Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda: In effort to prime chatbots to make pro-Israel arguments the site published 124 reports, over 560,000 words in nine days, Guardian analysis shows

A crow perches on an Israeli flag near an empty beach along the Tel Aviv coastline in April 2026. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

Jason Wilson

 

Wed 26 Aug 2026 

A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.

The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.

The New York media production company Piro Inc filed the site with the US justice department this month under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law that requires anyone working for a foreign government to formally disclose it, as material it distributes for the Israeli government.

The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name.

The existence of the site was first reported on 14 August. Since then the institute has added a page headed funding, which states: “An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding, and that was true when it was written.”

The site is one part of a broader effort, financed by tens of millions of dollars from the Israeli government and routed through third parties including the European advertising group Havas Media, to prime chatbots to make Israel’s arguments for it... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda

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Amid the systematic killing of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, one organisation has been quietly bringing British media workers to Israel.

Journalist Amal Khalil reporting in Lebanon last month (Photo: Mohammed Zaatari/Alamy)

Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel

JOHN McEVOY
23 April 2026

On Wednesday, journalist Amal Khalil and photographer Zeinab Faraj were reporting from southern Lebanon when an Israeli airstrike reportedly hit a car in front of them. 

The two journalists, working for the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, were then targeted as they sought shelter in a nearby home. Khalil was killed and Faraj was seriously injured.

Khalil is one of over 259 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists to be killed by Israel since 2023, with the IDF responsible for two-thirds of all journalist killings globally in 2025.

While systematically killing Palestinian journalists, the Israeli government blocked entry of foreign media workers to Gaza, in an effort to create a blackout of its genocidal campaign.

At the same time, an influential lobby group named ELNET has been quietly taking UK journalists on propaganda tours of Israel, Declassified can reveal.

ELNET was created in 2007 to “counter the widespread criticism of Israel in Europe”, and is increasingly seen as the AIPAC of Europe.

The journalists who participated in ELNET delegations to Israel have written for some of Britain’s largest news organisations including the Telegraph, Spectator, and Mail on Sunday.

ELNET has also taken former British military officers to Israel, with many of them returning to Britain and putting a positive spin on the IDF’s operations in Gaza.

Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, told Declassified: “Journalists can try to claim that these are fact-finding visits but, in reality, they are junkets specifically deigned to generate pro-Israel coverage.

“Embedded journalism like this is dodgy in peacetime but utterly scandalous during a genocide when the rest of the world’s media have been locked out of Gaza. 

“At the very least, just as the UK competition regulator insists that paid-for content must be ‘clearly labelled’, the same should apply to news stories that are made possible by well-funded supporters of the Israeli regime”.

ELNET...    

READ MORE   https://www.declassifieduk.org/lobby-group-taking-journalists-on-propaganda-tours-of-israel/

How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion [that we know of]... Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

(Quincy Institute's Youtube) https://youtu.be/j1UxyTFGdFk?si=bJGOgQxa0IGDNc9S  

Jul 25, 2026 ALWAYS AT WAR | A QI SHOW

In the latest episode of Always at War, Courtney and Alex examine Israel's $1 billion campaign to shape global opinion and policy toward Israel with the researcher who's done the work to expose it: QI Fellow Nick Cleveland-Stout.

Quincy Institute researcher Nick Cleveland-Stout has the most comprehensive data yet on the extent of this foreign influence campaign

By Courtney Rawlings, reposted from Responsible Statecraft, July 30, 2026

Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has spent over a billion dollars on global “hasbara” — television appearances, social media campaigns, chat-bot training, and other efforts to influence how people think about Israel. And this “public diplomacy” budget more than quadrupled in the last year alone.

To understand these efforts to win back American hearts and minds, we welcomed Quincy Institute Research Fellow Nick Cleveland-Stout to the latest episode of Always at War. Nick’s latest research is the most-definitive accounting yet of Israel’s new approach to winning over American’s hearts and minds.

Nick’s findings surface a surprising development in Israel’s influence efforts: while the country used to rely almost exclusively on wealthy, sympathetic advocates tilting the policy process toward Israel’s interest via American lobbying groups like AIPAC, Israel has recently been forced to hire U.S. contractors and firms that have to register as foreign agents under FARA.

