Comment: This is on top of of a whole intelligence department dedicated to information dominance on the internet.
The tide is turning against you Israel - good luck with that...
Israeli targeting policy under scrutiny after tanks kill 15 in a Gaza school run by the UN
I wonder why?
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Independent
In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government
plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven
universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and
tweets to foreign audiences.
The students making the posts will not reveal online that
they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence
about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversee the programme,
confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli
public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information
consumption”.
The government’s hand is to be invisible
to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been
planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorising
government projects that “the idea requires not making the role of the
state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great
involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or
affiliation”.
According to the plan, students are to be
organised into units at each university, with a chief co-ordinator who
receives a full scholarship, three desk co-ordinators for language,
graphics and research who receive lesser scholarships and students
termed “activists” who will receive a “minimal scholarship”.
Mr
Netanyahu’s aides said the main topics the units would address related
to political and security issues, combating calls to boycott Israel and
combating efforts to question Israel’s legitimacy. The officials said
the students would stress Israeli democratic values, freedom of religion
and pluralism.
But Alon Liel, the doveish former
director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, criticised the plan as
“quite disgusting”. “University students should be educated to think
freely. When you buy the mind of a student, he becomes a puppet of the
Israeli government grant,” he said. “You can give a grant to do social
work or teach but not to do propaganda on controversial issues for the
government.”
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