propaganda
Secretary of State John Kerry met with Hollywood studio chiefs in Los Angeles on Tuesday to discuss various topics including Islamic State. Kerry uploaded a photo of the meeting on Twitter, saying, "Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative."
As it stands, the international coalition is far from winning the information war against the Islamic State. Its air strikes may be squeezing the group in Iraq and Syria and killing many of its leaders, but that has not halted the self-proclaimed caliphate’s ideological momentum.
The "Peer 2 Peer (P2P): Challenging Extremism" project, launched in spring 2015, is based on the premise that empowering student "experts" in reaching their peers was a critical strategy in efforts to combat extremist propaganda.
Soledad Altrudi's paper on the Blue Book on Argentina receives award.
During the 1950s, there was a term that was sometimes used to describe people who were exploited by Soviet communists to publicly support their ideology. The term was “useful idiots.” The phrase, like communism itself, has largely disappeared from use, but there are still plenty of useful idiots around. If you don’t believe it, just spend some time watching RT.
From the archives: David S. Jackson on Russia's RT network.
Terrorist groups may now have a harder time using Twitter as a platform for radical activities. For years, terrorists groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda have used social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, to spread extremist messages, recruit followers, and call on sympathizers in the West to commit acts of violence at home.
The Foreign Ministry has become just one more office that engages in public diplomacy. This must be frustrating for the idealistic and motivated Foreign Ministry diplomats based in Israel and abroad who chose the diplomatic calling out a desire to serve and defend the state against the propaganda spewed by a host of countries, non-state actors, terrorist groups, Islamists, and BDS activists. These are people who received training in the art of diplomacy and are therefore the best qualified to take up Israel’s case abroad.