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LAST, BUT NOT LEAST

ON THIS PAGE:
• Cyber Wars and Digital Justice 
• The Film We Weren't Supposed to See
• BDS Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

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• Uri Avnery: Israel's Iconic Voice of Dissent
• Amos Oz: Novelist, Activist...Zionist Apologist?

The Film We Weren't Supposed to See
The Lobby–USA:a stunning

documentary reveals an

investigation exposing how Israel

lobbyists “spy on, smear and

intimidate US citizens who support

Palestinian human rights, especially

BDS – the boycott, divestment and

sanctions movement,” reports

The Electronic Intifada. It was made

by Al Jazeera in 2016-2017, but the film

was suppressed after the government of

Qatar (the Gulf emirate that funds Al Jazeera) came under intense Israeli and US pressure, “ironically from the very same lobby whose influence and antics the film exposes.” In a 2018 journalistic coup that greatly serves U.S. citizens as well as justice activists worldwide, Electronic Intifada obtained a complete copy of The Lobby – USA and published it online.

An undercover reporter posing as a pro-Israel volunteer in Washington DC learns firsthand how Israel’s government agency, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, is colluding with an broad network of US-based organizations: “gathering intel and reporting back to Israel,” according to an Israeli embassy employee, and supporting Israel’s global campaign of covert sabotage against the BDS movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement is one of many groups standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people that are being targeted by the Ministry and its many arms in the U.S., components within the politically powerful Israel Lobby. 

In the film, the former intelligence officer who directs this Ministry claims they have mapped Palestinian rights activism “globally. Not just the United States, not just campuses, but campuses and intersectionality and labor unions and churches.”

Watch this film! Each of the four parts runs roughly 50 minutes:
See Parts One and Two in this article      See Parts Three and Four in this article

READ MORE

The Forward: We Made A Documentary Exposing The ‘Israel Lobby.’ Why Hasn’t It Run?
The circumstances of the threat were these: In 2016, the award-winning Investigative Unit I directed sent an undercover reporter to look into how Israel wields influence in America through the pro-Israel American community. But when some right wing American supporters of Israel found out about the documentary, there was a massive backlash. It was even labeled as anti-Semitic in a spate of articles.
    This uproar came at a time when due to an arbitrary blockade on Qatar imposed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Qatar had been pursuing an end to its siege by appealing to the U.S. According to reports, Qatar sought to offer its own side of the narrative in this conflict by hosting thought leaders, including from the American Jewish community. From reports in the Israeli press, I learned that Dershowitz had been brought to meet with the Qatari emir, and that the American Jews had brought up what they saw as Al Jazeera’s “anti-Semitism” in those meetings.
    Of course, our documentary is not anti-Semitic. It is an exploration of how Israel, a foreign government, influences U.S. foreign policy.
….And yet, our documentary has now been elevated to the center of an international scandal, with Al Jazeera’s reputation in America seemingly hanging in the balance.

Electronic Intifada: Watch the Film the Israel Lobby Doesn’t Want You To See
Jacob Baime, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, claims in the undercover
footage that his organization uses “corporate level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence
software” to gather lists of Palestine-related student events on campus, “generally within about 30 seconds or less” of them being posted online.

....Baime describes how his group has used anonymous websites to target activists.
“....you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted
Facebook ads,” Baime explains in part three of the film . “Canary Mission is a good example,” he states. “It’s psychological warfare.” The film names, for the first time, convicted tax evader Adam Milstein as the multimillionaire funder and mastermind of Canary Mission – an anonymous smear site targeting student activists.

Electronic Intifada: Watch final episodes of Al Jazeera film on US Israel lobby
In the final two parts of of the film, Tony gets a deeper look at Israel’s covert influence campaigns during his internship for The Israel Project In part three, Al Jazeera interviews Bill Mullen, a professor of American Studies at Purdue University in Indiana, and a leading activist in the BDS movement. As The Electronic Intifada reported in 2016, Mullen and his family found themselves targeted by an organized smear campaign, starting in March of that year. Several anonymous websites sprang up, containing fabricated accounts of sexual harassment by Mullen, supposedly by a student.
Episode Four reveals how Israel is working against the Black Lives Matter movement. Israel’s consul-general in Atlanta is seen in undercover footage complaining that “the major problem for Israel is with the young generation of the Black community.”  The Israel Project’s successful attempts to influence American mainstream media are also detailed, with former CNN journalist Jim Clancy describing it as “propaganda.”

Haaretz: ’We Are Working on Foreign Soil and Have to Be Very Cautious': Shelved Al Jazeera Film Details Israel's ‘Covert War’ Against BDS in U.S.
“We have three different sub-campaigns which are very, very sensitive,” she adds. “Regarding data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organization, money trail, this is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best.”

....Vaknin-Gil also talks about her ministry’s cooperation with different pro-Israel groups in the United States, explaining that “the Israeli government decided to be a key player, it means a lot. We can bring things that usually don’t exist in NGOs and civilian entities.”
    The Strategic Affairs Ministry has an annual budget of hundreds of millions of shekels, and fighting the BDS movement is one of the ministry’s main priorities. The exact allocation of its resources is not publicly available.

....Another entity mentioned in the report is Kela Shlomo, an Israeli intelligence firm with close ties to the government, particularly the Strategic Affairs Ministry, which is conducting research on BDS activists. One of the heads of the company is shown in the documentary discussing an initiative called “Israeli Cyber Shield,” stating that “this project is actually a civil intelligence unit that collects, analyzes and acts upon the activists in the BDS movement,
whether it’s people, organizations or events, and we give everything we collect. We are using the most sophisticated data system in the Israeli market.”
    One person featured in the documentary is Kenneth Marcus, who is currently a senior official in the Trump administration’s Department of Education. At the time of the filming, however, he was head of a pro-Israel group called The Louis Brandeis Center. In his meeting with the undercover Al Jazeera reporter, Marcus explains how he thinks the fight against BDS on American campuses should be waged. [See UMKR's report on Kenneth Marcus' appointment to the Dept of Education.]

Electronic Intifada: How Israel tried to hide its “malign campaign” against US citizens
This week, RT aired the first half of a conversation between host Chris Hedges, journalist Max Blumenthal and me about the film The Lobby – USA….I tell Hedges that the story has been starved of oxygen by mainstream media:
“Imagine that, all other things being equal, this had been an undercover documentary revealing supposed Russian interference or Iranian interference or Canadian interference in US politics, and powerful groups had gone to work to suppress its broadcast, and then it leaked out, just that element – the suppression and the leak – should be front page news.”
    Instead there has been silence.
    Blumenthal says the film reveals “a foreign government running a malign campaign against American citizens who are particularly progressive in order to prevent them from carrying out legal political activities in the United States.”
    It exposes “military psychological warfare tactics being used against Americans by a foreign power,” Blumenthal adds. Watch the interview with Hedges at the top of the page.

Electronic Intifada: Meet the spies injecting Israeli propaganda into your news feed
“I want to create a community of fighters,” Vaknin-Gil said soon after her appointment to the strategic affairs ministry. She said she planned to “flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda that would be publicly distanced from the government. More recently, at a Jerusalem Post conference, she announced in passing that she came “from the intelligence in the IDF,” the Israeli military. Streamed live on YouTube, the December 2017 panel was a debate on how best to combat BDS.
   Vaknin-Gil conceded that BDS activists’ human rights arguments are so compelling at the grassroots in Europe and the US that “over there, unless we will do something, we will lose.”
She credited supporters of Palestinian rights with “acting very, very smartly.” Palestine solidarity activists “are fighting for the hearts and minds of grassroots,” she said, and asserted, “we just woke up [to BDS] and we have to do it very fast.”
    BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti told The Electronic Intifada that Israel had failed to win “the battle for hearts and minds at the grassroots level.” According to Barghouti, Israel is “desperately trying to suppress the enormous growth of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights into the mainstream by passing draconian measures of repression and exporting them through its lobby groups to Western governments.”

Electronic Intifada: Smear Tactics Targeting Palestine Activists Get Personal

Palestine solidarity activists in Indiana are being subjected to a new kind of online harassment. Beginning in March, about two dozen websites emerged targeting at least three organizers for Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and one professor who acts as an adviser for the groups at two universities in the state. The websites contain fabricated allegations of sexual harassment, “immoral” behavior and terrorist leanings. They appear to be part of a well-coordinated attempt to smear the reputations of individuals who speak out for Palestinian rights....Unlike past attempts to smear the characters of Palestine activists, the websites do not exclusively focus on their target’s activism.
   For example, one chastises a Muslim female student for supposedly improper behavior. Another accuses the male professor of sexual harassment. The websites present no evidence to support their claims. Analyzed together it is clear the websites are being managed by the same person or group of people. There is also evidence that the same people who created these websites attacking Palestine activists may be planning to create more websites posing as pro-Palestinian.

Orient XXI: Such a Mysterious Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs
For many years, Israeli officials and diplomats were certain that if only they could perfect their PR skills — “Hasbara” in the Hebrew lingo—the Western world may have accepted the Israeli policies of dispossessing, exploiting and oppressing the Palestinians as benevolent methods, devised for the benefit of humankind. No more. These days, when the BDS (Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions) campaign has become more and more trendy among Western intellectuals and artists, Israel opts for an altogether tougher policy. The BDS campaign has been upgraded to another “strategic threat” on Israel, almost as the Iranian threat, with a potential to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state, if quoting the former director general of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, retired brig General Yossi Kuperwasser, a military intelligence expert.

