Some commenters saw a Zionist conspiracy (when they weren’t expressing disdain for the video’s “bad taste”). But could the Israeli government, or any sympathetic organization, have masterminded something so anarchic, brazenly neglecting to tout Israel’s holy sites and instead pitching the Azrieli Mall highway bridge? Another theory: Maybe the artists were spontaneously moved by their love for Israel on their way home from an evangelical church. Yet others speculated it was all a big prank staged by an Israeli backpacker trawling the Incan ruins of Peru, who thought it’d be funny to juxtapose their song with footage of the Tel Aviv pride parade.

In truth, credit (or blame, if you prefer) lies with a different set of rootless cosmopolitans: several creative-class Argentine Jews (and one quarter-Jew) living in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and New York, only one of whom has actually been to Israel, and none of whom even met the singers during the video’s production. Their intention, these impresarios say somewhat vaguely, was to fight preconceived notions that Israel is a sad and scary place.

“It’s not a song in favor of Israel,” said Gastón Cleiman, an advertising man in Buenos Aires who wrote the song’s lyrics and who, along with Sebastian Muller, dreamed up the idea. “It’s a song against prejudice.” Cleiman is freelancer; Muller works for an interactive firm in Madrid whose clients include Nike and Coca-Cola. Both men swear the project was their own initiative, with neither official money nor messaging. The music was written by Gaby Kerpel, another Argentine Jew, who also scored De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta and is part of a Latin electronic collective known as Zizek and performs reinterpreted Colombian cumbia under the alter ego King Coyo, and the video was directed by Picky Talarico, better known for directing Latin mega-stars’ videos and high-profile commercials.

It started with Muller and Cleiman, who were channeling their mutual obsession with the millions-strong YouTube sensations Wendy (who, at 8, recorded sugary-voiced videos about her thirst for breast milk and beer), La Tigresa (a surgically enhanced hairdresser from the Peruvian Amazon fond of leopard print and reborn as a singer at 65), and Delfín, an amiable but stone-faced Ecuadorean whose first rise to his feet in indignation had been for a disco-beat ode to 9/11.

“One sees them and is seduced,” Cleiman said, speaking in Spanish. “These are things upon which you cannot force reason, because then surely you will find defects. But the truth is, you cannot stop watching them.”

“I feel they are doing something new that relies on authenticity,” Muller, who studied film at Tel Aviv University, told me earnestly, in Hebrew. “They haven’t learned the rules of how to communicate with images. It’s a kind of dogma without consciousness.”

Muller conceded that some of the singers’ fan base was ironic or mocking. “For many people, the combination of authenticity, of pop-culture kitsch and the bizarre is an ugly aesthetic,” he said. “But once you break from your prejudice, you can get to a different approach. Once you break those barriers, you are free.” He likened the process of changing one’s perception of the video—in part because of its pure addictiveness—to changing one’s view of Israel.

That’s the argument he presented to the singers, too. “They also had preconceived notions about Israel,” Muller said. “So, we said, what do they think when people write negative things about them on the Internet?” All three signed on.

This time, parts of the Internet responded with enthusiastiasm, bringing the performers unimagined international fame and tributes. The breathlessly heralded “pasito de Delfín” dance in “En Tus Tierras Bailaré” has spawned homages by someone in an Iron Man costume in a park, by well-off children in a kiddie pool, and by at least one woman in drag.

***

Sitting in a Manhattan bar, Talarico, the video’s director, recalled how pleased he was when Muller forwarded him YouTube comments complaining that the video looked like the work of a beginner student, and a not very good one.

Talarico’s usual clients are the likes of Julio Iglesias, Nelly Furtado, and Juanes, but when Cleiman called and asked him to recommend a director for “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” Talarico volunteered himself.

“I have this concept of art as being when you manage to do something without your mind interfering, without being led by preconceptions and prejudices,” he said. “For me, there’s always an opinion, there’s always self-consciousness. I think these people don’t have that. So, I think they’re true artists.”

Cleiman had written the lyrics to Kerpel’s music on a boat to Uruguay, trying to mimic the imperfect rhyming and simplicity of the singers’ previous work. “I’m trying to remember a phrase of Picasso’s—It took many years for me to learn how to paint like a child,” he said.

All of them had labored to make themselves invisible, befitting a video that Alma Guillermoprieto, writing on the New York Review of Books blog, saw as evidence of “the chaotic transformation of a culture that has always had an infinite and joyful capacity for self-invention. This is not outsider but insider art of the deepest sort, forged in a hot-hot crucible, and it is we who stand on the outside, peering wistfully at the screen.” For the Argentines involved, cultural insiders by profession but arguably outsiders as Jews and in a country that has always held itself apart from Latin America, the wistful peering was in awe, at footage shot in Peru and Ecuador by local directors given only the loosest instructions.

“After 200 music videos and 400 commercials, it was like an undoing,” said Talarico. “A deconstruction.”

He intentionally used footage of Israel that defied logic. “If we were doing a corporate video for Israel and we had a voice-over saying, ‘Visit Jerusalem,’ then fine, we use Jerusalem. But this was not like a video of a party where you can see the brand of whiskey.” It’s not clear to him whether the video changed the way anyone thinks about Israel, but it doesn’t really matter that much to him. “With Israel, there’s something in my blood”—he has a Jewish grandparent—“but if someone had approached me to do this video for Afghanistan or Argentina, I would have done it too.”

Meanwhile, the video’s wild success has meant the artists now have mobility beyond the virtual. La Tigresa has already been brought to Buenos Aires by a party promoter, where patrons at a chic restaurant she ate in burst into “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” where she was stopped in the street for photos and hailed as a gay icon. Kerpel wants to collaborate with Wendy Sulca. Agencies are calling Cleiman and Talarico, seeking to tap this confusing enthusiasm.

And Muller is seeking partners or donors for a worldwide tour that would span Latin America, Miami, New York, and end up in Israel. “That’s our dream and their dream,” he said. “They already know a lot about the country because we showed it to them. And they have a connection. But they want to be there physically.”

Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Hamas Free Gaza Movement, told the New York Times in a telephone interview from Cyprus today that Israeli soldiers dropped onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara and “opened fire on sleeping civilians at four in the morning.” That is undoubtedly the version of events that will be believed throughout the Middle East, where any anti-Israel theory is swallowed whole. But those not merely motivated by ideology might reach a rather different interpretation of what happened, thanks to the videos of the event released yesterday by the Israel Defense Forces.

The least-convincing video came first—a long-shot showing much of the vessel from above, presumably from a camera on one of the helicopters that inserted the commandos. The footage is grainy because the raid occurred in the early morning hours and was filmed with a night-vision lens. The figures are seen from a distance. They’re tiny. The only way you can tell what’s happening is from labels inserted by the IDF—e.g., “The first soldier is injured and thrown to the deck.”

Much better footage was released a few hours later. In a close-up shot you can actually see the troops descending on ropes and being set upon by an angry mob. The “peaceful” passengers wielding chairs and metal rods are clearly visible. So, too, is the horrifying sight of a soldier going head-first overboard.

A third video is almost entirely dark, but the soldiers’ conversation in Hebrew—with English subtitles provided by the IDF, but an accurate translation—tells the story. “It’s coming from all directions,” they shout. “We need to be evacuated now! Real weapons, real weapons! They are firing on us. There is live fire below.” As much as the words the desperate tone of the radio chatter conveys the magnitude of what was occurring.

This is further confirmed in an interview posted by the IDF with one of the commandos, whose arm is in a sling and whose face is obscured. “Every guy that descended was met by three or four people,” he says. “And they just started beating him up, tearing him to pieces. It was a lynch.”

Israel’s enemies long ago realized how potent propaganda warfare could be. They have made ample use of video cameras and Internet postings; Hezbollah even has its own satellite channel. Israel has been late to realize the importance of information warfare, but in its response to the Gaza flotilla dust-up it is finally casting aside the instinctive secretiveness of the military to give the world a view of what actually happened. Of course that won’t change the minds of many who are instinctively anti-Israel. But it’s better than simply ceding the information battlefield as Israel has done too often in the past.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.

You know, the little questions.

These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

Predictably, stodgy viewers found Silverman’s approach offensive (come on, people—“house that is a city”—is sheer! comic! gold!). Among the scolds is Catholic League president Bill Donohue, quoted in an article in America, a Catholic weekly. He says Silverman is being anti-Catholic and that her “filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.” Really? Donohue’s obviously not following the comedian on Twitter, where she spares nobody, least of all her own kind, from insult. To wit: “Saw A Serious Man last night — a disgusting yet accuate portrait of us grossy jews down to, like our thicker-ish saliva.”

Sarah Silverman: Sell the Vatican? [America]

Video Shows Captive Israeli Soldier in Good Health [NYT]
Watch New Schalit Video: ‘I Yearn to See My Family Again’ [JPost]
Gilad Shalit in Video: I Feel Healthy, Being Treated Well [Haaretz]

Check out the Jerusalem Post’s video comparison, chilling titled “Flying Insects vs. World Leaders,” for an object lesson in the insecticidal advantages of democracy over theocracy.

Flying Insects vs. World Leaders [JPost]

The biggest hit in children’s entertainment in the Arab world is less Jonas Brothers and more Jihad: the Birds of Paradise, a Jordanian-based production house for kids, is rapidly gaining popularity by churning out songs about martyrdom and violence against Israelis and Jews. “When we seek martyrdom, we go to heaven,” sings one little girl in “When We Seek Martyrdom,” the group’s latest blockbuster. “You tell us we’re small, but from this way of life we have become big. Without Palestine, what does childhood mean?” There’s also a music video, in which menacing-looking children sporting yarmulkes and toting semi-automatic weapons, intrude upon a garden where other children, beatific and wrapped in kaffiyehs, the traditional Arabic headdress, peacefully play.

Like other Birds of Paradise productions, the song has spawned dozens of YouTube fan tributes, and even captured the hearts of adult terrorists, who used the tune as the soundtrack for their menacing-looking videos. Their parents must be so proud.

On Wednesday night, a few hours before President Obama was set to address the Muslim whole world from Cairo, filmmakers Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana cruised through Jerusalem’s outdoor cafes asking drunk American kids a simple question: “What do you think of Obama coming to the region?” The responses, which featured plenty of f-bombs, ranged from the unpublishably offensive—including one from a guy who claimed to have volunteered for the Obama campaign—to the merely stupid. One girl who claimed she was a political science major failed to correctly identify Benjamin Netanyahu, but cheerfully rattled off a catalogue of conspiracy theories, including Obama-as-crypto-Muslim, Obama-as-foreign-born-citizen, and Obama-as-terrorist. “All I gotta say is, I want pussy!” exclaimed one teen, staggering slightly. “Is this gonna be on national TV or something?” asked another. We’re sure their parents are very proud.

Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on Eve of Obama’s Cairo Address [Mondoweiss]

Egypt wants the Hebrews to finish building the pyramids, but it’s time to move on.

Coming in October: Episode III, “Getting There Is Half the Fun.”

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Featuring the voices of Julie Klausner and Sean Modica.

God holds Abraham to his word. Isaac goes along for the ride.

Written by Jonathan Katz, Stephen Levinson, and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson.