20,000 NIS ad

I actually worked for Shalom L'dorot once. Once was more than enough thank you. I had told Yosef that I could write fairly well, he said that with my hippie appearance I looked the part, (^thank you so much^) so he decided to bring me to meet Daniel. Daniel was the one who was described by the board of Shalom L'dorot as "not knowing his ass from his elbow."

Beforehand, he explained to me what was going on. Shalom L'Dorot was going to splurge on a 20,000 NIS full color, page 3 ad in the Jerusalem Post. (20,000 NIS, at the time, was a just a bit less than six thousand dollars.)

"Why?"

"We need exposure."

"Have you heard the expression 'don't put all your eggs in one basket?'"

"Have I? Yes. Has Daniel? No."

"I see...do you guys have that kind of money?"

"Not that I've seen." Regardless, we, Yosef and I, mapped out a fairly decent ad. The focal point of this organization was that they had translations from Palestinian Television, and showing the pure hatred that was being broadcast to the Palestinian youth, literally advocating suicide bombings and Jihad. (You'll just have to take my word for it that Israeli TV is not anti-Arab. There may be a lot of shows in Arabic that are pure propaganda aimed at the Arabs, but they are not advocating any actions against anybody, Islam, Arabic, or anybody of the like.) They were selling the videotapes, subtitled into either English or Hebrew. ($19.95 for 8 minutes of material. ^Ooooh, sign me up.^) They went on to show that the fundamentals of the PLO Covenant were still being preached, and that before peace would be made, if the Arabs really wanted peace, they should have to preach peace amongst themselves. (As we see with hindsight, this ad made no difference, it's all now a moot point now, post-Wye.)

So the ad Yosef and I knocked out had some of the more interesting stills off of the video, a scary headline to the tune of something like, "'THE TIME HAS COME FOR A JYHAD!!!,' 'Death to the Jews!" something that would really grab the eye. Under the stills were, of course, the captions of their translated dialogue. We put in an explanation of what was really going on, what the organization was, what it stood for, etc.

So we took a day off from Yeshiva to deliver it to Daniel. It was excused, so we did it in a rather round about way, having some nice meals that Yosef manages to get for near free from various connections in Jerusalem. When we're about to get to the office, Yosef asks, seemingly out of the blue, "By the way, Michael, do you generally think in a series, or in round ways?"