Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Asa Wynn-Stanley from the Electronic Intifada.
That's electronicintifada.net.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Yeah, pretty good.
Good deal, man.
Happy to have you here.
It's been too long since we've spoken, but you've got some great journalism to talk about here.
I guess the background is Al Jazeera did a documentary, what, a year or two ago or something, about the Israel lobby in the United Kingdom.
Groundbreaking stuff.
And then they did it again.
An undercover reporter went in, got secret footage, did this great investigative journalism on the Israel lobby and their activities in America.
And then Al Jazeera, which is run by the government of Qatar, after all, decided to censor it.
And so, wow, isn't that exciting?
Now I want to know everything about it.
And it turns out you got some leaks, Asa.
And also, I know you're covering the other leaks and reports of leaks.
There's an article in The Nation.
There's Max Blumenthal over at the Grayzone Project, etc.
So it's coming out and descriptions of the documentary are coming out here.
So this is really cool, I guess.
First of all, tell us kind of the overview of what you know about this thing so far.
Yeah, like you said, there has been two undercover reporters that Al Jazeera managed to infiltrate into the Israel lobby, one in the U.S. and one in the U.K.
And they were doing it around about the same time in 2006.
And at the beginning of last year, January 2017, the first program, the lobby, came out and it was all about Israel lobby groups in the U.K.
And their influence in primarily the Labour Party, but also the ruling Conservative Party.
The influence of Conservative Friends of Israel is quite apparent in the Conservative Party, the ruling party in the U.K. at the moment.
But it's also in the opposition Labour Party, the left wing party, although it's far more contested in the Labour Party.
And so that came out and it had quite a big impact.
You know, it made some front pages in mainstream newspapers in this country for a little while.
It died down fairly quickly, although the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, had to make a statement to parliament stating that the Israeli diplomat, so-called, who had called him an idiot, amongst other things, had been sent home to Tel Aviv.
But it was far more than just some sort of choice words about him.
There was an extensive amount of backroom dealing going on.
And what, to me, amounted to essentially sabotage by a foreign organization, a foreign government, working to undermine democracy, really working against the interests of Labour Party members, certainly.
And even working against some conservative ministers and MPs that were perceived to be too critical of Israel.
And Al Jazeera has done a whole other documentary and it's been censored by Qatar, which bankrolls Al Jazeera and is where Al Jazeera is based for various complicated reasons.
But essentially it amounts to the fact that Qatar is trying to get close to the Trump administration and sees sort of closing up to Israel lobby groups as a way to do that.
And one of the things that it's done is to censor this film.
Well, yeah, because they do have some problems, the Qataris, some problems of their own.
I guess I could see why they were susceptible to extortion when it came to this.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's interesting, too, right, that just, I mean, even just so far, that the Israeli government takes a very hands-on role.
And we already know this, you know, I guess, anyway, from all different reasons.
But I guess there's kind of a pretension that, well, you know, the Israel lobby in America, it's the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and they're Americans.
They're not Israelis.
They're Americans.
And they just like Israel a lot.
And so they lobby for it.
And you might think that the Israelis would trust them to do a good enough job.
They've got, you know, the neoconservatives and the think tanks to protect them.
And so everything's fine.
But, no, they really get extremely engaged in picking and choosing, as you're saying, which candidates to ruin, which cabinet ministers to try to attack and these kinds of things.
Yeah, there's certainly a degree.
I mean, of really sort of micromanaging, I mean, especially, I would say, in the UK, things are far more desperate for them in the UK.
And we see that we see this.
I mean, in the Labour Party, especially.
So for decades in the US, Israel was a what they like to think of as a bipartisan thing.
Both Republicans and Democrats for a long time were, you know, seen as pro-Israel, were close to and they tried to back people from or from both of the main parties.
And it was very similar in the UK for a long time, especially with the.
So both Labour governments and conservative governments have been relatively pro-Israel for a long time, but especially under the former Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.
But that started on both sides of the Atlantic.
This sort of hegemony, hegemony as a political hegemony, you could say, has started to collapse.
It started to crumble far more in the UK.
You see that Labour Party has become.
Palestine has become a cause for Labour Party members and the leadership of the Labour Party has changed immeasurably under Jeremy Corbyn.
And we can see that it's become far more of a partisan issue.
And we're starting to see some signs of that happening in the US, too.
Certainly at the grassroots of the Democratic Party, people are expressing support for Palestinians.
That's far from translating into policies of the top of the Democratic Party.
If anything, it's the opposite.
But what we see is as Israel lobby groups become more isolated in these mainstream political parties, their strategies are going to become far more desperate and far more hands on.
They're going to try ever more nefarious things, really.
And it becomes more and more a case of open sabotage, really.
I was at the Labour Party conference this week in Liverpool, and there was a massive vote for a future Labour government to end arms sales, British arms sales to Israel.
And, you know, it was such a Palestinian flags were waved on the conference floor.
And it was a sea of Palestinian flags.
And it was such a graphic illustration of how isolated the Israel lobby is, you know, that they don't have the people on their side.
So they have to resort to kind of backroom deals and putting sort of secretive pressure on behind the scenes.
And so the more that happens, the more desperate they're going to become.
We've seen another illustration of that.
Labour Friends of Israel, which is a group that has MPs as its supporters, it had its annual reception.
It was diminished in terms of the support from Labour leaders that it's had in the past.
It has had support from Labour leaders in the past.
Labour leader this year was absent.
But what we had was they invited along an Israeli member, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, came along from the Israeli Labour Party and basically threatened Jeremy Corbyn and said that you meet with with because of your meetings with Palestinians, who she called terrorists, because because you've met with so many Palestinian terrorists.
You don't expect us to turn the other cheek.
Don't expect us to turn the other cheek.
Those were her words.
I mean, this is not not very subtly veiled threat to continue its campaign of sabotage in the Labour Party that it's been doing over the last three years since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Party leader.
Yeah, well, they could just emancipate the Palestinians.
But since that's off the table, I guess they just have to double down now.
So, well, a couple of things there.
I'm glad you mentioned Corbyn and all that.
We'll get back to this documentary in a minute here.
But so there's been this major campaign against him, accusing him of being an anti-Semite.
Now, I know he's done some politically incorrect things, showed up at the wrong wreath laying or, you know, whatever kind of thing.
But I guess and, you know, I don't understand British politics the way you do.
I'm an American.
But it seems like basically leftists are civil rights types and not anti-Semites.
The only real anti-Semites are right wing anti-Semites.
And none of them, I don't think, are really secretive about it.
They like talking about that.
So it seems kind of on the face of it that like, come on, what is this guy?
Hates Jews?
It doesn't really make sense.
But I don't know.
Yeah.
Maybe there is something to it.
Or is this just, you know, the ultimate example of what you're talking about?
Well, they'll just go to any length, any ridiculous length to try to preserve their power inside the UK government.
Well, I mean, as you said, it is ridiculous.
And it's something that doesn't really have any factual basis.
I mean, yes, anti-Semitism exists on the left and on the right.
But it's a marginal phenomenon.
I mean, anti-Semitism mostly exists on the sort of extremist right in terms of neo-Nazis and people like that.
That's where the main examples of it comes from.
It doesn't mean the left is immune from it.
It does happen on the margins.
But what we've really seen is over the last few years a sustained campaign to smear the whole of the Labour Party.
And more specifically, the Palestine Solidarity Movement, because that is where Jeremy Corbyn comes from.
And that's been one of his main causes over the years is to support solidarity with freedom for Palestinians.
It's been a sustained campaign to smear him as an anti-Semite because of that and the movement behind him.
So it's essentially a sabotage campaign.
So, you know, there has been some marginal examples of genuine anti-Semitism.
Yes, that has happened.
But in the main, what it is, is not.
It's expressions of solidarity with Palestinians.
It started with attacks on Jeremy Corbyn because of his support for Palestinians.
And then it went on to the wider Labour Party.
So the first example came in February 2016.
The first allegation of a sort of systemic, supposedly systemic anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was in February 2016.
And it was supposed to be an Oxford University Labour Club.
And it became a big story in the UK, you know, anti-Semitism in the Labour Club.
Jeremy Corbyn hasn't done anything to stamp it out.
And it led to no less than three separate inquiries by organs within the Labour Party into alleged anti-Semitism.
Now, what was the factual basis?
There was no factual basis for it whatsoever.
It turned out, I mean, I did report on this and one or two others did.
But in the main, it was ignored.
This person who came up with this fabrication was somebody, his name was Alex Chalmers.
He was a student.
And his only evidence, apart from some unnamed allegations, which turned out to be essentially libelous allegations.
And that's why the papers didn't, most of the papers didn't report the names behind these allegations.
But apart from those, the main allegation was that the Labour Club had passed a motion supporting Israeli apartheid week.
So this is an annual educational event, which the Palestine Solidarity Movement puts on to educate people about the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and the rest of Palestine.
And how their situation is an apartheid situation because of racist and equal laws that the Israelis hold them to.
So now has this really hurt the Labour Party, these weeks and months of attacks like this?
Yeah, it has.
It has.
And so it hasn't had as much of a desired effect as they would have liked.
So it's a mixed picture.
OK, but it certainly had an effect.
I saw a headline yesterday where Corbyn said that if Labour wins in the next elections and he's the head of the party, so he would then be presumably the prime minister, that the first thing he'd do, I guess he said, was recognize Palestine as an independent state.
I mean, that's a pretty damn big deal.
And it doesn't sound like he's been all that intimidated after all, if I read that right.
Yeah, I mean, and also the membership.
I mean, more importantly to me is the fact that because personally, I don't agree with recognizing the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinian state.
But aside from that, more importantly to me is the fact that the membership of the Labour Party voted during the week to end arms sales to Israel.
And so if anything, the campaign of smears has had the opposite effect because it has actually forced the grassroots of the party to say, well, you know, maybe I did support Palestine a bit, but now I'm really going to educate myself and find out about it.
And the more they educate themselves, the more that they see the injustice there.
So in some ways, it's had the opposite effect.
As you said, like still at the top of the party's refused to back to pressure in a lot of ways.
But as I said, it's a mixed bag.
So he has sort of succumbed to pressure in other ways.
So like what it's done, the main effect of the campaign of smears has been to limit the amount that the Labour Party could go on the offensive in terms of its political campaign to try and win elections.
So it means, for example, it spent the whole summer just trying to essentially defend itself against the charge of this anti-Semitic instead of putting out its policies about, you know, just normal things that people want the government to do in terms of housing and health care and so forth.
It hasn't been able to focus on those policies so much.
It's had that sabotage effect.
That's one.
The other effect it's had is within a negative effect within the Labour Party grassroots.
It's become a divisive thing that has turned people against each other.
So who are, you know, people who are genuinely comrades, it's turned them against each other.
So people get attacked.
You know, there's this kind of McCarthy atmosphere of like a witch hunt.
It's often called a witch hunt by a lot of people on the left.
And I think that's accurate because it's like your sort of finger point.
You don't want to be denounced yourself as a witch or in this case as an anti-Semite.
So you point to someone else as an anti-Semite.
And these things kind of descend then into sort of mutual recriminations.
And it becomes all very toxic.
And so, I mean, if you think of things like in the history of counterintelligence and in the history of psyops by various governments, if you think of things like COINTELPRO and you think of operations that the British Army did, for example, in Northern Ireland with what it called a psychological operations, what other armies have called psychological operations, what was the goal?
The goal wasn't just to spy on groups that they considered to be subversive or to be, you know, communist or to be in the case of Northern Ireland, like, you know, the Republican movement and so on, which, again, they considered to be linked to communist Russia and so forth.
The goal wasn't just spying.
It was active sabotage.
And they did that quite often by creating disinformation.
A mix of truth, half-truths and outright lies was spread to, for example, get the black chapters of the Black Panther Party to, you know, false false letters were sent to kind of get people to fall out with each other and to fight.
And then this this kind of this kind of fake dissent then took on a life of its own and became real.
So I think very much that is very much what is what is happening in the Labour Party, what's been happening over the last few years.
And we do see that and I've documented there is a role of the Israeli government in this.
I'm not saying it's behind everything.
Absolutely not.
It's not it's not as powerful as it would like us to think it is, but it certainly had a role.
And and and there's you know, there's been other parties as well.
Other other entities, I suppose you could say, that have had this kind of influence.
But Israel certainly being part of driving it.
Well, you know, a big part of the narrative is one of those kind of, you know, in PR, it's really great technique where they argue past the sale.
And I've seen some kind of I think this sort of Israel lobbyists who were infiltrated for this documentary we're about to talk about.
I saw their narrative on Twitter there a few weeks ago before I quit it.
Cold turkey.
My bad.
But I saw the narrative that they were pushing that British Jews are terrified.
What's going to happen to them when the Labour Party comes to power?
You know, and then you're just supposed to fill in the blank and imagine like, what did they say they're going to do?
You know, get around everybody up and send them off to.
This is this is the kind of fear mongering narrative we've seen with a lot of the papers in this country.
And it is actually very dangerous.
And there is real fear out there, you know, because in any propaganda campaign, it's going to have an effect.
And there will be some people who are sort of misinformed and will genuinely believe it.
You know what I mean?
So who's really victimized?
If British Jews are falling for this to any degree or any percentage of them are believing in this hype and are terrified literally because of it, because it's working, this propaganda, then they're just the collateral damage in the drive to get these politicians who are posing a problem for Israel.
And these people, you know, screw them.
They can let them be terrorized.
That's right.
And another dangerous thing we saw this week at the Labour Party conference, which got hardly any media attention.
I mean, no really mainstream media attention that I can see was that there was threats of violence and actual assaults and two cases of hoax bomb threats against against some political events.
But they were anti-Zionist Jewish events.
So there was the.
Well, well, Jewish Voice for Labour is is is more accurate to describe it as a non-Zionist event rather than organization rather than anti-Zionist.
But it's certainly been it's certainly a pro-Palestinian organization.
Their activists have certainly been or most of their activists, at least, have certainly been very critical of the whole Labour anti-Semitism narrative pushed by the mainstream media.
And they were they had an event on a film showing about Jackie Walker, who is a black Jewish anti-racism activist who's been very critical of this narrative and has been expelled from the Labour Party for that.
And her film showing got 15 minutes in before it had to be abandoned by the venue because they had a bomb threat phoned in.
So it's very clear that, you know, I don't know who was behind that.
But there was also an organization calling itself very falsely named, but calling itself Jewish Human Rights Watch, which is a really quite extreme right wing organization, which was actively harassing people at the Labour Party conference, filming it and trying to get.
Provoke some sort of reaction out of them.
In two cases, it's been reported today that they in one case, a JVL event, they actively assaulted somebody.
It's been reported today.
And they also filmed themselves harassing a trade union leader, trying to provoke a response out of him and videoing it.
So, you know, it's starting to reach really dangerous proportions, really dangerous levels.
And I think it is going to continue.
You know, I mean, I think it's going to keep going on.
Yeah, well, they have a problem.
All they can do is just wait, keep establishing those facts on the grounds and keep putting off the rest of humanity and their protests and just, you know, head down and keep barreling ahead.
That's the program.
And so, listen, I mean, we got to talk about this.
So who is this reporter?
Do we know who is the reporter?
Is it the same, quote, unquote, Tony, who infiltrated the UK and the American Israel lobbies?
Or explain this story to me, please, a little bit better.
OK, so, no, there was two different people.
So there was a report called.
So they were working about the same time on different sides of the Atlantic.
So there's there was Robin, who was the the the name under which the undercover reporter was in the lobby, the UK edition and in the US edition.
There's somebody called Tony.
And and now have they revealed their real name since then that, you know, hey, I'm a reporter and I'm taking responsibility for my work here kind of thing.
No, no, that's OK.
That's OK.
So but they say they have a reason, like, well, they want to keep doing this.
I don't know.
It hasn't really had that whole situation hasn't come out.
It's just that I mean, there have been reports of that you can find out about their identity, but that hasn't been confirmed or denied by Al Jazeera themselves, as far as I know.
All right.
Anyway, so go ahead.
So, yeah, in terms of the contents of the U.S. documentary, I mean, you asked me this towards the beginning.
I didn't really answer.
I went into an explanation of more of the circumstances of why it's been censored.
But we do know some of the contents of the documentary.
So we are the Electronic Intifada first published in March, a report of some of the contents of it.
And as you mentioned, Alan Gresh, a French veteran, French Middle East journalist, has reported more recently as well, more details of it.
And let me mention here that you have links to all this other stuff, too, in your article, which is, again, at Electronic Intifada, censored Israel lobby film starts leaking.
That's one of them.
Yeah.
So go ahead.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, and that's probably a good one for your readers to start with, because it kind of summarizes some of the stuff that's out there.
So in addition to these summaries of what it reports based on people who've seen the documentary of what the documentary contains, more recently, actual excerpts of the documentary begin to leak.
So began to leak.
So we've obtained some clips at the Electronic Intifada and we've published them.
We've put them on our YouTube channel so people can watch them.
Max Blumenthal and his colleagues at the Grayzone, you know, our good friends, has also released some clips as well.
And, you know, hopefully more will come out.
