It’s hard out there for Haim Saban.
The billionaire and philanthropist owns a controlling stake in the humor website The Onion. Yesterday, The Onion ran a piece entitled “IDF soldier recounts harrowing, heroic war story of killing 8-month-old child.”
“I could see the whites of the baby’s eyes and hear her terrifying cries, and I knew it was either her or me,” read the piece. “And this wasn’t some newborn infant, you know? This was a baby who could probably sit up independently. I was scared, but I acted quickly to throw that tear gas at her and her older sister. And who knows how many lives I saved when I shot the women trying to help her?”
How to respond to such counterfactual, anti-Semitic drivel masquerading as satire? How to counter a publication massively popular with American millennials sounding every bit like Hamas propaganda?
Just ask Haim Saban, of course: The billionaire’s other recent investment was the Campus Maccabees, a group of real-life teenage Power Rangers that he founded with his fellow billionaire Sheldon Adelson and that was designed to fight anti-Israel bias in academia. Saban eventually bowed out of the group, but the recent Onion piece is a reminder that Israel still has a hasbara problem, as Haim Saban had wisely intuited.
The solution, then, is simple: Haim Saban must invest in a new hasbara effort dedicated to targeting The Onion, which Haim Saban owns, thereby creating a perfect Haim Saban Möbius strip that exists independently of any outside interference. A Haim Saban publication will run outrageous anti-Israel pieces, a Haim Saban nonprofit will come up with clever ways to refute them, and the rest of us will finally be free to care about things that actually matter.
