What if ... (if Qassam-Rockets would bombard Berlin Paris and London)

This posted video has a long backstory behind it, but I realized that it’s important to trace the steps I took to find this short clip. I first began searching for materials for this blog by doing a general “gaza video” search through Google and following different media sources and sites.

One of the first links I found connected me to a PBS story called How Social Media War was Waged in Gaza-Israeli Conflict, which discussed both pro-Israeli and pro-Gaza perspective websites. The first highlighted group was Help Us Win, and one of its reporters was quoted as saying: “‘We are fighting against the mainstream media who prefer to ignore certain bits of information about Israel,’ Berger told me in an interview, ‘and social media is an effective way of providing the right information passively.’” The name sounded incredibly familiar, so I clicked on the Help Us Win site to keep exploring. As I read about their site, an online pro-Israeli database, I remembered where I had heard of the group during the actual conflict. Help Us Win is a group determined to distribute information in new and untraditional ways, such as through Twitter as well as Facebook. They are most well known, as some of you may remember, for the Qassam Counter. This was a feature on Facebook where users could “donate their status” to this cause and it would automatically link to an update the number of Qassam rockets that had fallen on Israel. The status would appear like this: “QassamCount: One or more rockets hit Israeli civilian areas today. Click here for more details: http://qassamcount.com/today.” I remember reading this status on many of my friends’ pages, and I always wondered where the counter/pro-Palestinian status was. At first I thought this was a Facebook-sponsored status donation (like they did for the presidential elections) and I was angered that I couldn’t find a counter-status donation since it focused on attacks on civilian areas, which were happening on both sides.

As we’re now starting this blog project, I began examining more deeply what these counters and this website mean. I was searching around the Help Us Win site and I found this short cartoon video, showing Qassam rockets hitting Berlin, London, and Paris. This clip plays on European stereotypes, showing important city landmarks being bombed and caricatures of French, German, and British people. The video ends with a message on the screen: “How do YOU like it? In Sderot, Israel, people have been living like this for the last 8 years.” I thought this video was an interesting start to examine the victimization of both sides in this conflict. The counter, along with the video, constructs Israel as a target, as the injured party in this larger fight.

I thought this video was especially important in our new world of social media, how do we examine the role of unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian sites? Social media does not require unbiased viewpoints, and how do we balance what we consider to be objective news stories with these subjective accounts and opinions? The Help Us Win site self description is “A site where you can ensure that the international coverage of the Campaign Against Hamas is balanced.” But what media sources are actually balanced, and how can we create a full picture of this conflict?

I’m sorry for the long post! I know its a sort of silly short video, but I felt like the connections between each step were the important part to trace: from a more objective media source, to an opinionated site, to Facebook, to an individual’s YouTube clip, each source represents the disparate ways in which we get our information.