Israeli Propagandists Threaten Destruction of Europe as Punishment for Boycotting Israel

GRAYZONE PROJECT

Prominent supporters of Israel’s far-right government aspire to be the vanguard of Zionist evangelism.

David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker. His website is www.davidsheen.com and he tweets from @davidsheen.

A new video released by a pro-Israel public relations group has a startling message for Europeans: their continent is about to be obliterated by Islamic armies, and if they don’t stop the movement to boycott Israel, Jerusalem will permit the catastrophe to occur. The video was released yesterday on the Facebook social network by Hallelu, a little-known PR outfit dedicated to improving the international image of the State of Israel, and has already racked up over five thousand video views:

The minute-long video has high production values and features 3-D animation and a script with a pointed political message. The plot of the narrative is as follows:

In the opening scene, a massive boulder as large as an entire village, emblazoned with the logos of the Islamic State and the Al Qassam Brigades of Hamas, begins to roll down a hill towards a Disney-esque medieval municipality labeled “Europe”. As it picks up momentum, a gargantuan rock-creature with a blue Star of David on its shoulder attempts to slow the ISIS-boulder’s descent, but is unsuccessful on its first attempt. The boulder rolls past a peak with an Israeli flag planted at its precipice and continues its descent down the mountain.

Looking weary but undeterred, the Jewish-or-Israeli-identified rock-creature leaps ahead of the boulder’s path and with great effort manages to stop it in its tracks. Though the rock-creature saves most of the city from being crushed to dust, the inertia of the boulder drives the rock-creature into the spire of a structure at the entrance to town, causing that one building to collapse.

In immediate response, signs saying “Boycott Israel” pop out of town’s towers and the city lets loose with a barrage of missiles aimed at the rock-creature, including a large rock inscribed with the logo “BDS” - a reference to the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions movement that targets Israel.

Though the projectile seems to cause no physical harm to the rock-creature, his facial expression turns to a grimace, and he elects to remove himself from the boulder’s path and allows it to complete its original trajectory, completely crushing “Europe”-town, before rolling right into a body of water and sinking straight down.

In the final seconds of the video, the screen goes to black and the viewer is told, “Israel is fighting your war - Support Israel,” while the heavy footsteps of the rock-creature are audible in the background. The clip concludes with a credit screen bearing the logo of the Hallelu Foundation.

The message of the video seems glaringly obvious: Islamic armies will first fight Israel, but eventually they will attempt to annihilate Europe; if Europeans don’t appreciate the way that Israel combats Islamists, and aren’t willing to accept the inevitable costs of this war of civilizations, Israel will abandon the ungrateful gentiles to their deserved fate: extinction.

Among the most-recognized names that Hallelu counts as “Foundation Members” on its website are three prominent patriarchs, columnist Ben Dror Yemini of top-selling Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Arabist professor Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Israel’s Bar Ilan University, and Greek Orthodox Patriarchate spokesperson Father Gabriel Nadaf.

Yemini has advocated rounding non-Jewish African refugees out of Israeli cities and into desert detention centers, in order to prevent Jewish African-Israeli women from dating them. Kedar has advocated threatening to rape the mothers and sisters of Palestinians in order to deter them from carrying out attacks against Israel. In recent years, the Israeli government carried out each of these proposed policies.

Nadaf leads efforts to draft Christian Palestinian citizens of the country into Israel’s army. A close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was one of only six people to light torches at an official state ceremony for Israel’s “Independence Day” earlier this month. Days before the ceremony was held, it emerged that Nadaf has been accused of sexual harassment by several of the young men that he tried to draft into the IDF.

Two other Hallelu “Foundation Members” have connections to the Netanyahu government, as well. The group’s “Director of External Relations” Rena Riger was Netanyahu’s Director of Foreign Affairs while he was Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2003. Also, “Foundation Member” Wilhelm Roth has also served as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Advisory Committee to Danny Ayalon between 2011 and 2013, when he was Netanyahu’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, according to Roth’s Linked In profile.

In the last year, the Netanyahu government has begun to publicly accuse Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions activists of posing an existential threat to the State of Israel, and has apportioned huge budgets to combat the phenomenon. Last month, a top ruling Likud party lawmaker, Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz, threatened BDS activists with “focussed civil elimination”. While the threat was vaguely worded, it suggested that boycott campaigners could face lethal retribution from Israel.

The first video to be published by the Hallelu Foundation, released just over a year ago, explains the group’s raison d’être. Complaining that all previous public relations efforts by Israel were ineffectual — “we just really suck at explaining what the hell is going on here” — the clip’s narrator proposes that Hallelu be made the over-arching PR promoters of the State of Israel:

“Hallelu was founded in order to thoroughly change the way we think of hasbara [propaganda]. It intends to tell the world the true story, and has the exact plan of how to do so. At first, the Hallelu Foundation plans to become an umbrella organization for all Jewish organizations in Israel and abroad that deal with hasbara.”

The narrator goes on to explain that the group intends to not only defend Israel from charges of human rights violations, but to go on the offensive, as well: “Hallelu plans to start a series of unprecedented attack campaigns, the likes of which we’ve never seen, both in content and in range.”

Hallelu’s attack forces will target media outlets that publish negative reports about Israel’s actions, the video says. “A battery of lawyers will legally pursue any website, newspaper, TV network in Israel and abroad that will spread lies about Israel’s operations,” the narrator states. “The anti-Israel organizations will learn: they can’t write whatever they want anymore.”

Interestingly, the video also debunks one of the oft-repeated talking points of Israel’s most vocal defenders: that Boycott-Divest-Sanction activists hate Jews and target Jews just because they are Jews. “Has everyone turned anti-semite? No, they haven’t,” the narrator explains. “They do exactly what we would do in their place: they boycott, demonstrate, apply international pressure, stop tourists, investors, performing artists.”

Update: The high-quality animation component of the video was not an original creative work, but rather an enhancement of a sampled clip, nearly all of a seventy-second award-winning CG short called “A Tale of Momentum & Inertia” by Portland, Oregon animation studio HouseSpecial. Presumably, Hallelu would prefer that this fact not be widely known, and not only for reasons of legal copyright. In the original HouseSpecial animation, the massive boulder which destroys an Israeli settlement of some sort and the village “Europe” - identified as Hamas and ISIS - is actually inadvertently created by the Jewish-or-Israeli-identified rock-creature himself, when he tries to build a structure of some kind, perhaps an altar, on the top of a hill. If Hallelu’s political metaphor is then expanded to also include the introductory footage from “Momentum & Inertia” that the would-be hasbara mavens chose to cut, it would mean that in Israel’s efforts to build some kind of structure on a hill, it created ISIS and Hamas, which then destroy an Israeli settlement and the European continent.

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/israeli-propagandists-threaten-destruction-europe-punishment-boycotting-israel