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Radio War Nerd EP #414 — The Pro-Israel Propaganda Machine Exposed, feat. Lee Fang & Jack Poulson (Patreon)

Published:
2023-12-15 20:49:03
Imported:
2023-12
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Guests: Lee Fang & Jack Poulson 

Recorded: December 14, 2023

The pro-Israel information war since October 7 has unleashed a wave of censorship and cancel culture unlike anything we've ever seen. Thanks to reporters Lee Fang & Jack Poulson, we get a rare look into how the infowar sausage is made—the players, the networks, the rhetorical strategies & goals. It's a raw look at the powerful using their power to discipline the rest of us.

Read Lee & Jack's article, "Inside The Pro-Israel Information War" here.Subscribe to Lee Fang's substack here, and Jack Poulson's substack here.

Total time: 1:15:16

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Order your print copy or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

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Comments

xxx

I drove through LA last week and saw a pro-Isreal billboard, but that's the only thing I've seen. On social media it's all pro-Palestinian content. All of this shit is super toxic tbh and I've been avoiding it like the plague.

AG

I listen a lot to Breaking Points by Krystal and Saager and they are regularly critical of Israel. I did message my the White House and my U.S Representative giving my opinion and got one of those all in supporting Israel responses.

AG

There are billboards for rent in my town for $300 a month and I think it would be fun to write my opinion there too but then I remember how much trouble I've gotten in for work emails. What if I say some critical stuff and now the ADL is on my ass.

AG

Besides, it would be a better use to give the money to RWN.

Torgeir Tannenwald

Lee Fang is an interesting guest on this topic being as he is very pro cop, the same police who have actively trained with Israeli security. I think theyve shared tactics as well as propaganda excuses for violent behavior against a colinized group. Anyway, this is before I heard the episode, very open to hearing him out.

William Brame

Why are y’all platforming a blatantly racist piece of shit like Fang? I should’ve known when you had exactly zero African guests on your Ethiopia episodes that yall were suspect, but I let it go. Seriously this breaks my heart because this is probably my favorite podcast. And no I’m not liberal offended, I’m a black guy that really likes this show and respects the fuck outta y’all! After calling out Taibbi how can you not see how racist Fang is? Just because he’s Asian? Cmon guys this is really upsetting.

Joel

What did he do that was racist?

Joel

Great episode. Would be cool to look into to getting Grant F. Smith on the show. He's done a ton of really thorough and mind-blowing research into the lobby and the history of AIPAC that I feel hasn't really hasn't permeated public consciousness as much as it should.

George P

I’d bet Mark and John don’t know anything about his pro cop history during the BLM protests and just saw a well reported article about the pro Israel machine and reached out

William Brame

Just peruse his twitter. He was very pro cop and anti BLM. Then he moved even further afterwards. I understand he wrote a piece about this stuff but surely there were other pieces about pro Israel propaganda rings? Hell, they coulda just got the other guy who wrote it and left Fang off the show.

William Brame

The episode was good but honestly fuck Fang.

Jason Thompson

XTwitter is amazingly pro Palestinian (mixed unfortunately with antisemitic bullshit, from the top down). My Facebook otoh is garbage, everybody in the USA totally ignoring Palestine and going on with their movie-watching, cat-photo-posting lives. Maybe it’s just my friend group. But I think as long as nothing is said, that’s the pro Israel position by default, of course. :(

John Hadzipetros

I genuinely worry about the devaluation of the category of anti-semitism that these folks are engaging in, like a boy who cried wolf effect, or worse yet calling into being much worse forms of anti-semitism in the future than the ones these folks imagine to be rampant right now.

Jason Thompson

The other day NPR boosted some article about some European anti-hate (?) organization ICAHN, and the first line of ICAHN’s report casually lists “antisemitic and anti-Israel” speech online as if they’re the same thing, and I just wanted to scream

David Andrews

The greatly overused accusation of "anti-semitism" is losing all of its punch. More importantly, I fear that was Israel is doing (with full US government support) will be bad for all Jews in the long run.

a clash of purple

I'm not worried about that. I mean, let's be honest here, the only reason anti-Semitism is a charge with any force behind it is because of the Israel lobby, who use it cynically as a weapon against their political opponents, not to protect Jews. The level of hatred, oppression, and violence directed against Jews isn't meaningfully affected one way or the other by Israeli propaganda.

J P 3

The propagandistic conflation of anti-semitism with pretty much all criticism of Israel is especially dangerous (or the implication that Israel speaks and acts for all Jews). To the extent that the propaganda gives license to Israel's actions too and allows it to act with a sense of impunity, I think it is likely to produce a backlash.

J P 3

File under FWIW, but the one university president to grovel for forgiveness (who was fired or strongly encouraged to resign) was at University of Pennsylvania. UPenn was the school where Biden was hired for about $1 million for a no-work, no-show sinecure after his time as VP. The school is also home to the Biden Center. The MIT and Harvard presidents clearly must have had some high profile backers acting behind the scenes to protect their jobs. Quite a contrast.

William

lol, “some [conservatives] are genuine, and want to have an open dialogue” @~50min. If lee believes this, he is an absolute dumbass. Which conservative? Mitt Romney? Those guys are all effectively democrats now

Matelda

He's thinking of my one retired uncle (unlike my other retired uncles)

Matelda

He has a lot of bad opinions but he's always been a good reporter. There are few such cases but he's one.

