Leaked scenes from censored documentary reveal Israel lobbyist Noah Pollak astroturfing an anti-Palestinian protest
Exclusive
leaked scenes from Al Jazeera’s “The Lobby – USA” documentary
show how Emergency Committee for Israel Executive Director Noah
Pollak and the Hoover Institution astroturfed an inflammatory protest
against the 2016 Students for Justice in Palestine national
conference.
by
Max Blumenthal
The
Grayzone Project has released scenes from an investigative Al Jazeera
undercover documentary, “The Lobby – USA,” whose publication
was blocked by the government of Qatar under Israel lobby pressure.
The
footage reveals how Emergency Committee on Israel Executive Director
Noah Pollak and the right-wing Hoover Institution organized an
astroturfed a protest aimed at disrupting the 2016 Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP) national conference.
According
to one Hoover Institution campus fellow, “This is the first foot
soldier activity that I think we’ve been forced to do.”
A Hoover
fellow who identified himself as “Marshall,” explained the
background of the protest: “It was basically like Noah Pollak
coming in and being like, ‘Look, there are these jihadis who
basically support suicide bombing, and they’re on a campus and you
have to stop them.'”
“It’s
a chance to shout at Arabs,” another fellow interjected.
Marshall,
who is African American, divulged his fear that some media outlet
might publish “a photo of Deon [another Hoover Institute fellow]
and me together, and we’re just like clearly identifiable. They’re
like, “Oh, who are these traitors who sold out to the Jewish
conspiracy for money?'”
He then
joked: “I’m like, ‘We did! We cost $50,000 plus benefits.”
Later,
as the bus neared the SJP event, Marshall aired more doubts about the
staged protest: “No, no, no — this is astroturfing… It’s
when you set up fake protests.”
“It’s
not that astroturfing is wrong, it’s just that your astroturf has
to be, like, committed,” he lamented.
Months
before Al Jazeera’s investigative unit went undercover in the
Israel lobby, it interviewed me about the way the lobby operates. In
the footage presented in this clip, I can be seen explaining that its
outfits in Washington have been “manufacturing the image of a
grassroots movement by taking corporate money and basically paying
people to appear as activists.”
A
censorship campaign to conceal Israel lobby dirt
Pollak’s
Emergency Committee for Israel is part of a coalition of right-wing
and Israel lobbying organizations that have devoted increasing
resources to undermining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement, or BDS. Al Jazeera’s censored “The Lobby” documentary
exposes intensive collaboration between these US-based cut-outs, the
Israeli military-intelligence apparatus, and pro-Israel oligarchs
like Sheldon Adelson and Adam Milstein.
For that
reason, Israel lobby forces enacted a pressure campaign that appears
to have succeeded in suppressing Al Jazeera’s release of “The
Lobby.” The campaign consisted of visits by high profile Israel
lobbyists Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein to Doha, as well as
threats from Congress to force Al Jazeera to register under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act if it aired the documentary. Qatar
has since donated $250,000 to Klein’s Zionist Organization of
America and other hardline Israel lobby outfits.
Electronic
Intifada reported in June that Qatar decided to nix “The Lobby”
over “national security concerns.” According to reporters Asa
Winstanley and Ali Abunimah, there were concerns in Qatari governing
circles that release of the documentary could even prompt the US to
pull its Al Udeid Airbase from the Gulf country at a time when it was
under embargo from Saudi Arabia and UAE, both close allies of Israel
and the US.
Despite
the ban, pieces of the documentary have begun to trickle out. This
August 27, Electronic Intifada released footage identifying Adam
Milstein as a moving force behind the malicious anti-Palestinian
blacklisting operation known as Canary Mission. The report came on
the heels of a Grayzone exclusive naming pro-Israel lawyer Howard
David Sterling as the owner of Canary Mission’s web domain.
The
footage revealed here by the Grayzone shows in vivid detail how the
Israel lobby has compensated for its lack of grassroots influence by
essentially paying for protesters.
Xenophobic
diatribes and terrorism charges “just to provoke everyone”
When the
Hoover Institute conservative campus cadres arrived at their protest
destination, they were herded into a room to receive their marching
orders from Pollak and Yael Lerman Mazar, the director of legal
affairs for the Israel lobbying outfit, Standwithus.
Lerman
urged the protesters to use “peaceful, good language.” At
the same time, she instructed them to “stay on message”
with reporters by emphasizing that “SJP is a hate group”
and that “SJP endorses violence, terrorism, things like that.”
Among
the outlets that covered the staged protest was the Free Beacon, a
neoconservative website whose publisher, Michael Goldfarb, has also
served as an advisor to Pollak’s Emergency Committee.
When the
protesters finally assembled to confront SJP members, they unveiled
provocative banners and barked inflammatory taunts.
“Hey
SJP, what do you think of this? Resistance? Child suicide bombers?”
Pollak shouted at the student activists.
“Real
baby killers, these terrorists. They kill women, they kill children,
they don’t care about anything,” a Hoover fellow exclaimed.
“They
rape women too, all the time,” remarked another.
During a
private conversation with “Tony,” the Al Jazeera undercover
reporter who filmed the documentary with a hidden camera, Pollak
explained his smash-mouth strategy: “The activism has to be very
provocative and, like, attention getting and, like, total
no-fucks-given. We’re going to be more pro-Israel than you can even
imagine. Just to, like, provoke everyone.”
In
arguing that his tactics were more likely to find an audience in the
US than in the home country of “Tony,” the Israel lobbyist
unleashed a xenophobic diatribe.
“The
majority of Americans are pro-Israel,” Pollak said. “Whereas,
if you take a poll of Israel in the UK, it’s just pure hatred of
Israel. You’re country, like, basically let half of fucking
Pakistan move in. So you have a different problem than we do here.”
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