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Author=Don Radlauer;
Description=Essays on Israeli policy and politics, terrorism, and life in the Middle East.;
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Text of the page (random words):
ch some form of accommodation with them the jews are a genuine if somewhat odd and annoying religious ethnic group we have a genuine connection to the land of israel which we have maintained faithfully for thousands of years after all that time we re not all going to decide to go somewhere else the holocaust happened and in its course some six million jews were murdered even had the holocaust not happened the jews would be entitled to a national home in palestine israel so said the league of nations which created the legal foundations not only for israel but for most other countries in the middle east and many in eastern europe the green line is a major fact of israeli and palestinian life and history there is no point in hiding it from students as if it had never existed refusing to face up to facts is not healthy they do not after all go away when we turn our backs on them and the more unpleasant ones have an annoying habit of biting us in the butt when we re looking the other way we don t have to love them but we do have to live with them by retreating into fantasy we render ourselves incapable of coping successfully with the real world of today and abandon all possibility of building a more hospitable future generally accepted fact is of course a bit of a complicated issue since many true things have been widely disbelieved at times and many falsities have been generally accepted as true further facts even when based upon accurate observation always reflect some point of view some limitations in perception in the immortal words of stuart mayper no fact is simple nonetheless the fact remains that we can distinguish between extensional and intentional thinking the former attempts to ground itself in observations of reality while the latter begins with a framework of ideas and desires filtering information based upon what fits comfortably into this framework denial then represents an extreme case of intentional thinking if this seems a bit abstruse remember that you didn t have to read the footnote read more back to summary posted by don radlauer at 3 48 pm permalink 11 comments nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp digg it send it tuesday december 26 2006 a hedgehog s hasbara last week i attended the second day of a conference on the media as a theater of war the blogosphere and the global battle for civil society unfortunately i missed the first day which actually covered a lot of the stuff i was most interested in my immune system and assorted pathogens disagreed with my plans and the less said about the details of the dispute the better in the aftermath of the conference and indeed during the conference itself a number of my fellow blogger attendees reacted rather negatively to much of the conference s tone and content i ve waited to set out my own thoughts on the subject although i ve written a bunch of long comments on something something liza wrote a pretty scathing review of the conference there and some pointed debate to put it mildly followed between the liberal blogger set of which i appear somehow to have become an honorary member and the rest foremost among the defenders of the conference is richard landes who put the whole thing together and as far as i m aware was principally responsible for selecting its panelists rather than repeat what liza and lisa and yael wrote about the conference itself i ve been trying to figure out what s really going on here why is it that good and sincere people have such radical disagreements about a topic that at least at first glance should be fairly simple there is one thing that all of us or at least all of us involved in this debate agree on israel s image in the eyes of the rest of the world is abysmal our response has been to attempt more effective hasbara literally explanation but more accurately translated as public diplomacy public relations or less delicately propaganda the problem is that israeli public diplomacy has been monumentally unsuccessful of late the plucky little underdog of yore is now seen as the big bad wolf oppressing and occupying the palestinians offending hezbollah by existing basically insulting iran by accusing president ahmadinejad of all kinds of horrible things and feeling offensively sorry for itself every time a walking bomb blows up a bus or café we seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding why we are perceived so negatively are we not a thriving democracy do we not mean well okay we ve had to do some rather unpalatable stuff at times but hey we live in a rough neighborhood and it s not like we enjoyed knocking all those houses down and our adversaries include some genuinely evil people guys who think blowing innocent women and children to bits is a good thing as long as it happens to us and not them the hasbara establishment consisting of certain individuals and agencies of the israeli government along with a bunch of concerned individuals and private organizations has responded to the failures of israeli image making by circling the wagons closing ranks girding their loins going for the jugular and keeping their powder dry or in other words and without the tortured metaphors they ve opted to do pretty much what they ve been doing all along but louder and more forcefully others of us believe that a more nuanced diverse and proactive approach is called for for example rather than simply reacting to events on the ground by trying to explain or justify them the approach that is implicit in the use of the hebrew word for explanation to describe public diplomacy we believe that public relations concerns need to be a major input into policy making just as politicians get advice from security experts before making decisions with security implications they should get advice from people who understand international journalism and public opinion before making decisions that will affect how israel is perceived overseas while we hasbara rebels don t have an official set of beliefs we aren t a cohesive organized group although someone recently accused us of being a sorority and i ve always wanted to sneak my way into a sorority a lot of us seem to believe that current traditional israeli hasbara is not only too reactive but also too strident too self righteous and too focused on the evils of our adversaries i m not going to repeat all our arguments and the counter arguments here go to the thread at something something to see what i m talking about at some point i should collect everything i wrote there and edit the good parts into something eventually at some point early in the debate i began to realize that the people with whom i was debating while sincere well meaning intelligent and well informed nonetheless didn t get it no matter how my sorority sisters and i tried to explain our position they didn t understand that we could be enthusiastic zionists eager to see israel positioned better in world opinion cognizant of the genuine problems out there including some egregious bias in news reporting along with an awful lot of simple and not so simple cluelessness and yet strongly disagree with their approach to hasbara i don t yet entirely understand why traditional hasbara practitioners have such difficulty understanding the sorority view it s not exactly rocket science after all since the debate began i ve had the refrain from a favorite song of my youth constantly running through my brain