Matelda

Whenever I hear him talk about something he genuinely studies, he's great. I don't follow him on twitter because his half-baked opinions are terrible.

drewb

I've noticed that whenever I dip into Threads, almost all of the recommended posts are pro-Israel content. One or two pro-Palestine posts show up now and then but at least from this angle, the algorithm has made its mind up

Simon

The accusation that Fang is racist came from a colleague who was upset about him tweeting an interview with a young African American guy who was making some half-baked comments about crime during the 2020 protests. I suppose you could construe that as trying to implicitly make a racist argument, but you'd have to reach pretty far to do that. Fang has never published anything explicitly racist as far as I've seen.

Ellen Harold

It seems the award wasn’t really cancelled but the venue was changed.

Ellen Harold

I thought Gessen’s article was very perceptive, though I noticed that the online version had several corrections listed beneath it and I wondered if the uncorrected version went out in print. One thing that I wondered about was what evidence there was that Arendt was the author of the 1948 open letter. Not saying that she didn’t. Seems very plausible, but I‘ve always seen it referred to as the “Einstein letter.”

William Brame

That’s were it started but he very quickly proved it correct. Like I said, go to his Twitter and do some scrolling.

Norman

Similar stuff seems to be happening in Europe too but it's way more effective there. As German who isn't living in Germany anymore, I feel like everyone back home has been slowly getting insane since the Ukraine war started and now the entire centre-left has turned into completely lackeys of US-empire, becoming way more enthusiastic about it then Americans themselves.

cam

Decent episode derailed by headline/Twitter gawking and Fang voicing some of the most naive ideas ever heard on RWN

Simon

I follow him and I've never seen anything explicitly racist. If there's something specific, I'd be curious to see it. He does bad social commentary, and he makes dumb comments about the police, which I think is more anti-anti-cop than anything else. Maybe he's hiding some deep down racist sentiment, but I think it's a hard case to make and it's more likely he just has twitter brain. Your comment "because he's Asian" is very unkind as well. Being "Asian" doesn't bestow any inherent quality in anyone one way or another. We shouldn't be qualifying or disqualifying people over labels that are ascribed to them for arbitrary reasons.

Aaron Dellutri

Listening to this episode this morning, driving down Interstate 294 getting to work. On the right side, "Bring all the hostages home" billboard expressing Israeli desires. On the left side a mile or two later, "They have no water, no food, no electricity. Ceasefire now!" Expressing pro Palestinian side. If the propaganda war is being fought on the expressway, then Israel is ahead but Palestine is gaining ground.

Aaron Dellutri

I'm a Socialist in a group in Chicago, the USA. I met with a German guy who wanted to join. We had a long talk in which he criticized our pro-Palestine stance. I listened calmly. It became clear to me that there was no way he would stay with us, because he was 180 degrees from us on Palestine despite being a Marxist. It was strange.

Justin Thompson

I don't recall specifics and I'm not gonna look for it, but he's posted stuff along the lines of "what about black on black crime?"

etienne

this whole idea-complex that jews both in the diaspora and in israel are at imminent risk of a new genocide is so fucking weird to me. If anything if I want to be really *really* cynical about it I'd say that the feeling that there's a striving minority out there keeping to itself and nabbing the high status jobs has moved to *east asians*. For all intents and purposes secular jews in most of the west can just pass off as white, no?

Norman

Antideutsche are real thing in German left circles. Since the early 2000s, a subset of the German left shifted to essentially become like US-Neocons on foreign policy. The actual core group of Antideutsche has always been pretty small but they have influenced a larger portion of the German left to drop any support for the Palestinian course.

Ander Pierce

Yup. Secular jew here and guess what? As far as anyone is concerned I'm a slightly pasty white guy with a camo hat

Lojban Chauvinist

This is a good observation. Still, antisemitism is on the upswing. Lots and lots of antiestablishment conservative-leaning young people have discovered what they call the "Jewish Question" in the last five years; it's not just oddballs like the artist formerly known as Kanye, or Elon Musk

Lojban Chauvinist

Last week's Harvard-Harris poll found that 67 percent of Americans age 18 to 24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors."

Steve Mathews

There's something I'm having trouble understanding here. Has everyone just accepted the idea that censorship is a good idea, i.e. effective? Was all that Saint Dalton Trumbo, Demon Sen. McCarthy, "Wisdom of Crowds" stuff that we were taught in the 1980s just Cold War propaganda? I mean, wasn't it pretty much agreed that Soviet censorship gave rise to samizdat, that undermined the regime etc etc...?

Mark Ames

No doubt there's more open anti-semitism, probably much facilitated by the internet, but this Harvard Harris poll is deeply fucked. It's a Mark Penn production, which explains a lot, and it's a great example of how polls themselves are shaped to be propaganda weapons. Penn makes a living serving the rightwing of the center/Dem Party, so this poll includes questions like "Over 3.2 million came into the United States illegally over a twelve-month period ending September 2023, and more than 400,000 have crossed since then. Given these numbers, should the administration continue its current policies or issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of people coming across the border?" and of course the answers skew heavily anti-immigrant. And "If a student calls for the genocide of Jews should that student be told that they are free to call for genocide or should such students face actions for violating university rules?" and so on. https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf

Jeff Normal

For people who are looking for evidence for Lee Fang and his straw man “reporting” on Black Lives Matter in the Bay Area California: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/lee-fang-forced-to-apologise-for-reporting-on-blm/ In his defense I could only get through the first few minutes, but they were pretty awful. Same kind of talking points the red hats at work use before they start dropping “N” bombs. I agree with some of the other folks below, it doesn’t matter how good this person’s reporting is in relation to Israel, they should not have been invited.