Confirmed: Israeli Propaganda More Effective Than Thought!

A little over a week ago, Great Britain's Advertising Standards Authority took a stand to defend the UK (if not the world) from nefarious Israeli propaganda:

An Israeli tourist office press campaign has been banned by the UK advertising regulator for including pictures of East Jerusalem, part of the Palestinian occupied territories.

The Israeli Government Tourist Office (IGTO) press ad stated that a tourist can "travel the entire length of Israel in six hours" and featured a range of photos of destinations in Israel including a picture of Jerusalem.

A complaint was received by the Advertising Standards Authority that the image showed the Western Wall of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, both of which are in East Jerusalem and part of the occupied territories of the West Bank.

The ASA said that readers of the ad were likely to assume that all the places featured in the ad were within the state of Israel.

"The status of the occupied territory of the West Bank [is] the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that the part of East Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead," added the ASA. [emphasis added]

How right they were! Too bad they acted too late, as revealed by an investigation by Honest Reporting:




As Jonathan Tobin writes:

Even if future “peace” deals might attempt to divide the city and rebuild the walls that divided it between 1949 and 1967 (when Jordan illegally occupied those areas now misleadingly termed “East Jerusalem”), the Old City is now firmly under Israeli jurisdiction. Any ad that attempted to portray these places as currently being under the control of any country but Israel would be misleading, not the IGTO’s inoffensive appeal to tourists.

Since the ASA leaped into action in response to a single complaint, one might get the impression that their motive was something other than accuracy in advertising.

Technorati Tag: Kotel and Western Wall.