Coles

They discovered that frightening westerners about Muslims made them like Israel more In 2025, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned an American marketing company to find out how to make people in Europe and the United States feel better about Israel. The company was Stagwell Global, headed by Mark Penn. A man who had advised Bill Clinton and helped Menachem Begin win the Israeli elections in 1981. They conducted surveys, organised focus groups and tested different messages on Western audiences. In September 2025, the research leaked. One of the problems they discovered was that many Europeans had come to regard Israel as a genocidal, apartheid state. Even people who disliked Hamas and Iran were using those descriptions. Quite a public relations problem. So what would make people more sympathetic to Israel? The researchers tested different approaches. Some emphasised women's rights. Others LGBTQ rights. Others portrayed Hamas as determined to destroy Jews and spread jihadism. And they found something particularly effective. Fear of radical Islam. One finding in the leaked recommendations was that the notion of radical jihadism was universally effective. Another message, portraying 'Free Palestine' as a slogan of terrorism rather than freedom, performed particularly well with American conservatives. When researchers combined these themes with messages about Israeli values, support for Israel improved by more than 20 points on average in each of the five countries examined. What was being measured here? Not whether Palestinians were being treated humanely. Not whether the bombing of Gaza was justified. Not whether the settlements were legal. Which messages made foreigners more sympathetic to Israel. On October 29, 2026, researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza published the results of a three-year investigation into an enormous covert advertising campaign. They documented 533 million exposures to anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Qatar propaganda across 30 countries. The advertisements portrayed Qatar as secretly engineering Muslim migration into Europe. Muslims were presented as an invading population. The material borrowed from the far-right 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory. The researchers traced technical evidence, including Hebrew-language computer file paths and an Israeli IP address, pointing to production in Israel. They concluded with moderate to high confidence that the operation originated there. They could not establish who ultimately financed it. These are separate investigations. There is no demonstrated connection between Stagwell's research and the people who organised this advertising operation. But consider the overlap. One investigation documents an Israeli government-commissioned study identifying fear of radical Islam as a particularly effective way to improve Israel's reputation. The other documents an enormous, apparently Israeli-origin campaign flooding Western audiences with frightening stories about Muslims. An ordinary human being becomes a convenient object of fear. A commercial opportunity. A tested message. An advertising impression. And somewhere, behind a computer screen, someone measures whether the fear is working.