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Monday, March 1, 2010

Who Created the Parody of Israel PR (Masbirim) Website?

OK. MK Yuli Edelstein, as Information Minister, put together masbirim.gov.il as part of a new Israeli PR campaign.

Today, it appears some leftist types have taken a page out of the book of the people who created the whitehouse.com porn site 10 years ago.

They've created a very similar-looking site at masbirim.co.il.

Of course, the site is instead called מיניסטיריון האמת
(Ministry of Truth) and has links to B'tselem and a few other sites, as well as a video of the rock-slinging (in the sense that they use slings to hurl them much harder than could be done by hand) 'non-violent' Bilin demonstrators.

Now, I believe it is meant for internal Israeli consumption seeing as it is all Hebrew, and it's possible they're not even anti-Zionists.

A whois shows that the site is registered with one Ofri Mann of Rishon LeZion, though he may just be an Internet guy and not one of the people behind the site.

In any case, as the hardly left-wing editor of Jerusalem Post, David Horowitz, notes, the whole campaign is kind of ill-conceived.

“Are you going overseas? Hosting people from abroad?,” asks the Ministry of Public Diplomacy’s new masbirim – “explainers” – Web page. Well then, it gushes, you too can become “ambassadors for Israel” and “together, we’ll change the picture.”
...
[Israel will do better] When it internalizes that, no, we’re not a “normal” country with which Europe and the West can be expected to easily identify, but rather a lonely, gutsy democracy under relentless attack in a tyrannical region.

Israel will fare better when, before going to war, it prepares the diplomatic and the legal and the media ground as effectively as its prepares its fighting forces.

For all our righteous sense that we are so far more sinned against than sinning, Israel is also hobbling itself through incoherence.

While Fatah ostensibly wants peace along the pre-’67 lines and Hamas unequivocally wants us gone, nobody, but nobody, knows quite what it is that we want.

Our prime minister says he has a vision of a Palestinian state, but he is also planting saplings at bombastic ceremonies at West Bank settlements and extending national heritage status to the Cave of the Patriarchs. Even if that makes a certain kind of sense to some of us here, it is plain incomprehensible to most who are not. The Goldstone Report is a strategic threat to Israel but Israel is begging Mahmoud Abbas – who initiated Goldstone by accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza – to please, pretty please, come and talk peace with us. Where’s the clarity?