Coming soon to your US tourist sites and church conferences: Israel’s two new campaign armies: Anti-BDS Warriors and Smiling Tourists.
Israel wants you to forget about the grief and suffering that continues in Gaza. They are telling us the Goldstone Report is so yesterday. Thanks to US pressure, the UN will wait another six months to act on the report.
The death of an Hamas official in Dubai? No problem; the story created barely a ripple in the US...
It is time to change the subject. Enter, stage right, Israel’s Ministry of Public Diplomacy and one of its US partners, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The “Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy” (IMPD) sounds so Orwellian that it seems almost unfair to mention it. But you decide what’s fair in the IMPD’s smiling tourists campaign to issue happy talk hasbara kits to Israelis traveling outside their homeland.
Yuli Edelstein, who runs the IMPD, calls his volunteer Israeli travelers the Tzva Hasbara LeYisrael, the Israeli Public Diplomacy Forces, a play on the Hebrew name of the IDF (Israel Defense Force) and the concept of “hasbara” or public information.
The Jerusalem Post explains:
Thousands of citizens are willing to help get across the message that Israel is a modern, democratic country with an impressive list of achievements. Now they can learn how.The new English-language site is due to go on line in April. It will join the Hebrew site Masbirim.gov.Il, which has attracted around 150,000 “hits” since it debuted two weeks ago.
The preparation runs from workshops for official delegations to pocket pamphlets distributed at Ben-Gurion Airport for regular travelers, and – as becomes the modern media age – information contained on the newly created Web site.
Minister Edelstein reports that training sessions have begun. A pamphlet describing “how to defend the country” is being distributed to departing passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport.
It is hard not to conclude that these pamphlet-holders will see themselves as Israel’s Good Cops on the corner, helping little old ladies across the street and patting little children on the head. Message: Your friendly policeman is here to help you.
The Good Cop Israelis will explain to the American public that all is well in Israel, with its booming economy, its beautiful new, secure, protected, highways and all those newly built housing units nestled among the West Bank’s green-covered hills.
But Public Diplomacy wars are not won by Good Cops alone. A PD army needs its Bad Cops as well. Enter the anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) warriors.
Two recent punches were thrown by the Bad Cops, aimed at Christians in particular. Both came from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the zealous Nazi hunter.
The first punch thrown appeared in the Jerusalem Post. It is a doozy. with a headline that says: “Liberal Protestant Churches Pose Growing Threat to Israel”. That’s Iran nuclear attack language. So pay attention.
Israel is facing a threat from theologians and activists in prominent Protestant churches throughout the world, in addition to the threats posed by “lawfare” and the Goldstone Report, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, charged on Tuesday.
Cooper was speaking at a plenary session of the seventh annual Jerusalem Conference in the capital.
“Theologians and activists in some prominent Protestant churches are seeking to destroy Israel from Above,” Cooper warned. “Their activities threaten to turn traditional friends into enemies and erode support for Israel in the United States…. They cast Israel as a theological mistake, conceived in the sin of the last gasp of Western colonialism.”
According to Cooper, the center of the Protestant theological war against Israel is the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization of liberal church bodies, boasting a worldwide following of 349 churches and 580,000 members.
He said one of the most prominent denominations in the WCC is the Presbyterian Church, which was the first to call for divestment from Israel.... Full story
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