In the ongoing propaganda battle between Israel and Hamas during the 46-day war in Gaza, West Jerusalem has come up with a new line.
Hamas = Islamic State
The inspiration for the Israelis came on Tuesday when the jihadists of the Islamic State beheaded the kidnapped American journalist James Foley, publicizing the execution in a graphic video.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office saw the opportunity. Portray the Islamic State’s killing of Foley with the public executions in Gaza of alleged collaborators with Israel:
Initially, the campaign appeared to backfire. Foley’s family had requested that images from the video not be shared, and Twitter announced that it would suspend or applying warnings to any accounts that shared the screenshots. With Twitter users protesting the apparent violation by Netanyahu’s account, the tweet was removed and replaced with a message without Foley’s picture:
However, one of the secrets of a successful propaganda line is to be persistent. By Friday morning, Netanyahu’s office had a new way to write the same equation, tying Hamas’ most recent executions of 18 alleged spies for Israel to the Islamic State’s mass killing of Iraqi soldiers in June:
The simple truth: #Hamas is #ISIS. ISIS is Hamas.
Performing public mass-executions in cold-blood. pic.twitter.com/q7hpTmDq7R
— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) August 22, 2014
And on Saturday Netanyahu used a phone call to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to bang the drum even louder:
The world saw yesterday that Hamas, like the Islamic State, carries out mass public executions. In addition, Hamas, like the Islamic State, it persecutes and oppresses minorities.
The ideology of these two groups calls for Islamic caliphates and both use the same murderous methods — Hamas is the Islamic State, the Islamic State is Hamas.
