03/21/12 – Dimi Reider – The Scott Horton Show

All right, so welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest is Demi Rader from 972 MAG in Israel 972MAG.com.
And he's got this really interesting story.
I'm, I'm very thrilled to see this actually.
Israeli Iranian Solidarity Exchange sweeps Facebook.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, how are you?
It's good to be on the show.
All right, well, good.
Thanks.
I'm very happy to have you here.
This is a real cool thing.
You say, last Saturday, a brand new internet meme, a peace meme started sweeping Facebook and the internet between Israelis and Iranians.
What's going on there?
Yeah.
Well, basically, this, this couple from Tel Aviv, two graphic designers have decided that they were tired of having the politicians speak for them and exchange threats of war and decided to take their own message to the internet.
They created this banner and superimposed on their picture, asked a few friends to come over and have their pictures taken with their kids.
And it's going to be a really kind of really simple, very human portrait.
And started posting it on the internet.
And at first, a lot of the reactions were quite cynical.
I mean, even the friends that came over said that we were doing them a favor.
We're doing really kind of, some of us didn't think it was a very light, you know, an idea that's likely to catch up.
And other people on the internet first started creating kind of parody memes, you know, like a picture of the Trojan horse or the message Trojans, we love you, we'll never bomb your country.
Right.began to come through.
And then conversation started.
And a lot of the messages you see now on Facebook are posters simply saying, Oh, my God, I just spent an hour talking directly to an Iranian student.
That was amazing.
So yeah, so here we are.
It's growing and growing.
And there's going to be a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest the war.
Well, you know, the possibility of war.
Luckily, we're not at war yet.
Wow, yeah, that's really great news.
And I appreciate the whole I guess we all have to appreciate the new 21st century technology angle of all this the web 2.0 angle where the former arbiters of communication are just made irrelevant and the people at the low end just go directly to each other.
And now could you give us any kind of estimate as to how many of these different pictures have been made and sent back and forth in this way?
I think at least several hundreds.
But you have to remember that for every person that uploads a picture, there are dozens more who share it and pass it around without even if they don't contribute directly.
So it touched many, many people.
And of course, it was a very good media coverage, both in Israel and around the world.
So a lot of people now know about these exchanges in Nigeria.
I mean, I can say that we had hundreds of comments on my piece in 972.
And nearly all of them were expressions of love and solidarity from Israelis and Iranians.
And I can, I, you know, we can tell from where our readership is coming from.
And we suddenly had a jump in hits from Iran.
So, yep.
Wow, that's great.
Yeah.
And you have a bunch of great examples of these pictures.
Again, it's a 972mag.com.
Israeli-Iranian Solidarity Exchange.
Sweeps.
Facebook.
And they say, we love you, Israeli people.
We do not want war with any country.
And Iranians, we will never bomb your country.
We love you.
That kind of thing.
People going around their states and trying to make peace.
And now you point out in your article on this that the Israeli people don't want war with Iran.
That's what all the polls say.
They especially don't want war if America isn't going to do it for them, which is, I guess, even better, right?
Yep.
They seem to be commanded and fought, at least in the initial stages, by a very small group of people.
You know, it's the governments on either side, neither of which enjoy a lot of support from the street, like you pointed out.
I mean, it's very difficult to get accurate poll data from Iran, of course, but we do know that Ahmadinejad is extremely unpopular.
He was just recently humiliated once in the parliamentary elections, and he was called before the parliament and grilled by the MPs, which is unprecedented.
So, you know, there's Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad on either side, and then the actual action will be fought by a hundred and something pilots and then by a few hundred missile operators.
And compared to that, there are these masses and masses of people who just want to get on with their lives.
They have absolutely no interest in the war.
In terms of how this Spain might or might not affect Netanyahu, it's very difficult to say.
You know, governments in democracies don't necessarily listen to people when they say, don't go to war.
We all remember the massive marches in London in 2003 that had absolutely zero effect on the government's decision to go to war in Iraq.
But luckily, this is an election year, and the election right now is looking very good for Netanyahu.
He looks set to either keep his power or increase it.
And a war like that can very seriously go wrong, and Israelis can be very, very harsh on their government after a war.
They might not always stop a war, or they might support the government if the war is being fought, you know, people rally to the flag.
But if there is a perceived failure of either the government or the military in Iraq, ever since 1973, Israelis have been very critical.
And the last prime minister who went to war was Ehud Olmert, who went to war twice.
And even though, while the war was happening, he enjoyed some support, after the Lebanon war, he began an inevitable decline.
He lost his popularity, he lost his party, he lost his political momentum.
I wouldn't like to be there.
Netanyahu would love to stay in power for another five years.
So if there are early indicators that even before the first shots were fired, people already are extremely skeptical about the war, maybe, maybe it will get him to hesitate a little bit.
Yeah, well, you know what, if the Kony 2012 goofballs can whip up a bunch of war propaganda the way they did in the last few weeks, it ought to be just as easy to whip up a bunch of anti-war sentiment when you have, you know, peace and right on your side, you know what I mean?
And I think this is so cool, this story where it started out, and it's so obvious, right, the Trojan horse, that kind of thing.
Oh, yeah, we'll never bomb you and whatever with the sarcasm.
But the sarcasm immediately got drowned out by these really honest sentiments of people saying, no, we really don't want war.
Picking up this meme.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's all the more remarkable because, sadly, it's much easier to rally people to war than to peace.
It's something, I think, very deep within us as human beings.
And I've been to some mediation trainings, and one of the first exercises you get to do is the group is asked to write a list of all the synonyms they can find, or all the words and associations they can find with the word war, right, or conflict.
And they usually fill up a couple of pages.
And then the rest is the same about the word peace, and usually they end up with less than half a page.
We are kind of, you know, conflict is something that we've been doing since forever, and it's something very dynamic.
It's a call for action, whereas peace is all too often perceived as a call for inaction.
It's a state of being.
And yet here, remarkably, it actually sparks something very, very big.
I think also it's probably reflecting the level of anxiety.
I mean, we've been hearing about this impending war for years, and people really, really don't see why it should be happening.
All right, everybody.
That is Demi Rader from 972MAG.com, Israeli-Iranian Solidarity Exchange Sweeps Facebook.
Thanks very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.