Israel out guns Palestinians on social media spin
Benjamin Netanyahu has hundreds of thousands of followers on nearly every social media platform in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Farsi. He’s just one example of the sophisticated way Israeli government officials and politicians are using social media to enhance their propaganda to those targeted audiences. In comparison, the Arab and Palestinian social media accounts that are important barely reach tens of thousands, mainly in English and Arabic, with some in Hebrew, and are losing to Israel in the social media war as they lost to the Israelis in domination of the Western mainstream news and entertainment medias.
By Ray Hanania
Israel has outgunned the Palestinians and the Arab World in the mainstream Western news media for years, despite the Arab World’s huge financial balance sheet driven by oil sales. And in recent years, they have used the same strategy to outgun the Palestinians and Arabs in social media spin and Internet outreach.
While the Arabs have never truly understood how powerful a fictional story or a slanted news story can been terms of winning support among Western audiences who then support huge political and financial support for Israel’s unjust agenda, the Palestinians and the Arab World have spent most of their time ignoring the power of the news media while complaining about the mainstream news media’s bias.
The truth is that Israel’s media strategy has been extremely effective, ut more so than normal because the opposition from the Palestinians and the Arabs have been so weak. Part of the problem comes from cultural arrogance. Arabs believe that if you don’t speak the Arabic language, you are second class and not worthy of their attention. In most cases, the Palestinians and the Arabs basically speak to themselves even in the growth of the Arabic language satellite media stations lie Aljazeera. It’s one reason why the United States market and cable TV ranchers resisted and blocked the advent of English versions of Aljazeera after it launched in the 1990s in Arabic.
Even today as Aljazeera, the leader in Arab World news, expands into English, the English site still caters to Arab and Muslim audiences and not the audiences that need to be educated, Western audiences and especially Americans who are the single most important factor in sustaining Israel’s militarist oppression and human rights violations.
I address tis in my column at Middle East Monitor, one of the most effective pro-Arab online news and commentary websites which is based in London.
The column is titled “Israel’s Six Day War on the Internet” and compares the phenomenal success Israeli officials have in their expansive social media campaigns while the Arab languish with little or no true understanding of the power of Social Media.
Like the news media, the Arab World does recognize the media for its potential to expose their own corruption and their focus is more on cracking down on Arab journalists, bloggers and social media stars who tend to turn their anti-Israel rage inward attacking Arabs more successfully than they ever could Israel.
Israel’s Six Day war on the Internet
By Ray Hanania
Middle East Monitor Jan. 17, 2019.
The fundamental failure of the Arab world to understand the significance of communications, public relations and now the internet has served to undermine Arab causes and allow their enemies to thrive.
This failure is most obvious to Palestinians, who watch in amazement as Israel exploits every aspect of communications to promote its false narratives and libel of the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, Palestinians and Arabs remain in their ineffective, traditional comfort, sipping from tiny porcelain cups of kahwah arabiyya (Arab coffee), believing that all the evils and injustices of the world will right themselves on their own. …
To read the column at Middle East Monitor, click this link.
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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