It's been a fun day in the Twittersphere, as my post demolishing the 972mag's attempt to attack me got some play.
It seems to have angered the usual hate-Israel crowd, who have been hurling the biggest insult they can to me - that I engage in hasbara.
The author, Noam Sheizaf, called me a "Hasbara mouthpiece."
Joseph Dana of the same online blog said I was having a "bad hasbara day."
Later he said "@elderofziyon calls his own work 'humorous.' Do his readers understand that he writes humor or Hasbara?"
One of his retweeters wrote "that hasbara means deceit and you are not insulted means to admit to the charge, an honest man who ply's deceit for a living."
And Dana then had a series of tweets for what good, upstanding citizens must look for when dealing with that hasbara crowd.
Wow! The word "Hasbara" is as toxic to these guys as the word "Zionist" is to Arabs! So much so that they assume that bringing out that term automatically means they win the argument!
Well, at the risk of making their heads explode, this blog is dedicated to hasbara. There, I admit it. I even gave a couple of lectures on how to create effective hasbara (and how this blog falls short.)
I wrote eleven hasbara rules in the talk, and one of them was "Truth Above All." If we lose credibility, we lose everything; if one is not comfortable using a specific argument, don’t fake it.
"Hasbara" means, simply, explanation. It refers to public advocacy for Israel. It does not mean deceit, lies, or running away from the truth - quite the opposite. It means telling the truth about Israel and the Arab world in the face of the huge amount of misinformation and lies that exists out there.
So, go ahead, call me a hasbarist. It's a compliment.
