Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Amnesty International is now calling Israel’s mass atrocity in Gaza “a live-streamed genocide” due to the way this nightmare is unfolding right in front of us on the screens of our devices around the world, and public support for Israel is plummeting in the United States.
Zionists are losing control of the narrative, and they know it. And they are not taking it well.
During a speech at a summit hosted by the Jewish News Syndicate earlier this week, former US senator Norm Coleman said that Jews are “the masters of the universe” and should use their power in Silicon Valley to control online information in order to win a “digital war”.
Coleman, who is Jewish, made the following remarks on Monday:
“A majority of Gen Z have an unfavorable impression of Israel. And, my friends, I think the reason for that is that we’re losing the digital war. They’re getting their information from TikTok… and we’re losing that war.
“And when you think about it, the masters of the universe are Jews! We’ve got Altman at OpenAI, we’ve got [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg, we’ve got [Google founder] Sergey Brin, we’ve got a group across the board. Jan Koum, y’know, founded WhatsApp. It’s us.
“And we have to figure out a way to win the digital battle. We’ve got to get our digital sneakers on, so that the truth can prevail over the lies. And when we do that, the future of Israel will be stronger because a majority of all Americans will support Israel. We’ll make that happen, we have to make it happen.”
If any anti-Zionist with a public profile had said Jews control Silicon Valley and use it to influence public opinion for the benefit of Israel, they’d be forcefully denounced by the entire western political-media class as a rabid antisemite. But a Jewish politician saying Jews must use their control over Silicon Valley to influence public opinion about Israel receives no attention from that same political-media class.
Interestingly, at that same event, Meta’s “Jewish Diaspora” chief Jordana Cutler noted that Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram “banned content claiming Zionists run the world or control the media.” Under Cutler’s own guidelines, the prior comments from her fellow attendee would have been banned if he had said them on Facebook instead of at the Jewish News Syndicate International Policy Summit.
Israel’s backers have been whining about losing control of the narrative for months.
In February, US Senator Lindsey Graham told the press at an event in Tel Aviv that in the Arab world “Israel has won the war on the ground, but they’ve lost it on television,” lamenting that “all they see is morning, noon and night attacks on the Palestinian people.”
The Arab world is seeing attacks on the Palestinian people morning noon and night because that is what’s happening. That is what the entire world is seeing.
In a talk at the McCain Institute last year, then-Senator Mitt Romney told then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Congress supports banning TikTok because it shares information that turns people’s opinions against Israel, saying such information has a “very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”
After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”
Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything. Everything is about narrative control. It doesn’t matter what happens as long as you can control how people think about what happens.
During the university protests last year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp came right out and said that if those on the side of the protesters win the debate on this issue, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.
“We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are like a sideshow — no, they are the show,” Karp said during his rant. “Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the west, ever.”
In an audio recording published by the Tehran Times in 2023, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is heard saying “We really have a TikTok problem” and calling for more aggressive online narrative operations to control public opinion about Israel among young people.
In the audio recording, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ADL, Greenblatt says the following:
“I also wanna point out that we have a major major major generational problem. All the polling that I’ve seen, ADL’s polling, ICC’s polling, independent polling suggests this is not a left or right gap, folks. The issue in United States’ support for Israel is not left and right: it is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas’s you know massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high. And so we really have a Tik-Tok problem, a Gen-Z problem, that our community needs to put the same brains that gave us Taglit, the same brains that gave us all these other amazing innovations, need to put our energy toward this like, fast. Cause again like we’ve been chasing this left-right divide. It’s the wrong game. The real game is the next generation, and the Hamas and their accomplices, the useful idiots in the West, are falling in line in ways that are terrifying.”
Israel’s backers are losing control of the narrative because there’s only so much that PR spin can do to convince people they’re not seeing what’s right in front of their eyes. If you’re strangling someone right in front of me there are no words you can say to me to convince me I’m not seeing someone being strangled, no matter how skillful you are at manipulation.
Actions speak louder than words. Talk is cheap. A picture is worth a thousand words. These aphorisms exist for a reason. Past a certain point there is only so much that mountains of verbiage can accomplish when people are seeing history’s first live-streamed genocide playing out right before their eyes.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The average human life is dominated by mental stories, so if you can control the stories they are telling about what’s going on, you can control the humans.
Losing narrative control is losing real power. That’s why Israel’s supporters are growing increasingly anxious.
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Feature image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
