The cyberhate-intifada

...This is a cyber-intifada, where the bulk of the incitement was hidden beneath the surface even among those who watch for it. In the dark corners of Facebook and message boards, the hate is endemic. This month, that hate went viral. Youth have been brainwashed. I am afraid that we are only in the beginning of this war. The electronic inciters ensure that successful attacks must be emulated and failed attacks must be avenged. Traditional disincentives to terror simply don't exist in cyberspace. Arab adults don't want this violence but they cannot openly oppose it because no one wants to be branded a "collaborator." Arabs who publicly oppose the violence are almost completely nonexistent.

Elder of Ziyon..
14 October '15..

Most content generators want to find the magic formula that would make a tweet or post or video explode in popularity - to go viral.

There is no shortage of advice on the web on how to make something go viral, but let's face it - there is no recipe. Sometimes, the stars align and something goes viral, but behind every successful meme are thousands that went nowhere.

Just like there are many people who try to find ways to make their content go viral, so there are many people who have been trying to incite Palestinian Arabs to a third intifada.

Just as there are entire companies nowadays dedicated to finding and pushing viral content, there are organizations and prominent people who have been working hard to start a new terror spree. They try to anger the Arab street with lies and deception.

We've seen it for years.

- Palestinian leaders in 2009 warned of a new intifada.- Fatah in 2010 threatened a new intifada.- People called for a new intifada if hunger striking prisoners would die.Muslim leaders, specifically Sheikh Tamimi and Sheikh Raed Salah, have been making up lies about the Temple Mount for many years all meant to spark a new intifada.- Tamimi predicted that Jews would massacre Arabs on the Temple Mount last year.- Journalist Khalid Amayreh has been inciting and pushing for an uprising for years.- Even Chris Gunness warned that an intifada would start if UNRWA wasn't properly funded.

I have documented literally hundreds of examples of Arab incitement against Jews. There i always a different reason to be angry, but the desired result is the same: violence.

This is one reason why blaming the "settlements" or Israel's Temple Mount policy or any other alleged grievance is spectacularly wrong. If any or all of the supposed grievances are addressed, more would replace them. One only has to go back to before 1967 or before 1948 or before even the first Zionist Congress and see that there was still violence and there was still incitement.

The ultimate "cause"is that Jews aren't Arabs and non-Muslims aren't Muslims. The violence of today is just a variant of the oldest violence there is: you are different than me so therefore you must be eliminated.

But the proximate cause is the never-ending tsunami of incitement in Arab newspapers, Arab classrooms, mosques and social media.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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What Palestinians Are Saying Online

by Jonathan Schanzer
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2011, pp. 15-24

http://www.meforum.org/2821/palestinians-online

During the past decade, Washington has repeatedly failed to gauge the extent of Palestinian anti-peace sentiments with devastating consequences. The July 2000 Camp David summit triggered the worst wave of Palestinian violence since 1948 (euphemized as the "al-Aqsa Intifada"); the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006 led to a victory for the Hamas Islamist group. Now that President Obama has announced his ambitious timeline for Israeli-Palestinian peace, could the administration be rushing headlong into yet another diplomatic failure?

A recent nine-week study by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) of online Palestinian political sentiments suggests that this could be the case.[1] Palestinian Internet users often derided diplomatic initiatives, and their discussion of the peace process was overwhelmingly negative. More alarmingly, the study revealed several troubling trends among Palestinian social media users—notably the prevalence of Islamism, fissures between factions, and the inability of liberal reformers to be heard—that cast doubt on both the prospects for peace and the likelihood that a democratic Palestinian state will emerge.

Background

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice excused the administration's failure to anticipate Hamas's landslide victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections as "not having a good enough pulse" of Palestinian society and politics.

For years, reliance on faulty poll data and input from "experts" on the ground has thwarted Washington's ability to take the Palestinian pulse. The George W. Bush administration's decision to support the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, for example, was due, in no small part, to polling data that all but guaranteed a Fatah victory over Hamas. The polls were produced primarily by Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Research, which conducted three studies of Palestinian opinion in June, September, and December 2005. These indicated that Fatah's support among Palestinians ranged from 44 percent to 50 percent while support for Hamas ranged from 32 to 33 percent.[2] "With each new Shikaki poll," Middle East scholar Martin Kramer noted, "U.S. policymakers grew more lax when it came to setting conditions for Hamas participation."[3]

Reliance on these polls proved a grave error, as Hamas won the election by a landslide. The Islamist faction, best known for acts of violence against Israel, claimed 76 of 132 seats (74 under the Hamas banner, plus 2 independents), granting it the right to form a government.[4] In the end, more than one million Palestinians cast their votes in what observers considered a relatively free and fair election—a rarity in the Arab world.

What went wrong? Shikaki's critics alleged that his polls may have been part of Fatah's election strategy to project its strength.[5] But whatever it was that led Washington astray, the outcome of the elections made clear that the U.S. government lacked a reliable read on the Palestinian street. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said of Hamas's victory in congressional testimony, "I've asked why nobody saw it coming … It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."[6]

Four years later, Washington may still be unable to assess Palestinian allegiances in the West Bank and Gaza, and the stakes are even higher.

The 'Facebook' of Palestinian Society

Asaf Romirowsky
American Thinker
14 November '10

In the internet era, the battleground of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer limited to just ground, sea, or air mêlées. Now the boundaries have shifted to include protracted and arduous online campaigns.

Israelis are only just starting to internalize the necessity of victory on both fronts -- the physical and the virtual -- as the mission to delegitimize Israel online becomes pervasive. For example, in 2008, Israelis living in the West Bank were shocked to discover that they had to choose "Palestine" as their state, with no option for Israel, when filling out the address section of their Facebook profiles. In contrast to the much-discussed "facts on the ground," here was a blatant attempt by Palestinians to revise history by creating "facts" online in order to claim that an area of Israel today is a valid Palestinian state -- a state which in reality has never existed.

Even more flamboyant confrontations take place daily on Wikipedia, where Palestinians have sown "destroyed villages" and "war crimes" allegations across the map, to the point of claiming that Tel Aviv was founded on the ruins of invented villages.

(Read full article)

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