And there's a lot of interesting stuff that's come out so far.
But in sum, what we know the documentary is that it shows a network of pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. that are effectively acting as unregistered agents for foreign power Israel to spy on U.S. citizens in order to essentially to subvert the democratic process, to influence U.S. elections and influence them, not necessarily in favor of one candidate or another, but in a more pro-Israel direction.
That's what's being attempted, you know.
And there's there's several there's a lot of these organizations.
So in.
Well, give me an example, first of all, of what it is that they're doing, spying on Americans.
Who specifically and what are they doing with that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, for example, there's a group called Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is working.
There's a clip.
Part of the film is said this this hasn't been released as a clip yet.
Hopefully it will come out.
But reportedly, according to our sources, there's a clip.
There's part of the film which says that there's there's there's footage showing an Israeli minister, an Israeli civil servant who works for an inferent influential Israeli ministry called the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which is essentially a sort of semi covert spy agency.
Her name's Sima Vaknin-Gil.
And in the film, she says, we have FDD.
We have others working on this work.
And what she's talking about is profiling activists and money trail.
And specifically, she's talking about the BDS movement quite a lot, because that is the remit of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs is to wage war against the BDS movement.
The Ministry of Strategic Affairs is known and has been reported in the Israeli media and by many others, that it's its whole remit is to work against to sabotage the BDS movement.
And a veteran Israeli journalist, Yossi Melman, talks about how the Ministry of Strategic Affairs runs a campaign of what he calls black ops against Palestine solidarity organizations all over the world.
And these groups like FDD and others are acting as essentially unregistered foreign agents.
There's another example of a group which we've covered in some of our articles related to this documentary, which is called the Israel on Campus Coalition, which is funded by a multimillionaire financier named Adam Milstein, who and this this organization got some budget of some eight million dollars is probably more by now.
But when about the time the documentary was filmed, it was about eight million dollars, I understand.
And it's in the documentary.
It said that they they admit to coordinating with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs on what it calls its intelligence brief.
So they're using like the language of spy agencies.
I mean, maybe, you know, maybe they're exaggerating their role a little bit.
But I mean, there's there's no doubt that they're coordinating their activities of spying on American citizens for the benefit of the state of Israel in order to combat, you know, a legal, nonviolent democratic movement.
And what it does is the ICC specifically runs an anonymous blacklisting site called the Canary Mission.
And what that does is try to ruin the career prospects of young students in revenge for them being active in Palestine solidarity movement.
But we also know more because of more recent reporting by the Jewish Daily Forward that the Canary Mission's reports and these kind of dossiers then get more recently being used by Israeli border guards to deny usually Palestinian American citizens entry to even, you know, may not even entry to Palestine.
They may not even be doing anything political.
You know, they may just be visiting relatives and they're being denied entry.
But on at least in part on the basis of these dossiers on the Canary Mission.
So you've got a whole network of these organizations in the US which are working in coordination with Israeli intelligence and they're acting for foreign power.
And in some that's what the documentary shows and proves.
And they may be right.
They may even be they may or may not be violating US law.
We don't know.
But until we see more details of it.
But there's certainly strong evidence to suggest that they are.
And it really should really be looked into more.
I mean, when we see all the hype in the media about what Russia is supposed to have done and so forth and how it was, you know, allegedly so instrumental because in the 2016 US elections, because no one could possibly dislike Hillary Clinton for who she is.
Then, you know, really what anything Russia is really alleged to have done in the US elections pales in insignificance to what we know for a fact Israel has been doing in the US and is actively doing in the US.
Now elaborate a little bit about this Canary Mission and what they do to these students.
Okay, so essentially what it is, is it's a website and it's completely anonymous, but it looks fairly professional on the surface.
And it's it lists profiles of young student activists, people.
So people not like myself, they may just be, you know, young and active in the Palestine Solidarity Movement.
As a journalist, I've got a public profile and, you know, I expect some sort of public accountability.
But these people are often just their only, you know, so-called crime is to to be working for Palestine, Palestinian human rights.
And what they then get done is they then get a whole series of allegations enlisted about them, about how their supposed crimes and and quite often, and then they're accused of racism.
So being a supporter of the BDS movement, for example, is then is that that's considered to be anti-Semitic, according to this website.
So then that is then listed.
And on the top of every profile, it says, if you're racist, the world should know.
And so if you search the name of such a such person, if a prospective employer searches for their name on on Google, quite often because, you know, they don't have much of an online profile.