Times of Israel: US Jews said to reject Israeli cash to fight BDS,

fearing ‘foreign agent’ label
The Tuesday report in the Forward named the Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Jewish Fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi as three of the organizations that recently said they could not accept money from Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry. According to the report, the money the groups turned down was aimed at bringing “influencers” to Israel — people who could help build support for the Jewish state upon their return to the US.
    One Jewish organization that was contacted by the ministry claimed ministry officials had become “anxious and frustrated” because they had to find a way to spend their budget.
US federal law obliges bodies involved in certain activities on behalf of foreign governments to go through a time-consuming process of registration with the Justice Department within the framework of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The act is aimed at monitoring foreign influence in American politics. Caleb P. Burns, a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, said that organizing trips for influential individuals on the Israeli government’s tab could well fall within the requirements for registration.

+972 Magazine: Challenging Israel's secret information warfare campaign
Israel’s government is outsourcing ‘mass consciousness activities’ to private organizations, unaccountable to the public. A legal challenge in the High Court aims to stop it. Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs is carrying out a global propaganda campaign on behalf of the Israeli government that violates human rights and is acting without authority to do so,  according to a lawsuit filed in the High Court of Justice Monday. Attorney Schachar Ben Meir’s petition demands that the High Court of Justice order a halt to the activities carried out by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, headed by Gilad Erdan. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which Ben Meir calls the “Ministry of Spying and Propaganda,” is, according to the attorney, surveilling citizens and conducting illegal operations intended to influence and manipulate public opinion.

BDS Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

In February 2018, a Norwegian parliamentarian nominated the BDS movement for Palestinian rights for the Nobel Peace Prize. Bjørnar Moxness (photo below) who made the nomination with the support of his party, the progressive Rødt (Red) Party, stated this was an effort toward “stopping an ascendent, racist and right-wing politics sweeping too much of our world” and that BDS "should be supported without reservation by all democratically-minded people and states."

From Moxness' published statement:
"Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement and the American Civil Rights movement, the grassroots, Palestinian-led BDS movement is a peaceful, global human rights movement that urges the use of economic and cultural boycotts to end Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law."
….
"The BDS movement’s aims and aspirations for basic human rights are irreproachable. They should be supported without reservation by all democratically-minded people and states."
….
"If the international community commits to supporting BDS to end the occupation of Palestinian territory and the oppression of the Palestinian people, new hope will be lit for a just peace for Palestinians, Israelis and all people across the Middle East."

News of the nomination brought celebrations worldwide from activists for Palestinian rights and strong disapproval from the Israeli government and its supporters. In a letter to Norway’s ambassador to Israel, Sharren Haskel, an Israeli legislator in Israel’s ruling Likud party, denounced the nominations and calling the BDS movement “anti-semitic,” further stating: “it is clear that the BDS movement’s ultimate goal is to destroy the State of Israel.”

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in the United States together with Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in the United Kingdom started an online petition of support for the nomination, to be forwarded to The Norwegian Nobel Committee. Originally aiming for at least 18,000 supporters and then 25,000, the petition gathered over 26,000 signatures.

The JVP and PSC call to action stated: “BDS stands in the same proud tradition of nonviolent resistance as the Montgomery bus boycotts, the United Farm Workers grape boycott, the boycott against South African apartheid, Gandhi’s boycott of British goods… the list goes on. And we know history will include BDS on that list…. Today – as was the case with all those other boycotts, in their time – not everyone sees BDS for the principled movement that it is. Every day, BDS activists are attacked by those devoted to defending Israel’s apartheid system. That’s why it’s so important to come out strong in our support for this nomination. And that’s why JVP and PSC have come together to advocate for this important recognition.”

United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR) issued a statement congratulating the Palestinian BDS National Committee, and Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) organized another online action to support the nomination.

READ AND WATCH

“BDS, YES” -JVP Facebook Video on BDS nomination and past Nobel recipients
BDS National Committee: BDS Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Full Statement by Norwegian Parliamentarian Bjørnar Moxnes on Nominating the BDS Movement for Palestinian Rights for a Nobel Peace Prize
Middle East Monitor: BDS nominated for 2018 Nobel Peace Prize
Jerusalem Post: Why we nominated the BDS campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize
Electronic Intifada: Why BDS movement deserves a Nobel prize
Arab America: Peace Organizations Stand in Solidarity for BDS Nobel Prize Nomination
Times of Israel: Norwegian MP defends nominating ‘peaceful’ BDS movement for Nobel
UMKR Congratulates BDS National Committee
FOSNA: Support the Nobel Peace Prize nomination for BDS!
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Bjørnar Moxness, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, nominated the BDS movement for the Nobel Peace Prize in February 2018.

UMKR Newsletter

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United Methodists are responding to Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth ,a statement of faith and urgent call to action from Christians in Palestine.  UMKR seeks, through nonviolent means and in partnership with Palestinian Christians, freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians and Israelis.

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UMKR & Partners News in 2018

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The Big Stories of 2018
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​Read these sections of
Part Two on our website:
• The Top Stories
• People in the Spotlight
• Events IN Israel/Palestine
• U.S. Scene: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism
• U.S. Scene: More from Trump Admin
• U.S. Scene: On Campus
• U.S. Scene: Legislation- State, Federal
• U.S. Scene: Changes on the Horizon
• Around the World
• Successes: BDS & More
• Last, But Not Least
• For Information Junkies