Israel to conquer Internet and photo edit its dirty image
Here follows two Jewish articles on Israel´s latest efforts to clean up its rightfully dirty image. Obviously the presence of images of Israel´s war crimes on the Net is a source of perpetual headache for the Zionists. Their solution is to "conquer" the Internet and flood it with images prepared with the help of Israel´s Foreign Ministry.
- Foreign Ministry out to 'conquer' internet
- Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image - an article that also reveals that a Wikipedia editor is recruited by Israel for pro-Israel propaganda
Foreign Ministry out to 'conquer' internet
By Itamar Eichner
YNetnews.com / Israel News, 03.09.2009
Anyone typing the word "Israel" on an internet search engine these days is likely to end up with results depicting war-torn Gaza Strip, courtesy of the Palestinians, the Foreign Ministry has found.
The ministry found that if one types the word "United Kingdom" into a search engine a picture of London's Big Ben appears; "France" results in the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and "Jordan" in scenic views of Petra; but type in "Israel" and unsightly images of bombarded housed in Gaza, or the nuclear facility in the southern city of Dimona, pop up on the screen. Not exactly vacation hotspots.
In order to combat the PR impediment, the ministry, along with the Israeli Consulate General in New York, has decided it was time to fight back: The consulate has long been spearheading various innovative PR projects and now it stands to fly seven media experts to Israel, including video and stills photographers, who will be tasked with capturing the country's more beautiful and unfamiliar sides, on film.
The project will see the mission photograph Israel's heritage sites, one of the Negev's cowboy ranches, Sde Boker, Caesarea, Akko and the Galilee; as well as shoot Israel's beaches, parks, cafés etc.
The Foreign Ministry is also trying to organize an aerial tour of Israel for the mission, so it may have a bird's-eye view of the country's sights.
The photos are to be loaded up to prominent websites the likes of Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, as well as be featured in several blogs.
The Foreign Ministry will maintain the copyrights to all photos, thus making them available for public use free of charge.
"We've protested Google allowing photos of bombarded Gaza to be included in search results about Israel, but it has made it clear that users can upload any photo they please and that it has no control over it," said David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, who initiated the mission.
"The fact of the matter is that Israeli surfers are rather indifferent, allowing the other side to dominate the web and upload its photos to harm the Israeli narrative. That's why we have decided to bring these experts to Israel. We want to see the internet flooded with the true images of beautiful Israel, free for anyone to use.
"The last few years have made us realize that blogs and the new media have essentially become mainstream media and we hope this mission will help open a dynamic, user-friendly, accessible third-generation porthole to Israel."
Photo Editing Israel’s Online Image
By Sharon Udasin, Staff Writer
The Jewish Week, 03/04/2009
New York Israel media consul David Saranga hopes to replace images of Gaza destruction like this one with photos of everyday, "real" Israeli life. Google images
A simple search for “Israel” on Google Maps will give you more than just roadways and town names: photographed piles of Gazan rubble will pop out of the map, taking precedent over images of Israel’s popular landmarks and landscapes.
Google can’t control which images appear because the content is entirely user-generated — also called “open-source” — meaning that Web surfers can add or delete content as they please. And on many such open-source sites right now, including Wikipedia and Flickr, Israel’s image is far from favorable.
But David Saranga, the media consul for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, plans to fight back. After launching a pro-Israel campaign through Twitter.com during the Gaza war and by bringing Maxim magazine into Israel last year, he says he is recruiting the best in the business to revamp Israel’s online image.
In just a few weeks, he will bring six American new media experts to photograph Israel, with funds from the Consulate and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rather than selecting people based on their photography expertise, Saranga said that he is choosing his team members based on their proficiency editing blogs and open-source media.
After guiding the group members together for the first part of the week, he will send each person to a different part of the country — not to touristy destinations like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but instead to less trodden places like the fertile farms of the Galilee, villages in the Negev or small ancient cities like Caesaria. While participants are free to take photos of whatever they choose, Saranga hopes that they will document the “real” Israel — environmental advances, high-tech innovation, Israeli culture — instead of war. The bloggers will then upload their photo collections to various open-source sites, where young people will ideally access and repost the photos free of charge.
But some experts wonder whether or not the project will really be capable of making a dent in the criticism that the Gaza war engendered.
“While efforts like this trip can help Israel boost its image, much like trips by friendly journalists, they won’t do anything against those campaigners tirelessly removing anything positive about Israel on platforms like Wikipedia and seeking to brand any Israeli or Jewish source as ‘illegitimate,’” said Andre Oboler, a social media expert and CEO of Zionism On the Web. Oboler stresses that long-term success requires a wider response, perhaps led by a specialist organization or by turning Birthright alumni into online activists.
However, Saranga says the initiative will, hopefully, knock the pictures of destruction much further down the lists, behind photos of ordinary Israeli daily life. And because he has enlisted Internet authorities like pen-named Wikipedia senior editor David Shankbone, Saranga thinks that there is a good chance they’ll stay that way.
Shankbone — whose real name is David Miller — first visited Israel in December 2007, when Saranga led a group of journalists on a tour of the country’s high-tech and environmental developments. All in all Shankbone estimates that he illustrates over 4,000 Wikipedia articles with his photography.
“The idea is to create a body of work that not only Wikipedia can use but that the general public can use,” he said.
Shankbone is not Jewish, but he said he learned extensively about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in school. While he considers himself a supporter of Israel, Shankbone doesn’t intend to make Wikipedia a Zionist Web site, and he looks at the Gaza war as a black-and-white situation — Israel had a right to respond, but its mode of attack was not without fault.
Yet for Shankbone, the purpose of his photo expedition is not to document the aftermath of the war.
“People want to talk to you about other things than just missiles,” he said.
Ideally, Shankbone said he’d like to end up at solar power plants in the Negev Desert or in a southern city like Eilat, because he spent most of his time up north during the previous trip.
“I particularly like small towns, because my feeling is that anyone can come to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” Shankbone said.
While on open-source sites, users can add and remove other people’s contributions as they see fit, only an administrator can permanently delete the posts from the storage database, Wikimedia Commons. In his three years working as a Wikipedia editor, however, Shankbone said that he has been careful to avoid inserting his own political positions, and readers have rarely altered his content. His collection remains the largest Creative Commons — a Web-based data-sharing platform — photograph community generated by one person, he said.
Another trip participant, blogger and social media consultant Tamar Weinberg, will be joining the team with her photography-enthusiast husband. Weinberg said that she hasn’t been to Israel in 11 years, and with all the innovation that has developed since then, she hopes to document her trip through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and blogging.
“I want to capture the people, the places and the everyday life,” Weinberg said, noting that she will take hundreds of photos on Digital Single-Lens Reflex cameras, which were certainly not available the last time she was in Israel. “I want to capture the essence of this beautiful country and to convey this to my followers and readers on the social sites I plan to post these to.”
“I know that Israel has a lot to offer beyond what we hear in the media,” she added.
Critic Oboler, however, questions whether “bringing out people like Shankbone will help directly with the grass-roots, anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic activity that occurs online.”
“What it will do is help in the fight for hearts and minds online,” he said. “This proactive engagement is also important.”
“It certainly isn’t going to be the silver bullet,” Shankbone agreed. “It does give Wikipedia the opportunity or responsibility to present accuracy.”
And while Saranga hopes to change the world’s perception of Israel in the long term with the support of every American Israel consulate, he recognizes that, realistically, results will not be immediate.
“At the end of the day, a single activity won’t change perceptions; a single activity won’t change the criticism generated by the Gaza war,” he said. “But what is important is to create a critical mass of positive activities that will improve Israel’s image.”
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