?
SUTJHALLY: And that's true. Everyone tries to mold perception in some way for their own—their own actions. The difference in this case is the public—is that Israeli public opinion—or, Israeli public relations is so closely connected to the interests of the American state. And so they're not pushing against the American policy. And it's American policy working hand in hand with Israeli policy, as well. In the film, you know, we try and we—because we really want to make clear that this is not about an Israel lobby that's manipulating—you know, that's manipulating politicians and the public. The reason why Israeli public relations works is because it goes hand in hand with American elite opinion. And if that didn't happen, then the public relations wouldn't work in that way. And we know that that's—that those two things go together, because when American elite opinion differs from what Israel would do, oftentimes American elite opinion prevails, as in the discussion around the Iran policy. The Israel lobby really wanted to push a different line on that. But that was one place where the interests of the lobby diverged from the interests of the American state. And so, when we talk about this, it's not about—it's not about, you know, a lobby that has all this power. It's about an Israel—it's about a lobby that goes hand in hand with the interests of the state. And if that—
NERMEENSHAIKH: So, in other words, even—so, if U.S. elite opinion were to change, this precise strategy, hasbara, would be relatively ineffective.
SUTJHALLY: Well, it relies upon the American state to go along with it, which is why American public opinion is so important, which is why you have to control American public opinion. Not only do you have to control Senate and the House, which they do, but you also have to make sure there's no pressure on politicians, which is why you have to control public opinion, which is why we say you need to occupy American public opinion to make the occupation possible, as well.
AMYGOODMAN: When it comes to this film, where was it shown?
SUTJHALLY: We've had a huge amount of difficulty getting this shown. It's been shown almost nowhere in the United States.
AMYGOODMAN: Elsewhere?
SUTJHALLY: It's been shown in other—we showed it in Mexico City. It's been shown in Brussels. It's been shown—I just came from a screening in Beirut. We showed it in London. It's screened in—on television stations in Scandinavia, in Europe. Russia Today showed it. Al Jazeera showed it. So, it's been shown outside of this country.
AMYGOODMAN: And the reaction to this film when you attempt to get it to play in the United States?
SUTJHALLY: I mean, it's the way that censorship works, which is silence. We submitted it to film festivals, which is the first way you try and get some publicity and some visibility. We did not get it accepted into one film festival in the United States, and therefore that means it's very difficult then to make the next step, which is how do you get it into theaters, how do you get it into television, how do you get media reviews. I mean, we've—there's been, around this issue—and it's not just this film, but on this issue. It's like there's a web of silence around it.
And it's not just, you know, the right-wing media. It's not just Fox. And it goes everywhere. I mean, it's the one—it's the one topic that even so-called liberal media won't touch. In the film, you know, we had the example of Rachel Maddow, who is supposed to be the most, you know, progressive voice on television, and yet refuses to deal with this issue.
AMYGOODMAN: Let's go to another clip from The Occupation of the American Mind.
SUTJHALLY: Look at how American media covered Israel's 2014 attack on Gaza. A keyword search of all the major networks showed that over the course of the 51-day assault, Israel's ongoing military siege and blockade of Gaza were barely mentioned, compared to the thousands of times Hamas rocket attacks on Israel were mentioned.
JAKETAPPER: Why is Hamas launching missiles into population centers of Israel?
SUTJHALLY: The basic propaganda frame is built into the very assumptions journalists bring to the table.
JAKETAPPER: Since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, 8,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel.
SUTJHALLY: This is how propaganda works. It works by getting your words in the mouths of other people, especially the mouths of supposedly objective media commentators.
DAVIDGREGORY: I'm wondering, though, whether you're outraged by the conduct of Hamas, starting the conflict by firing rockets, building tunnels to kill and kidnap Israelis, being more than willing to sacrifice Palestinian lives by embedding them into—into their own kind of arsenal, and using them, as Israel contends, as human shields. Do you have a level of outrage at Hamas itself?
SUTJHALLY: It doesn't seem like propaganda at all. It just seems like news. And this goes across all the major media, including the supposedly most liberal. Look at Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who's known as the leading progressive voice on mainstream television. She did only four segments on the war. And during these few segments, she never once mentioned Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank or its siege and blockade of Gaza, and never once mentioned the fact that the U.S. has armed Israel with the very weapons that were being used against a defenseless civilian population, instead choosing to frame the invasion as part of a senseless cycle of violence perpetrated by both sides.
RACHELMADDOW: It's been a constant cycle of fighting between Israel and Hamas for the past several years in Gaza. And the fighting and the cause of the fighting feel terribly familiar, because this is basically a recurring war. And if it feels like déjà vu, feels like, "Ugh, I've heard all of this before," you are right, because this really does keep happening, over and over and over again.
RULAJEBREAL: Rachel Maddow, the most important woman on MSNBC, the leader when it comes to politics, in six weeks of war, never mentioned the word "blockade," "occupation," "illegal settlements," never mentioned the support that Congress have for Israel, unconditional amount of money, billions of dollars. What is that? What a disappointment! Our media operations, national media, is a scandal when it comes to Israel.
AMYGOODMAN: An excerpt from The Occupation of the American Mind, the documentary that is narrated by Roger Waters, that's produced by Sut Jhally. That last voice, former MSNBC analyst Rula Jebreal, who is an Italian-Palestinian journalist. Let's go for a moment to the contrast, Sut, that you bring into this film, which is the international media.
JONSNOW: Mark Regev, how does killing children on a beach contribute to that purpose? What was the point of bombing the al-Wafa Hospital, for goodness' sake? ... There are grave uncertainties—
MARKREGEV: No, no.
JONSNOW: —about whether you're acting within the law.
MARKREGEV: No, no, no. I disagree.
JONSNOW: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You are deliberately targeting—
MARKREGEV: No, I reject that.
JONSNOW: —neighborhoods in which you know there are women and children. ... You've tried everything with Gaza. You've besieged it for seven years. The people live an intolerable and ghastly life, and you know that better than anybody. Why don't you try one other thing: talking? Why not talk? Why not be brave and talk directly with them? Why not?
AMYGOODMAN: That's another excerpt from The Occupation of the American Mind. Sut Jhally, you produced this film. Talk about the contrast of the media coverage.
SUTJHALLY: I mean, the contrast is quite striking when you look at—when you look at—you don't have to go to other parts, you know, really foreign parts of the world. Just look to the way it's covered in the United Kingdom. That's a striking difference. And part of the reason—and, I mean, the clip we show—that clip we use was of Jon Snow, doing what a journalist should be doing, which is asking questions. So, in the U.K., journalism actually still exists. On this issue, in the United States, journalism has ceased to do what it's supposed to do, because it has just succumbed to public relations.
AMYGOODMAN: Sut Jhally, founder of the Media Education Foundation, which produced the film The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States. When we come back from break, we return to Sut Jhally and the musician Roger Waters, in a minute.
[break]
AMYGOODMAN: Roger Waters, performing "We Shall Overcome," accompanied by the teenage cellist Alexander Rohatyn, here in the Democracy Now! studios.
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