oh you know all the words and you sung all the notes but you never quite learned the song from the hedgehog s song by the incredible string band it s rather sad and very frustrating i wish i could find some way to convince people who know that their approach isn t working to think constructively about why it isn t working and how it might be made to work better on the other hand the debate has had one happy consequence i ve ordered cd s of the first three albums of the incredible string band the second of which includes the old favorite that i ve had running through my head for the last week after almost forty years it ll be nice to hear that music again tags hasbara read more back to summary posted by don radlauer at 10 09 pm permalink 9 comments nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp digg it send it thursday december 21 2006 blogging toy of the day writetomyblog in the past i ve used microsoft word to write most of my blog posts i like its spell checking and formatting as opposed to the primitive capabilities of blogger com s built in editor and i especially like the smart quotes feature which automatically inserts real quotes like the preceding instead of the tacky telegraph style quotes you get otherwise it also puts in genuine apostrophes i don t like the ones like the preceding while i can t help loving the real ones the problem however is this how does one get what one has written from word to one s blog the new word 2007 is supposed to have blog integration built in nice thought but it doesn t help those of us who don t have and can t afford word 2007 i ve been using a word add in from google the owner of blogger com and much else of the universe called blogger for word this allowed me to manage blog posts and send new ones to my blogs right from word only two problems first it doesn t work on my office pc where i do most of my writing and second it doesn t support the new version of blogger which i m now perforce more or less using good bye blogger for word so what to do after some frantic googling i ve discovered a new tool that shows some promise writetomyblog it s a free web based editor that allows you to manage posts write and post new ones insert pictures using a range of hosting options and do all sorts of other cute stuff so far the only feature i don t see that i really want is the smart quotes along with smart apostrophe and automatic n dashes so you re probably seeing this with a bunch of non smart quotes sorry sorry sorry if it actually works it looks like a pretty decent tool and if you can read this it worked tags blog blogging read more back to summary posted by don radlauer at 9 14 pm permalink 4 comments nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp digg it send it tuesday december 19 2006 lines and inanity among the many odd bits of education i ve picked up here and there i ve had the pleasure of receiving some very useful training in general semantics a rather obscure discipline that is very difficult to define but which can be described as a system for promoting accuracy of thought and feeling one of my principle teachers was robert pula who i just found out thanks to wikipedia s wonderfully rich cross referencing system died two years ago rest in peace bob a good bit of my rather annoying analytical style can probably be attributed to my exposure to general semantics almost thirty years ago one of the fundamental concepts of general semantics is that the map is not the territory the word is not the thing meaning that our verbal and non verbal representations of reality are at best just representations and not reality itself if we want to think accurately we need to be aware that it s all too easy to use these representations in ways that radically distort our understanding of the world for example i frequently see some of my fellow zionists saying and writing things like the palestinians don t want peace they just want to destroy israel the problem here is that there is no such thing as the palestinians several million people can be classified more or less accurately as palestinians and they lack even a means of expressing a majority opinion on this or any other subject to talk about the palestinians as if they were a unitary object with a single opinion on israel or for that matter on anything else is non sense i ve written in this vein before see the second paragraph of my response to a____ in strategic assets and white elephants since with our limited and imperfect senses we can never perceive reality entire all we have is representations words maps and other abstractions from the reality that is out there but which remains forever inaccessible to us if we want to get along well with the universe we should seek the most accurate representations we can get someone trying to understand the middle east can no more afford to think in terms of what the palestinians think than an american long distance bus driver can afford to use a map that shows new jersey next to idaho successful navigation requires maps that fit the territory all of this brings me to one of this month s existential crises in israel yuli tamir our minister of education has come under a barrage of criticism from the right for her decision to order the inclusion of the green line israel s pre 1967 de facto border which was in fact an armistice line recognized by neither israel nor its arab neighbors as a legal border in maps to be included in new elementary school geography textbooks according to some but by no means all israeli rightists and their supporters overseas including the green line in our children s maps will somehow turn them all into raging members of peace now and otherwise sap and impurify all of their precious bodily fluids this controversy highlights one of the more surreal absurdities in a region that possesses over 60 of the world s proven absurdity reserves although the green line is a significant factor in our lives it is entirely absent from most of our maps since a november 1967 government decision decreed that israeli maps should show only the post six day war cease fire lines and not the previous borders the green line has achieved a kind of massive intrusive invisibility this might make some kind of sense if the green line were in fact irrelevant but it isn t not only is it still a major part of israel s history and a constant point of reference in the debate about an eventual settlement of the israeli arab conflict it s also a significant influence on the day to day lives of many israelis until about six years ago israelis living across the green line received reductions in their income taxes many israelis think we still do and resent us for it people living across the green line myself included have an easier time obtaining gun licenses than otherwise similar people living inside israel proper many banks will not give mortgage loans on houses across the green line or else will finance a lower percentage of a home s purchase price than they would inside pre 1967 israel people living across the green line know that they can be evicted from their homes by their government as a result of an eventual agreement with our arab neighbors or else as part of a unilateral israeli withdrawal when we bought our house vaguely sinister wife and i had to sign papers acknowledging this in fact according to what we signed the government can at least in theory evict us without compensation for the loss of our home as soon as you cross the green line from pre 1967 israel you come under military rather than civilian legal jurisdiction this is easily forgotten since israelis living in the west bank are normally...