Israel's public relations battle

I think there is a willful naivete amongst Westerners about just how sophisticated the Palestinian propaganda machine is. Part of that is arrogance -- thinking that we're much savvier than they are, because we're Western. And part of it is a simple misunderstanding of the asymmetrical nature of terrorist warfare: the real target of terrorist acts isn''t those who are actually killed in any particular attack; it's those who watch the killing and are thereby filled with fear. Terrorism without an audience doesn't work. Terrorist organizations like Hezbollah actually have press offices, with helpful English business cards. Don't laugh -- they were helpful to CNN.

In the Israel-Hamas war, Israel has ramped up its own public relations efforts. They still don't match those of the terrorist-media symbiosis. But the Israeli Defence Force's new YouTube page, which you can see here, was the most-subscribed YouTube page on the whole Internet last week. And they've got an official blog, which you can see here.

Here's the page of all 28 videos release so far. To me, the most compelling were this shot of Hamas terrorists loading rockets on the back of trucks:
 

this mosque, which was being used as a weapons storage facility:



this United Nations school being used as a Hamas mortar attack site:


and this attack on a Hamas missile launch pad -- which looks like it was a few seconds late to stop the first missile from being launched: