Israel has angry football fans to blame
It is a confusing and bewildering time for supporters of Israel. It must be asking itself, “How did we lose control of the dominant narrative?”
It holds such influence over the Western media and the overwhelming majority of politicians in the US, Great Britain and mainland Europe.
Supporters of Israel have for decades become accustomed to entrenching the narrative that those who oppose Israel are anti-Semitic, intent on dissolving Israel and, more importantly, the Jewish people.
Although it was symbolic that scores of diplomats at the UN General Assembly chose to walk out last Friday rather than listen to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was not something new.
Israel and its friends have become accustomed to the majority of UN member states passing resolutions against it and its occupation of Palestine and Lebanon. It regards the general assembly as an adversarial gathering.
But there was something different about this time — you could hear it in Netanyahu’s voice as it almost cracked when he seemed to lament: “Terror seeks to destroy our way of life so there should be no confusion about this but unfortunately there is a lot of it in many countries and in this very hall as I’ve just heard good is portrayed as evil and evil is portrayed as good” (my emphasis).
Israel has had the monopoly on victimhood but today it is different — it finds itself needing to convince many that it is not the perpetrator and oppressor.
It is trying to finger Iran as the new Hitler and openly exploit the enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as the centuries-old Islamophobia that exists in the West.
But Iran has no control of the Western media and no propaganda machine that can compete with Israel and the US!
Well, if Israel wants to blame anyone, it should start with Arsenal and Manchester United football fans — they are the root cause of Israel losing the battle of ideas.
It all began back in 2012, when former BBC reggae radio host Robbie Lyle decided that he had had enough of the mainstream media ignoring fans’ voices in their coverage of his beloved Arsenal football club.
Therefore, he established YouTube channel ArsenalFanTV (AFTV), primarily as a platform for fans’ opinions and feelings.
The channel grew rapidly and fans rallied around AFTV as they pushed for a change in ownership, as well as the dismissal of long-time manager Arsene Wenger, which became known as the Wenger Out campaign.
The campaign went viral globally. There was even a Wenger Out placard spotted at the Save SA, Zuma Must Go campaign in South Africa.
Lyle opened the door for fans walking away from the mainstream media, both television and news, and establishing their own platforms where they can speak without society’s elites controlling or censoring their views.
The television stations thought of it as just a passing fad that would most probably die off once Wenger was removed. How wrong they were!
When the fans of the largest club in Britain, Manchester United, followed suit and established a plethora of YouTube fan sites, which drew in thousands of followers in next to no time, the writing was on the wall.
For instance, the United Stand fan site in Britain has close to two million subscribers, and it is not even based in Manchester, and there are many other Manchester United YouTube fan sites in Britain and across the globe — such as in the US, Kenya and South Africa.
The mainstream media initially reacted by ridiculing and undermining the YouTubers but that just made them look like fuddy-duddies who had not kept up with the times.
Today, a number of the British television stations, as well as the premier radio sports station TalkSport, have tried to woo these fan-journalists in the hope of co-opting them and their millions of subscribers.
But the YouTube channels have remained and grown. Mainstream television stations have attempted to lure fans by clipping their own football shows and putting them on YouTube but that has not been able to shift support for the fan sites.
You might be saying, “Fascinating story, but what has that got to do with Israel and the US losing the battle of ideas?” My response would be, “Everything.”
The success of the sports fan sites revealed that YouTube was an effective platform to counter the dominant narrative that was being peddled by the mainstream media and establishment elites.
And it was only a matter of time before political analysis sites began on YouTube. Initially, they were not that entertaining — generally footage of academic lectures such as those of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
Young political analysts and activists, who had grown disenchanted with the conservative nature of politics in the media, as well as their local political parties, began venturing onto YouTube.
Many of them were the young activists who campaigned for Bernie Sanders’ tilt at being the Democratic presidential nominee, as well as for UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Thus when Sanders and Corbyn were sold out by their respective party elites, these activists lacked the patience and party loyalty to remain.
Donald Trump’s election team, especially Brad Parscale, the senior digital operations head, cottoned on to the power of the internet, if not necessarily YouTube, and used Facebook effectively, with Cambridge Analytica, to guide the populace in particular demographic categories to support Trump’s campaign and defeat Hillary Clinton.
Today, there are so many openly left-wing, socialist, fiercely human-rights-based, anti-elitist, anti-political party platforms on YouTube. These sites have been effective in countering Israeli and American propaganda.
So even when Israel tried to shut the media out of Gaza, and powerful newspapers such as The New York Times ran with stories that Israelis had been raped on 7 October, there was a counter-narrative on YouTube, put together by seasoned journalists such as The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, that effectively debunked this story.
Another is Glenn Greenwald who also has his own channel. Greenwald famously opposed the Iraqi invasion by George W Bush, and is the journalist American spy Edward Snowden chose to be interviewed by when he revealed that American intelligence agencies had been illegally conducting global surveillance of various countries and leaders.
There’s Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, a respected expert on the Middle East, as well as Scott Ritter, a former UN arms inspector, and many others with YouTube channels, who have shown no loyalty to any political party but are practising journalism without the trappings of commercial considerations or needing to pacify editors who value their relationships with the political and business elite.
To understand how strong this independent media movement is, consider that even some journalists associated with Fox News, and therefore Donald Trump, have left Fox and established YouTube channels that have openly challenged the Israeli narrative. Among them is former US judge Andrew Napolitano.
Tucker Carlson, who was both celebrated and ridiculed while at Fox, has also established his own site and has shown a remarkable ability to be non-partisan.
It is these sites, mainly based in the West, that have effectively broken the monopoly Israel and the US have had on the narrative. In the past few months, there have been attempts to shut down some of them, with harassment and allegations of being spies for foreign governments. Ritter has had his passport taken away and his home raided by the FBI.
But, alas, the dam wall has broken, and there is no way to reverse the flow of alternative opinion.
Many have labelled social media a “weapon of mass distraction”, comparing it to the final days of the Roman Empire and the use of gory spectacles in the Colosseum of gladiator killing gladiator or Christians battling lions and wolves.
But recall that, in the Monty Python cult movie The Life of Brian, the leaders of the resistance against the Romans sit in the self-same Colosseum and plot the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Today, social media might not be the distraction many thought it would be, but it could very well be the primary vehicle to create a new order.
Donovan E Williams is a social commentator.