5 ms·

Propaganda that appears to be effective, since simply mentioning it brought your comment several steps into the grey.

• pron 14y ago
  Investigative journalism is quite common, and quite effective in Israel. Almost every official in every branch of the government has been subjected to it at one time or another. Often some official lies are exposed, and sometimes, hot-headed officials who don't know any better, would try to use the police to find the leaks in their department. This rarely leads anywhere. But a blog investigating a relatively minor -- though very important -- issue of soldier suicides, might expose some establishment lies or cover-ups, but hardly tries to expose "the IDF propaganda", whatever that means.
  • makomk 14y ago
    As I understand it, an ordinary investigative journalist looking into this would be subject to pre-approval of anything they wanted to publish by the military censor, and the censor would quite likely forbid publication. Same with foreign journalists operating in Israel.
    • pron 14y ago
      The military censor must not forbid publication unless there is a clear threat to national security. Of course, that sounds how it should work in theory, but, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to work this way in practice, too, at least judging by the amount of damaging material published that causes much embarrassment to military officials, even leading to their resignation on occasion. Obviously, people try to cover up potentially damaging information, but when they get caught -- they get caught. And sometimes, some idiot tries to mess with the press. It seems to me that in this case that someone probably thought that since it's only a blogger they might be able to pressure him into revealing his sources. But seriously, I had a hard time finding any mention of this in the Israeli press, which would normally love this kind of scandal. Exposing government malpractice, corruption and general idiocy is the national sport in Israel. Every Israeli reporter is imbued with the ambition of someday bringing down a government official -- the higher the better -- or, best case scenario, the entire administration. And I'm saying this as a former Israeli reporter. This case, though, is just small potatoes.
• shenberg 14y ago
  The reason this is done is mostly to avoid attaching social stigma to the dead person's family, and for the country to give the parents something, because, you know, their son is dead. There was a story about a soldier who had deserted, and when MPs found him, he ran away, was hit by a car crossing the street and died. He was considered to have died in the line of duty. You can call that propaganda, or being kind to people who just lost their son. People here in Israel don't care that much about the global number of dead in the IDF per year as a metric of how bad things are here, and you might see how calling something most people see as kindness granted to grieving people 'propaganda', which is a loaded word, is offensive. This is, of course, not to say that I think the IDF is right here - I think they're both totally in the wrong and being idiots here at the same time.
  • pretoriusB 14y ago
    >The reason this is done is mostly to avoid attaching social stigma to the dead person's family, and for the country to give the parents something, because, you know, their son is dead. That doesn't mean they can't give aggregate data.
    • yoavfr 14y ago
      That's exactly what the blogger has requested. He hasn't asked for any personal details.
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  • neumann_alfred 14y ago
    People have a right to truth that affects them, even if it makes them unhappy or angry. It is utterly patronizing to lie about the cause of death. Yes it's unfortunate. So? Have you ever lost someone to something stupid? Would you prefer having been lied to? BS. Also, if the IDF cared so much, why not let people who don't want to be in it go? "They found him, he ran away" kinda sounds like they saw him, but didn't move, and he just leaped into traffic. Not having been there I wouldn't know either way, but couldn't you just as well have said "they chased him into traffic"? But that would make it rather obvious that the motivations for not giving out the facts is to save the face of the IDF, not to protect anyone. To me it just adds insult to injury.