Lobby Watch 27 March 2024
Nuseir Yassin, the Palestinian viral video maker better known as Nas Daily, has been a useful tool for the Israel lobby as the Israeli government commits genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
This month Yassin accepted an award from the Anti-Defamation League “for his work in building bridges of understanding between Jews and Muslims,” the right-wing group said.
The ADL, an Israel lobby group that also masquerades as a civil rights organization, sent notices to US universities urging them to punish students who are protesting Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and designate them as “terror supporters.”
The video blogger gave an acceptance speech talking about promoting “peace” between Muslims and Jews in the region.
The award was presented to Yassin by Duke University professor Abdullah Antepli, himself a previous awardee. Antepli co-directs the Muslim Leadership Initiative, which promotes faithwashing junkets to Israel operated by the Shalom Hartman Institute, an organization with ties to the Israeli military.Also co-directing the Muslim Leadership Initiative is the American-born author Yossi Klein Halevi, a former adherent of genocidal anti-Palestinian rabbi Meir Kahane. The organization is also bankrolled by anti-Muslim extremists.
As Israel began its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza in October, Yassin posted a message declaring that he no longer identified as a “Palestinian Israeli,” but rather as an “Israeli first. Palestinian second.”Yassin stated, “I do not want to live under a Palestinian government, which means I only have one home, even if I’m not Jewish: Israel.”
Yassin’s insistence in his ADL speech that “everyone who spoke Arabic” where he grew up “hated the Jews” not only reflects his own ignorance but is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel, with more than 60 laws discriminating against its Palestinian citizens in all areas of life, including political and civil rights.
It is part of a longstanding and deliberate misconception that the violence arising from Israel’s belligerent occupation and colonization of Palestinian land is really rooted in religious strife. Promoting the idea that religious strife is at the root of the violence is a common tactic used by Israel propagandists to distract attention from the material reality of brutal Israeli rule over Palestinians deprived of their most fundamental rights.
This seemingly benign celebration of mutual respect among faiths, exemplified by Yassin’s award, actually serves to conflate religious tolerance with normalizing Arab ties with Israel, glorifying traitors to the Palestinian national struggle against a regime of occupation, settler-colonization and apartheid, and in its most disturbing and contemporary form, whitewashing Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Peace without justice
While Yassin declared that the “world changed” with the events of 7 October, he made no mention whatsoever of Israel’s killing of at least 32,300 Palestinians in Gaza since that day.
In his speech, Yassin recounted a recent trip to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of the only nuclear weapons ever to be used against a population. US President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people.
Yassin’s conception of “peace” is the absence of “people angry at America, angry at war, people who want revenge and justice.”
The Japanese descendants of survivors of the nuclear bombings refraining from seeking justice is Yassin’s idea of “peace.”
But this is not even true, as survivors of the atomic attacks have in fact tried to hold the United States accountable and continue to resist efforts they perceive as absolving the United States of its responsibility as well as continuing to seek compensation, despite obstruction from Japanese authorities.
Korean survivors of the atomic attacks on Japan also continue to seek an apology and recognition from the United States.
Yet Yassin celebrates the transformation of those cities, now bustling with “skyscrapers, public transportation, world-class infrastructure” as well as “so many American businesses like Starbucks and McDonald’s opening stores in Hiroshima” – two major American corporations that have faced a global boycott due to their response to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Yassin made no mention of the fact that less than one month into Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel told the US that it was modeling its attacks on the nuclear bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“It became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported last year.
“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II – including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – to try to defeat those countries,” the newspaper added.
Israel kept its word.
The bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in 1945 possessed explosive power equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Figures from January indicate that Israel has unleashed a minimum of 65,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, multiplying the firepower of the US bombing of Hiroshima.
That number is higher now, but Yassin’s concern with peace has nothing to do with stopping the ongoing slaughter.
Meanwhile, in November, Yassin traveled to Saudi Arabia and prepared propaganda videos for the country to promote its makeover as a high-tech haven under Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership.
Yassin traveled to Saudi Arabia despite him being an Israeli citizen. Yassin said he purchased a passport from Saint Kitts and Nevis, a tiny island nation in the Caribbean. There are no formal diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, though clandestine relations go back years.
Riyadh has even signaled it could hinge a normalization agreement on a deal that involves an end to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
None of Yassin’s videos mention Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen that killed tens of thousands of people and caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – at least until Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Atrocity propaganda
Meanwhile, Alyne Tamir – the former partner and colleague of Yassin – helped spread atrocity propaganda of rapes by Palestinian resistance fighters on 7 October.
The Israeli government claims that Hamas fighters had systematically raped women as part of their military assault on Israel’s southern command on 7 October.
“Hundreds of terrorists came into Israel’s borders, snuck into their towns and murdered entire families,” Tamir wrote on Instagram on 8 October.
“They raped women and are dragging their bodies in the streets.”
The lie that Hamas used “mass rapes” as a weapon of war, among other lies including 40 beheaded Jewish babies, were used to manufacture consent for Israel’s continued slaughter of Palestinians.
Tamir has not rescinded this claim, which has been presented by the Israeli government and parroted in mainstream Western media without any forensic evidence or first-person testimony that such crimes were systematic, pre-planned and were perpetrated on the order of Hamas commanders as a weapon of war.
In the post, Tamir described herself as “half-Jewish and Israeli.”
The social media influencer has had a long record of contradictions on this matter – identifying as Israeli when it suited her narrative and rejecting it when it did not.
When Tamir secretly went to Lebanon a few years ago, she blamed others for spreading what she called “fake news” that she is an Israeli citizen.
But there is a good reason for that belief: She and her partner Nuseir Yassin have repeatedly described her as “half-Israeli” or even just “Israeli.” Here is a list of times they have done so.
In her 8 October post, Tamir again describes herself as “Israeli” adding that “My father, brother and 80 family members are in Israel. They are fearing for their lives right now.”
Tamir has made no post on her Instagram grid expressing opposition to Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to her platform of 358,000 followers.
Comments
Another Person from Mossad?
Permalink Troy replied on
Remember the son of Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who worked for the Israeli secret service? How about the Muslim lady in California who was an IDF soldier. As we all know, these people are Israel's paid propaganda machines. They have no relationship or common points with Palestine or palestinians.
Useful idiot
Permalink Davoid O. Pysops replied on
I’m not believing these six assassinations were other than Mossad pretending to be creating an environment where peace is impossible (yet only superficially, deceitfully, and ostensibly advocated for), by intimidating those wanting reconciliation and peace.
This dude, which i stopped watching, I just don’t need to hear any more of.
A rocket missiling (misleading) of some superficial truth to hide the nastiest of payload lies — that’s pysops to the max.
Nas
Permalink David Archibald replied on
A silly little puppet dancing on the stage of his masters. Horror is made of such small things.
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