While the transition signals Israel’s increasing desperation, it also allows us to see who Israel is hiring and for what. Take for example, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is currently the proud holder of three of Israel’s largest contracts. His main gig: running a mass texting campaign on behalf of Israel while posing as mysterious “peace” groups like “Allies for Peace.” Or, to take another example, the public diplomacy group Targeted Communications Global, which has spent nearly $10 million to run ads on places like X, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart. It turns out, Israel is more worried about maintaining their right-leaning supporters.

But perhaps the most shocking revelation is just how much time and money Tel Aviv is spending on “training” our chat bots — think Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok. The Israeli government is actually paying for “LLM poisoning” — developing pro-Israel websites that feed information to these chatbots whenever they’re asked about Israel. The apparent goal is that, when you ask about a straightforward incident — like Hind Rajab’s murder by the IDF — the chatbot will feed you a “he-said, she-said” story that features Israel’s justifications for shooting a five-year old, not a straight, factual accounting of events... READ MORE  https://israelpalestinenews.org/how-much-is-your-support-for-israel-worth-try-1-billion/

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READ NICK'S NEW RESEARCH: https://quincyinst.org/research/the-e... 

2:45 - Meet the researcher exposing Israel's $1 billion influence machine  

5:07 - Why Netanyahu called this his most important war  

9:34 - How Israel went from AIPAC to hiring Trump's campaign manager 

 24:31 - Who Israel is trying to influence (and why it's not working)  

32:21 - How to manipulate an AI chatbot  

41:19 - $10 million in secret ads — and nobody noticed  

48:08 - Why Israel's influence campaign is backfiring 

"... Propaganda has proliferated: Israel has quintupled its PR budget to $730m to take control of the narrative. Criticizing Israel can now stop you from getting a green card in the US and, it would seem from the Piker decision, a visa to the UK. Despite all this, however, more people are coming to understand that what is happening to Palestinians is not complex; it is fundamentally wrong."

Why is Hasan Piker ‘not conducive to the public good’? Because on Gaza, we punish the witness, not the crime

Arwa Mahdawi

The UK has banned Piker and Cenk Uygur from entry – but the objectionable things they’ve said are not more dangerous than Israel itself

This week, the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase, but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.

A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for). What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.

Neither Piker nor Uygur have said anything that is more divisive or dangerous than former Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s declaration that all Palestinians were responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. A UN commission of inquiry found that Herzog incited the commission of genocide with this statement and said that his later modifications of that utterance were an effort “to deflect responsibility for the initial statement”. Still, the British seem fine with that first statement: Herzog met with Keir Starmer in London in 2025. Clearly that meeting was deemed to be conducive to the public good.

But, again, I don’t want to pronounce on each of Piker or Uygur’s statements here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of making this a story about two American commentators or the limits of free speech. Because at its heart, the Piker-Uygur ban is about a far more insidious issue. It’s about what Britain, and the US and Israel, wants us to believe is “good” – about the way in which our fundamental sense of what is “good” and “bad” are being manipulated.

Wherever you live, whatever you believe, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, most of us have a shared understanding of basic moral concepts, of what is good and what is bad. We understand that children are innocent and should not be killed in the thousands. We understand that a region’s healthcare system should not be systematically wiped out and medics targeted. We understand that there should be laws around warfare to protect civilians. We understand that people should not be expelled en masse from their land, their homes replaced with luxury settlements. We understand that collective punishment is a crime, one that is very much not “conducive to the public good”.

None of the above is complex, no matter what some people would have you believe. I come back to the diaries of American peace activist Rachel Corrie often because they very eloquently show how there is no room for moral confusion when you are watching atrocities unfold in front of your own eyes. When Corrie went to Gaza in 2003, more than two decades before 7 October 2023, she wrote how nothing could have prepared her for what she was seeing, which she characterized as “a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive”. It terrified her, she said. “I just want to write to my mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature,” Corrie wrote. Not long after writing this, she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to save a Palestinian home in Rafah from destruction. Now, of course, the entirety of Rafah, once home to 275,000 people, has been razed to the ground.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/uk-hasan-piker-ban-israel 

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"Don't Say Palestine- How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide" NEW BOOK by the brilliant headline fixing writer Assal Rad ... "In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones."

 Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Humbled to share the cover of my forthcoming book. A project born of heartbreak, urgency, and the unbearable reality of watching Israel’s genocide against Palestinians unfold in real time.

Assal Rad  https://x.com/AssalRad

PLEASE FOLLOW HER

https://x.com/AssalRad  

 

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GKY3ZYF9?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

A searing indictment of Western media that lays bare how the "free press," long tasked with speaking truth to power, instead became a vital part of the machinery that enabled the genocide in Palestine

If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.

Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as "children" and "civilians," while Palestinians are "people under 18" and "collateral damage"; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that "Gaza's living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5." No, Rad corrects: Gaza's living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.

In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis. 

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/834977/dont-say-palestine-by-assal-rad/ 

 

Praise 

 

“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.”
—Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“If you’ve ever wondered how the media manipulated perception through subtle use of language, this is the book for you to read. Assal Rad in her superb book shows how no other institution is as instrumental in shaping perception like the media, which is not a record of truth-telling but a carefully curated narrative and elaborate system of erasure, euphemism, and deference to power.”
—Raja Shehadeh, National Book Award finalist and author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

“A poignant reminder of the power of words to normalise, or legitimise, genocide.”
—Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism

  

News is propaganda everywhere with America duped, taxpayers robbed, & international law ignored while war mongering Israel aggressively gains endless power and resources.

Israel VS Palestine & Israel VS Iran & Israel VS US ... Western mainstream media's blockade of the actual facts 

"US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops, according to complaints made to a watchdog group..."

US troops were told war on Iran was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’, watchdog alleges

Religious freedom group says 200 troops sent complaints of superiors using extremist Christian rhetoric to justify war

• Middle East crisis – live updates 

... The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from service members across all branches of the armed forces, including the marines, air force and space force.

One complainant, identified as a noncommissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”.

“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added.

The NCO’s complaint was filed on behalf of 15 troops, including 11 Christians, one Muslim person and one Jewish person. The complaint was first shared by MRFF with Jonathan Larsen ... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran-war-christian-rhetoric

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ICE’s New-Age Propaganda With its string of “wartime recruitment” ads, often featuring pop songs and familiar meme formats, the agency has weaponized social media against itself. by By Brady Brickner-Wood

Infinite Scroll

Kyle Chayka on the people and platforms that are shaping digital culture.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll

 For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

Illustration by Ariel Davis

Late last year, the White House’s social-media team lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?” repeating each time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song “Big Boys,” from a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring SZA, as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song—“It’s cuffing season”—flashes in all caps across the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA have denounced the videos as “hateful,” “evil,” and “peak dark,” respectively. (In response to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her own “S.N.L.” appearance to make it seem as if she said she would “arrest” the cast member Marcello Hernández for being “too illegal.”) Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians’ songs, against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials—Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them—these videos are not one-off inanities or easily ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are part of a hundred-million-dollar “wartime recruitment” effort, according to an internal document obtained by the Washington Post, aimed at hiring thousands more deportation officers in the new year, a propaganda crusade intended to portray ICE as a team of Avengers valiantly defending American soil from a malevolent foreign terror. By splicing pop songs and familiar meme formats into cruel detainment footage, ICE strains to attract a younger demographic, hoping to convince people that the agency is a vibrant—and trollishly funny—organization engaged in the noble work of putting away bad guys. Oh, the pop stars got mad? Joke’s on them. Now even more people know ICE is hiring.

The Trump Administration has pledged to deport a million immigrants each year during the President’s second term—even, it appears, if the immigrants have not committed crimes or are lawfully residing in the U.S. This past summer, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress increased ICE’s budget to more than a hundred and seventy billion dollars across the next four years, netting out to an annual allocation that is more than the combined yearly budgets of all local and state law-enforcement agencies in the country. ICE has used some of this money to go on a hiring spree; the agency recently announced that it had signed up twelve thousand new officers and agents—a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent increase to its workforce... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/ices-new-age-propaganda

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