
Shabak recruitment graphic quote from A.A. Milne: “You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And wiser than you think.”
Shabak wants YOU!!
Israel’s domestic spy agency, Shabak, offers lofty aspirational messages on its recruitment website which include quotations from Helen Keller, AA Milne and Albert Einstein. It’s just wonderful to know that despite the fact that most of these recruits will likely be shortly torturing Palestinians to secure false confessions, the agency takes the high ground, always setting its sights on the noble and grand in humankind.
Besides the wisdom of Pooh Bear, the site quotes Helen Keller: “Life is bold adventure or it is nothing!” and that patron of all secret police everywhere, Albert Einstein: “Creativity is to see what everyone else sees, and think what no one else ever thought.”
Of course, this campaign wasn’t devised by a Shabak agent. It was farmed out to a marketing firm which consulted their inspirational archives for suitably dull quotes to use. But the fact that the Shabak has thought fit to polish its image and update its recruitment posture in the marketplace is interesting.
Not to mention that the ironies which this marketing push has evoked cry out for comment. First, Helen Keller was deaf and blind. So the marketing experts perhaps should’ve chosen a more apt celebrity to quote. Albert Einstein would’ve detested everything the Shabak currently stands for. And A.A. Milne? Creator of the “bear with very little brain?” Well, what can you say about Israel’s secret police quoting Winnie the Pooh?
Finally, note the “bold” intelligence operation which Shabak touts on this web page. To attract new recruits, it boasts that it “took out” a radical left-wing Israeli Jewish terror cell in 1988 called “Shining Path.” The cell was a splinter from Matzpen, which itself was an offshoot of the Israeli Communist Party. These were truly dangerous bomb-throwing terrorists who couldn’t seem to have organized their way out of a paper bag.
The blurb doesn’t list any actual crime that the cell committed except “sheltering” Palestinian militants who were “wanted.” It doesn’t explain what the Israelis, who served several months in jail for their acts of “terrorism,” actually did; who they sheltered, or what the Palestinians were guilty of, if anything. Further, I’ve never heard of the words “Shining Path” in connection with any militant group either Jewish or Arab. So this must’ve been some fierce agent of anti-Zionist perfidy.
In truth, 90% of the work of Shabak has nothing to do with Israeli Jews. Rather, it focuses obsessively on Palestinians. The remaining 10% deals with Jewish settler terrorism: not stopping it, but managing it. As for the Jewish left, there hasn’t been an arrest or imprisonment of such an Israeli for terror-related offenses in decades. Even then, those arrested had never engaged in acts of violence. But in the current Israeli political climate, why not manufacture a leftist threat that doesn’t exist? If it’ll make your boss happy…
H/t to Igal Sarna and Ofer Neiman for this story.
A short comment on yesterday’s post about the Senate bill attempting to force Pres. Trump to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Reports in today’s news add more context, noting that the bill sponsored by Adelson acolytes Sens. Dean Heller, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would halve the State Department’s security budget if the embassy wasn’t moved to “Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital.” It would also rescind the president’s right to apply a waiver which suspends implementation of the law.
This security budget provides the personnel, equipment and training to secure our diplomats in dangerous postings around the world…like Israel…or Benghazi. The spectacle of Republicans holding months of hearings to drum up outrage at the fabricated scandal of Hillary Clinton allegedly permitting her Libya ambassador to burn to death because there was inadequate security, seems lost on these dull solons.
And why do they believe Trump needs to be forced into moving the embassy? Hasn’t he been sycophantic enough to the Lobby in promising to do so, and by naming a new ambassador who would move the embassy to the Temple Mount if he could?



