At no point in “Casablanca” does anyone utter “Play it again, Sam.” Jimmy Cagney never called anyone a “dirty rat.” And Israeli pundit Ra’anan Gissin, invariably described in article after article as “the gravelly voiced former Israeli spokesman” — well, his voice just isn’t that gravelly.
That’s not to say Gissin isn’t a memorable speaker. And, if not gravelly, he certainly is loud. In a phone interview with j. from Long Island, Ariel Sharon’s former senior advisor could possibly be heard in Staten Island. But there is a method to his loudness — it’s all part of serving as an effective spokesman.
“I’m of the opinion that if you want to have your words remembered, you have to use all the tricks in the book to do that — word associations, stories, sometimes mimicking,” said Gissin, who will be in San Francisco on Friday, March 30 for a breakfast speech sponsored by the Jewish National Fund.
“This is a world where people zap through everything,” he continued. “There are 100 channels on television, and people don’t remember what you say. And they don’t even remember faces.”
Gissin wasn’t kidding about the mimicking, by the way. He does a wicked impression of his former boss, Sharon, and he may be the only man in Israel in 2007 who can impersonate long-deceased Republican political strategist Lee Atwater’s Southern drawl.
(Incidentally, when Atwater asked Gissin the difference between a Jew and a Zionist, Gissin replied that he was a Jew from the waist up and a Zionist from the waist down — and if anyone messed with the Jewish half, they’d be kicked by the Zionist half).
Gissin’s stop in San Francisco is part of his month-long tour of the United States with the JNF’s “Caravan for Democracy” program. Currently out of government, Gissin is working on a yearlong research project at the Herzyliya Institute on ways to spread Israel’s message despite an “indifferent and often hostile media.” That is more or less what Gissin speaks about in American cities.
For example, Gissin said, instead of a giving diatribe about Islamic terror and Israel’s virtues, why not try telling a couple of jokes?
“You can make the same message by retelling 4,000 years of Jewish history and boring [your audience] or by telling two good jokes in 30 seconds.
What kind of jokes, you might ask?
“I don’t have any jokes!” Gissin blasted at a decibel level roughly equivalent to a steam train plowing into a drum factory.
“But young people, bloggers, could do a marvelous job of this counter-insurgency warfare in the media without using weapons.”
Bloggers, by the way, are high on Gissin’s list of what Israel and her supporters need more of. He claims that mass-blogging revealed the identity of the man who conveniently dug up an infant’s corpse from a Lebanese apartment leveled by an Israeli bomb as throngs of photographers giddily snapped away was the same man who unearthed a baby for the cameras in 1996.
“I know news editors at major networks who, instead of tearing off [copy] from the wire and rewriting it, are browsing through blogs to find stories and elements they missed,” he said.
When asked, Gissin gently chided the actions of his old boss’ successor, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who urged American Jews to support the war in Iraq.
“Personally, I think Israeli leaders, whether it’s the prime minister or other figures, should refrain from making comments about something that’s a purely internal U.S. affair. Let’s put it fair and square: It’s none of our business. We have our opinions and we should keep them to ourselves,” he said.
“At the same time, I think it is incumbent on whoever is leading Israel to educate the American people and western nations about … what the Iranians want to achieve. That is our responsibility.”
Israel must, in Gissin’s words, be the “early warning system” for the world. But it cannot be the “Mikey” of the world, he said, referring to the 1970s commercial for Life cereal in which two brothers foist a questionable bowl of cereal on their little brother Mikey. Of course, “Mikey likes it.”
These days, “Mikey chooses what he wants to eat,” said Gissin, inferring that Israel cannot be used as the world’s guinea pig to determine the wiles of a nuclear Iran.
“We have a moral responsibility to alert the world,” he said.
And that’s no joke.
Ra’anan Gissin will speak at 8 a.m. on Friday, March 30 at the Concordia Argonaut Club, 1142 Van Ness Ave., S.F. For more information or to RSVP call (415) 677-9600 or email [email protected].