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Comment by dttze | Hacker News Reader

Israel has whole government and military orgs dedicated to hasbara and advancing Israeli and Zionist interests.

The editors were banned for organizing people around a vote. You going to pretend Israel doesn’t coordinate about the same things?

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I laughed when I read about this pro-palestine propaganda group. There's no organized state sponsorship of online astroturfing like Israel.

Norman Finkelstein puts it nicely: https://youtube.com/shorts/M0ZnnjQ3tAQ

Literally every government has people who go on social media or provide press reports. Only when Israel is involved do you start talking about it like it’s a conspiracy. Please reflect on that for a while.

Meanwhile Iran and Russia have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of the pro-Palestinian crowd doing the same in violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.

Literally every organized group has people who go on social media. Only when Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims do the same thing as Israel do you consider it biased and wrong. Please reflect on why you think that.

Meanwhile, Israel and the US have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of Israeli hasbara and US willingness to ban sites in support of that hasbara.

"No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters: there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims, 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China, Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to destroy all of those places the way that those places are working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-Israel narratives, rather than the other way around, which is what is actually reality.

Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".

Yes it is a good argument here. Yes they do have state level organizations and intelligence agencies being used to push propaganda and silence criticism across all forms of media.

Yes scale matters, the scale of resources used to push Israeli, US, and western propaganda dwarves that of China, Russia, or Iran. It’s laughable you use total population numbers here, as if every Muslim person is a dedicated jihadist working to bring down the west.

Anyway, not going any further down this pointless hole of arguing whether I hate Jews or not cause I don’t support the mass murder of children.

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