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| By Israel Insider staff November 13, 2007 |
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When you think of Holland, do you picture quaint canals, rosy-cheeked cherubs, artistic masters, shining happy blonde tall people holding hands? Not Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld.
He sees the Dutch in a very dark light, darker than the most dismal Rembrandt and far less pretty. Holland, for him, is a hellhole filled with horrible happenings, day after dreadful day. And that's not because he ate some bad mushrooms at one of Amsterdam's notorious "coffee shops" or had a disappointing experience inside a little room with a glaring red light.
What does the good doctor have against the Dutch people anything? Nothing really. He's just trying to prove a point about media distortion as it has affected the State of Israel.
Gerstenfeld has been a strategic consultant to the boards of major international corporations and since 2000 has served inter alia as Chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. These days, among other things, he focuses on bad news from the Netherlands. And a growing list of other countries. Our correspondent asked him what is his problem, anyway?
Q. What does the Bad News project consist of?
A. The essence of the Bad News project is a blog which lists only negative, yet true, news items about a specific country. I started Bad News about the Netherlands on the Internet in mid-October. The site can be found at http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.com. Since then four similar Bad News projects have gone up on Finland, Norway, Mexico and the UK. I do not even know most of the people who initiated them.
Q. What motivated you to start this blog?
A. For many years I had seen how many foreign journalists distort news about Israel in various ways. They take matters out of context, leave out essential information and blacken Israel. The same goes for other types of media and many Western politicians. As I am writing a book about the Netherlands, the Jews and Israel, the Dutch examples particularly struck me.
Q. Can you give some examples?
A. One concerns Conny Mus, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel. In April of 2007, he was the first western TV journalist to interview Ismael Haniyah of the Hamas, who was then Prime Minister of the short-lived Hamas-Fatah government. Mus said on TV that he could ask whatever he wanted, yet he didn't raise the most relevant question: What about killing all the Jews as stated in the Hamas Charter?
Another example is Dutch Development Cooperation Minister Bert Koenders. In a recent press release on 3 million dollar emergency help for the Palestinians in Gaza, he blamed the area's economic problems on the closure of its border by Israel. He also lamented the wilting of flowers in Gaza which should have been exported to the Netherlands. Koenders' press release did not even mention the Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza.
Q. What kind of reaction have you had to the project?
A. Most reactions have been very positive. Initially all I planned was to write an article in the Jerusalem Post. I did so in June explaining how one can, by publishing true but selected negative news, degrade the image of any country. The article listed ten news items from one week in mid-May about the Netherlands. These included misbehavior of Dutch soldiers both in Iraq and the Netherlands, an American government report about the Netherlands being the largest supplier of ecstasy drugs to the US, the extreme hate mail a heavily protected right wing politician received regularly from Dutch Muslims, the negative opinion of the UN Commission against Torture about the Dutch asylum policy, and a court decision that, while in office, a former deputy minister had incited to racial discrimination of citizens of Somalian origin.
Q. What happened until you decided to publish the blog?
A. After the Jerusalem Post article was published, several Dutch people wrote that if I started a Bad News blog, they would supply me with negative news items on a daily basis. They have done this for the past few months. These and many other positive reactions convinced me that such a blog had great potential.
I did some pilot presentations and journalists heard about it. Articles appeared in newspapers such as Haaretz in English, the Volkskrant in the Netherlands and the Miami Herald. I was interviewed by radio and TV stations in various countries. Even before the blog went up media with an audience of well over a million people had published it.
Q. What were the reactions when the blog started?
A. At least forty other blogs picked it up and wrote about it in languages such as English, Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, German and Czech. As mentioned, four Bad News sites on other countries have gone up since. A crucial one is Bad News from Norway because that country's socialist government is extremely anti-Israel. There have also been cases of severe anti-Semitism in the last few years, including a shooting at the Oslo synagogue, an attack on the synagogue's cantor and the desecration of the Jewish cemetery. Hardly anybody knows very much about Norway. And, after just a few days the blog shows that that country is far from the paradise the Norwegians present it to be.
Q. Please give examples of items mentioned on the Bad News from the Netherlands blog in recent weeks?
A. Some concern the killing of tens of civilians by Dutch troops in Afghanistan. They have been accused of carelessness by the president of Afghanistan, the head of NATO forces there, and their fellow Australian troops. The blog also mentions problems with ethnic minorities including the arson of cars in a neighborhood of Amsterdam almost every night over two weeks. The police, who were patrolling intensively, were unable to arrest even one perpetrator in the area of a few square kilometers.
Other items include that a government ministry has been breaking into the computer of a Dutch press agency. The Dutch government has announced that they hope to bring the number of children aged 12-15 drinking alcohol down from 82% to 62% within four years. The government also announced that it intends to reduce the number of youth having a dislike for Islam from 50% to 40% in the coming five years. There is a cumulative effect of adding some twenty such items each week in all kinds of societal fields.
Q. How can this be used in explaining Israel's position?
A. Let me first mention a luncheon conversation two years ago with three Dutch parliamentarians, one of whom is now a minister. I asked them what would happen if they would have had as many terrorist bombs in the Netherlands as Israel had. One of them replied "it would never get that far. We would have civil war long before."
Whenever I meet Dutch people who are critical of Israel, I say to them: "Look in the mirror". Without its existence being threatened there are so many things where the Netherlands fails by its own standards. If the country had to live under the conditions in Israel for decades it would never have been able to maintain a democratic state. That is true for all Western countries.
To the non-Dutch I say: what do you know about The Netherlands? According to trials we did most have difficulty to write a hundred words about it, full of stereotypes. Then we show them the blog on the Netherlands and explain how perception is influenced by media reporting and that all we did is write about The Netherlands like some Dutch journalists report about Israel.
Q. What's next?
A. We want to find more media in many countries who give attention to the Bad News project. I hope more people will send it to their friends and that sites on additional countries will go up. We are also finding new applications for the project all the time. Perhaps Israeli public diplomacy bodies will start to use it. It may enter the syllabi of professors of communications studies. The sky is the limit.
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