This will be the only page or one of the only pages that comes up.
And for someone, you know, it doesn't look like some.
So I suppose that pro-Israel or Zionist blacklists on the Internet are nothing new.
I remember, you know, many years ago, this be one called Masada 3000, which was like a list of Palestine solidarity activists from around the world who are kind of supposed to be blacklisted.
And many of them were actually Jewish and Jewish anti-Zionists.
But it was a really weird, odd website.
It may still exist out there somewhere.
I don't know.
But it just looks kind of a bit like a whack job site.
But on the surface of it to somebody who's just like a normal employer or a prospective employer who doesn't know much about the situation, it looks, you know, on the surface, credible.
So this is an attempt to kind of ruin people careers and to intimidate them into not getting involved to make it not worthwhile.
And so we know they're doing that.
And like I said, these profiles are more recently being used by Israeli authorities themselves to deny people entry to the country.
But another thing that the Canary Mission is is doing as well that we know from what's out there is they're actually doing on campus things as well to to intimidate activists into not getting involved into students and faculties and not getting involved into doing things like posters, Islamophobic posters on campus, calling, you know, naming people, putting their real image, real faces and names and calling them, you know, jihadists or Islamic extremists or all these kind of things on no more of a basis on the fact that they support BDS movement or the Palestinian human rights movement.
And people have had like things like their cars leaflet and stuff like that.
There was another really weird tactic recently where they seem to have hired actors to put on canary suits and this weird sort of mime mask and to do this outside of a hearing outside of a solidarity movement meeting to to kind of intimidate them is kind of weird sort of mime performance that they've been doing in this one campus in the US that was happening.
And these actors were, you know, they they ignored people, anyone who tried to engage them, say, well, who are you?
What are you doing here?
They just remain silent.
They can take continued on with their weird sort of performance.
So what it is, it's it's it's it's a form of psychological warfare in a way, you know, I mean, this is very much this.
This is what the Ministry of Strategic Affairs considers its campaign is a campaign of warfare.
They and they use these terms.
They actively use these terms.
And you see that in the documentary, as it's been reported about in the the ICC parts, the Israel on Campus Coalition, Jacob Bame, the leader of the ICC, talks about what he said was General General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.
Now, he made a mistake.
It was actually in Afghanistan that that counterinsurgency strategy.
But he's saying, like, we learned a lot from that.
We're trying to implement it now.
And he's talking about he's not talking about, you know, the Taliban.
He's talking about some student activists, you know, learn about McChrystal's insurgent math.
They might learn a thing or two.
Well, yeah, well, this is the thing.
Like they they they're they're they're they're they're using these warlike tactics for a democratic to counter a democratic campaign.
And again, we go back go back to Cohen's hope because it was very much the kind of calculus that the FBI were using back then for for for that.
Yeah.
And so now one of the other stories on here is about the astroturfing and professionals or whoever's extras from the street.
I don't know where they find these people from the game show audiences or whatever.
They just grab these people and put protest, put money and protest placards in their hands and send them out to, again, in the same sort of way, try to controversialize peace groups and this kind of thing.
And then they're busted.
And it's Noah Pollack.
Who's Noah Pollack who got caught doing this here?
That's right.
Yeah.
So, no, this is one of the clips that Max Blumenthal published that he released to the Grayzone.
And this is quite an amazing clip, really.
I mean, and this I really like this clip because it shows like I do think that Israel will be quite often tries to portray itself as being almost all powerful and just being like so insurmountable that it can't be defeated.
But this clip really shows the opposite.
It shows like a bunch of Keystone cops, really like they're really going along to this ridiculous astroturfing exercise.
So what it what the clip shows is a group of young fellows from I believe it's the Hudson Institute or another right wing think tank for Israel think tank.
I mean, it's not primarily about Israel.
It's just a general sort of right wing conservative think tank.
I think it's Hoover this time.
But, yeah.
OK.
All right.
So the Hoover Institute then.
And it's these these I suppose recent graduates, young young people, you know, fellows, they're kind of whining to the undercover reporter who they think is one of their own.
A pro-Israel person that Noah Pollack did a really bad job of recruiting them.
And they were forced to go along to this demonstration by their boss.
And they're literally on camera admitting that it's astroturfing and say, oh, yeah, no, this is astroturfing.
But there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
So they're trying to go there.
What they did then was they go along to a Students for Justice in Palestine conference and they're basically harassing the students there and just sort of trying to provoke them into a reaction and calling them, you know, supporters, terrorist supporters and supporters of baby killers and coming along with these ludicrous signs.
Noah Pollack is this operative for some obscure group called the Emergency Committee for Israel.
I think something like that.
And he's just sort of neoconservative organization, pro-Israel organization sort of.
And and he's, you know, but he's clearly got support for it.
And he's managed to rally these people along.
He's now he's now a writer for the Al-Gamayna.
And, yeah, so he's bringing he's bringing people along to this.
And it's like it's just showing how ludicrous their whole rationale is.
You know, they claim to have, you know, popular support for Israel in the US.
But where is it?
You know, they have to essentially pay people to come along to demonstrate.
They don't have the popular support that the Palestine Solidarity Movement does.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but one more here.
Talk to me about this Facebook campaign, because, you know, I was thinking when I was reading this is it really does sound like something a paranoid, crazy person would say and get made fun of for it that like, come on, this is just Israeli propaganda that like, you know, no way, man, you just think so or whatever.
But yeah, no.
Donuts and kittens and the West Bank.
Is that how it works?
Yeah, basically.
So this is the Israel project is running, ran and is still running because Facebook has refused to take action even after reports about this.
The Israel project, which is another one of these organizations, which, you know, seems to be working in coordination with the Israeli government in order to spread Israeli propaganda in the US, runs a network of Facebook.
Pages.
Now, this does this actually sounds like what Russia has been accused of, except in this instead of being, you know, some obscure troll farm with, you know, some Twitter account, which has got only a few followers.
This these are Facebook pages, which have got hundreds of thousands of followers.
And one of their videos has, I believe, more than 50 million views for one of its videos.
So it's a network of five Facebook pages, which ostensibly on the surface have nothing to do with Israel.
They don't disclose that they're run by the Israel project.
And on the Facebook pages themselves, there's no explicit disclosure of that.
And so they just run.
They just seem to be like normal Facebook pages of just different topics.
So one of them is supposed to be on environmental issues.
One of them is supposed to be on women's issues.
And one of them is supposed to be on history.
It's just called history bites and things like that.
And so I'm sick and to hear that you hate women and the environment and history.
This is this is the thing.
What this is what they're trying to do is they're trying to sort of infiltrate ostensibly progressive issues to infiltrate their message into that.
So they did most of the things they post either just banal, you know, banal things, you know, just literally postings of kittens.
And one of them, like you said, is just a donut and just things like, oh, just like click hit like if you like this, don't if you like this donut stuff like that.
And then, you know, in just a small, relatively small percentage, maybe 20, 25 percent, 20 percent of their posting, they'll sneak something in about Israel.
And they'll be like, hey, look at this pink fighter jet that the Israeli army put out there for breast cancer awareness.
Isn't that a good old one?
Because that's photoshopped anyway, right?
Like somebody already showed us a plain old jet.
And that never even happened.
And I know about that, but that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But so it's interesting that, you know, they really put that much effort into those kind of operations.
I remember reading in a Jerusalem Post or Haaretz, whatever years ago, about where the foreign ministry was having students do this and was, you know, paying basically like you'd pay extras in a movie or whatever to come and set up these accounts, not just for Facebook, but I think they were targeting the comment section on Yahoo News stories.
They decided was a place where they could have a significant, you know, kind of effect, Washington Post.
And then and then it's just sent legions of paid pro-Israel trolls to just parrot every talking point and denounce any dissent in the harshest of terms, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, there's quite a history of Israel doing this.
And of course, Israel is not the only country that does it.
But I think Israel doesn't get the reporting on its activities of this kind that other countries do because in the Western media, because they're quite instinctively pro-Israel quite a lot of the time.
You can't do that on television.
Her mom pays all the kids to pretend to like her.
That's terrible.
I think they're carrying around a guilty conscience here.
We better start paying people to like us, especially when it's our money in the first place here, you know?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, this is really great.
And so again, let me mention Max Blumenthal at the Gray Zone.
He's got the one on Noah Pollack here.
And then there's this thing in The Nation, how Israel spies on U.S. citizens, which is great.
And then Asa and Ali Abunimah have these at Electronic Intifada about the Facebook campaign.
And then also just kind of an overview of everything that's come out and this kind of thing.
All that's there at electronicintifada.net.
Thanks very much for your time, man.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
