Israel is in the business of manipulating public opinion

Following the Israeli raid on the 'Gaza Freedom Flotilla' in international waters on 31 May 2010, which saw nine activists killed and many wounded, on 17 June 2010, Russia Today quoted Ehud Shem Tov, editor of Israeli Social TV, thus:

“Israeli media does not give the Israeli public a true picture of what is happening. All Israeli military correspondents worked in the army and there is a deep connection between them because they rely on the army and for contacts and access to information.

The Israel Defense Forces controlled the way the flotilla videos were presented in the media. They chose to release them one by one so they could make their message clearer. They also seized all the footage from the flotilla so they could control it. Definitely there are videos that the army is not releasing.”

The same issue of RT quoted Danny Schechter thus:

“Israel is in the business of manipulating public opinion, it has been in this business for 40 or 50 years. They are very smart about how to create a media narrative, how to present themselves as the victims in almost every instance and how to portray anyone else as the aggressor or even anti-Semitic.”

In the March/April 1997 section of his own blog, Schechter says this:

"Images of the Holocaust are used for ideological reasons... 

Throughout my time in Israel I became acutely aware of how the Holocaust was used to justify some of the more unsavory aspects of Israeli policy. I was told more than once how: 'Whatever we do to them (the Palestinians) can never be as bad as what they (the Germans) did to us.'

The first stop of all foreign diplomats on arrival in Israel is Yad Vashem, before the diplomacy, before the state dinners and the visits these images are being used to serve narrow political agendas.

At the same time however as these images are being used for clearly ideological and political aims they are also imbued with a sort of false religiosity; they become sacred, untouchable, images to be contemplated silently, images that cannot be touched, that must not be used. They speak a silent, powerful an unquestionable truth; they are out of bounds.

As someone who had recently finished his army service in the Israeli Defense Forces, which included a stay in Lebanon and the Occupied West Bank, and as someone who was working in Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, I found this hypocrisy unacceptable."

Artist, television producer, independent film maker and media critic, Schechter won the Society of Professional Journalists' Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism in 2001.