SteamedPenguin

Ha'aretz has an interesting article on Israels' image problems in the USA.

Let me give some excerpts that are interesting:

The article talks about the group of professionals starting to deal with Israels image problem in the USA, they include such illustrious people as:

... Elias Buchwald, one of the founders of Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest PR firm in the United States; Fran Oppenheim, the owner of a consulting company and formerly brand director at the food giant Kraft General Foods; Helen Marlow, formerly Phillip Morris spokeswoman and vice president in the giant tobacco firm, who dealt with the "anti-tobacco" wave

Let's take for example Fran Oppenheim:

One right-wing, zionist organization reports she is a "representative for The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations". This is no big surprise, they aren't going to tap people to market Israel in the USA that are just middle of the road Americans. She'll be a true believer, or better yet, somebody who has totally bought into Israel as necessary for her social and political well being. Not that Israelis are necessary, just Israel. I doubt her Ashkanzi sensibilities really make her care about the unwashed masses our Arab Jewish Israeli immigrants. If the Israeli establishment doesn't care, I doubt these milquetoast-toast American Ashkenazis care.

The true believers are settlers. Not that I find settlers to be respectable people, but you gotta respect that sort of cheap commitment they have; Living in subsidized housing, getting what amounts to free water and power, and getting to shoot all the darkies you want without ethical or legal repercussions is hard living. By comparison this Fran Oppenheim really represent a weak commitment to Israel, living in the USA, being wined and dined by the cream of Israeli and American society, jetted here and there, without having to endure dealing with us smelly Palestinians.

I don't doubt she is a good marketer. After all it must take a wizard to try to sell utter crap. Just imagine what kind of integrity you must have as a person to stand in front of people and tell them that the rubbery piece of shit with a slightly yellow color is cheddar cheese?

That's right, she made her name selling crap and now she can cement it on the sidewalk of shame by trying to sell Israel, a racist, apartheid state that keeps ten million Palestinians under occupation, imprisonment, and terror, as a haven of not only democracy but good living and open-ness.

Next we have Elias Buchwald:

SourceWatch notes:

For the last 20 years Buchwald has been a volunteer media trainer at an annual program organized by the the American Jewish Congress and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A racist zionist crazy person has a mirror of previous article mentioning Buchwald:

The program is designed to improve the primary task of the foreign ministry representatives: hasbara - that peculiar Israeli word that is a hybrid of information, public relations and propaganda.The chief exponents of this craft are supposed to be the prime minister and foreign minister, but their English, ability to express themselves and the content of what they say does not exactly help to promote Israel's hasbara efforts, say Buchwald and Greenberg.

As a side note it is amusing to me to note that the same kind of people who have no problem breaking every international human rights law also have no problem breaking copyright. Not surprised, just amused.

Here is an interesting tidbit:

Buchwald senses that the terror mantra may have worked last year but is no good anymore, given Arafat's death. He suggests delivering a positive message: telling the Palestinians, "Come, let's make peace. We want a good economy for you. We want a good economy for us. We've had enough war. Let's live together."

That old Elias, he is a funny man. Disingenuous shit that he is. You do not work for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs then preach peace with us Palestinians when the mission of the Israeli government, and Prime Minister after Prime Minister is to eradicate the last traces of Palestinians off the land of Palestine. Maybe Elias Buchwald knows something about Israeli policy we do not? Perhaps Elias Buchwald now makes Israeli policy with regards to Palestinians and not the Prime Minister. I doubt that. He says "Let's live together" as if the barrier to Israelis living amongst Palestinians has been Palestinians and not the pervasive destruction of Palestinian homes, the rape of Palestinian resources, the imprisonment of Palestinians, and slaughter of Palestinian refugees.

Lastly we have Helen Marlow. Her name doesn't bring up much usable data, but "formerly Phillip Morris spokeswoman and vice president in the giant tobacco firm, who dealt with the "anti-tobacco" wave" should be sufficient to show what her merits are to the campaign. She defends selling deadly poison to an increasingly anti-smoking USA. That's right, she defends causing cancer, arteriosclerosis, emphysema. Hell, by comparison defending genocide, breaking international law, and torturing children should be easy for her. Maybe her epitaph will say "I was doing a job. I was just following orders."

Let us review:

Elias Buchwald is a professional salesman. His job is to sell anything to anybody. We know he is a long time media volunteer for Israel, but aside from that his credentials are selling the unsellable.

Helen Marlow a shill for the tobacco industry.

Fran Oppenheim salesperson for Kraft Foods. Selling the crappiest food in the world.

If this is Israel's Branding Dream Team then you know that Israels case is extremely weak. It is like getting represented by Johnnie Cochran, you know the perp is guilty when Cochran represents you. We know Israel is a genocidal, law breaking, occupying country, which is only reinforced by the presence of Buchwald, Oppenheim, and Marlow who come to whitewash and prettify the strange fruit hanging from the trees.

So some right-wing rag comes up with an article called "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries". Sounds scary eh? Let's take a closer at their picks:

Equalizing the distribution of wealth is more dangerous than exterminating millions of people.

Let's start with 'The most dangerous' book: "The Communist Manifesto". This isn't as important on its own as it is as a comparison with others, like the second most dangerous book. Look closely my friends, book number 2 falls over thirty below number 1. What is this number two? "Mein Kampf" by the one and only Adolf Hitler. So what message are we supposed to take away from this?

Advocating for a system that more fairly distributes wealth and seeks to alleviate the inequalities of the world is much more dangerous than the blueprint for exterminating people based on genetic predisposition.

Are the judges of the 'competition', and I use the word very lightly, advocating genocide and extermination by omission? You judge for yourself.

Sex is bad

Yes, apparently these idiots still drag old musty concepts like that to daylight instead of letting them rot in some musty crypt like the rest of their braincells. They say "The Kinsey Report" [was]

designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy". Ahem. In their own words they add: "Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws

Mind you even if that characterization were true these people aren't decrying the banality of 1940's sexual laws they are decrying the report for elucidating common sexual practices. Never once do they say these reports are false, just that they dabble in immorality.

The bottom line is that these assholes spend even a paragraph on demonizing... OK, I have to stop myself, they attempt to demonize the Kinsey Report, but their methods are so ham-handed and idiotic, their argumentation so poor, and their logic so weak so as to only highlight what a yellow rag this magazine is. I suspect that the only reason this magazine is able to publish since 1944 is the continued influx of money from ideologically motivated assholes and not actual news makers.

Thinking is bad

OK, the right wing isn't exactly the moral outlook of the thinking human being. Nowhere have idiocy, myopia, xenophobia, misogynism, homophobia and plain rudeness combined as in the right wing. These people would stick a rusty spoon in the left eye if they could get away with it, not because the eye harmed them, but because they are so indoctrinated and politically asinine that they can't distinguish 'left' the direction from 'left' as a political outlook, and try to stab their eye out for being a 'leftist'. Human Events seems to take this to an extreme.

They criticize John Dewey:

...he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead

I don't even have to try here. This is too fucking easy. In the right wing world schools are for teaching "knowledge" i.e. what your elders tell you is right, and build 'character' i.e. what your elders tell you to do. Thinking about these deeper concepts is really not encouraged. So when some liberal pointy-head, I really doubt Dewey is much of a leftist, comes to teach our younger generations "thinking skills" apparently he is too much of a threat.

This is the 'take home' lesson: the right wing only sees education as a means to achieve an end, which is to make people useful enough to be slaves in a more technical world instead of seeing as education as being an end in itself that we should pursue and encourage.

Making money: good! Making sure that society is healthy: bad.

John Maynard Keynes' "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" is the last book on the top ten list. Why? it is one point higher than the first 'honorable mention'. Something strikes me as inherently shitty about their selection criteria, but what do I know? I am just a socialist anarchist. I digress and all that, let's get back to the subject at hand. Their commentary is worth quoting extensively:

When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, [Keynes] argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity.

Immediately they attach the following to the end:

FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt

Mind you, they aren't saying that FDR, hence democrats are the cause of the deficit, but to their audience and to many people reading that screed that is what it will read like. How, pray, does FDR have such an influence on the economy sixty years after his death? Who the fuck knows and who the fuck cares? Apparently Human Events doesn't. Nevermind that the last two Republican Presidents of the USA have systematically ruined the federal budget, stripped services that already had money, increased spending on non-infrastructure building programs, and made the tax-burden on US citizens so disproportionate so as to punish the poor, the middle class and leave the richest and most padded go tax-free.

Tax the poor, whore it up with the rich. Let services wither on the vine and restructure government so that it only acts as a giant service provider to be accessed via fees. If you do not have the money then you do not need the fees and instead should make yourself a better economic drone to increase your wealth potential and be able to participate better in the government. What is next? In order to vote you need to pay USD 29.99?

Yes ladies and gentlemen, this is what modern newspapers come up with. However, instead of letting these assholes get away with this shitsmearing of our consciousness let us pay them back.

Here are their names and where they can be reached. Ladies and gentlemen, I present:

Americas Fifteen Most Dangerous People

Arnold Beichman

Research Fellow

Hoover Institution

Prof. Brad Birzer

Hillsdale College

Harry Crocker

Vice President & Executive Editor

Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Prof. Marshall DeRosa

Florida Atlantic University

Dr. Don Devine

Second Vice Chairman

American Conservative Union

Prof. Robert George

Princeton University

Prof. Paul Gottfried

Elizabethtown College

Prof. William Anthony Hay

Mississippi State University

Herb London

President

Hudson Institute

Prof. Mark Malvasi

Randolph-Macon College

Douglas Minson

Associate Rector

The Witherspoon Fellowships

Prof. Mark Molesky

Seton Hall University

Prof. Stephen Presser

Northwestern University

Phyllis Schlafly

President

Eagle Forum

Fred Smith

President

Competitive Enterprise Institute

These people should be ashamed and you should be ashamed for allowing these assholes to get any sort of space to air their decrepit views. What the fuck educational institutions are doing allowing shitheads and mental deficients to educate future generations is beyond my understanding.