Hamas wins the 2023 Leni Riefenstahl Propagandist of the Year award!
Image 1: From Flickr: Khaled Mashal of Hamas at his acceptance news conference and his sidekick Ramadan Shallah.
The 2023 propagandists convention was filled with a rare excitement this year. The last few years have demonstrated successes but nothing creatively different. Propaganda Academy member Paul Manafort stated, “The last few years have proven successful but continue to use well-established strategies. The Academy was looking for a truly mind-bending event, and despite the last-minute entry, we were blown away by this year’s awardee!”
“Not since the brilliance of ISIS have we seen such a propaganda coup,” said Ramadan Shallah. “ISIS was able to convince young western women not only to agree to become sex slaves, they even bought their own tickets!” “Everyone knows that women have naturally inferior intellects by the grace of Allah, but only the genius of ISIS could pull off that hat trick.” ISIS did win the Leni Riefenstahl Propagandist of the Year award in 2014 for their incredible success in convincing over 500 women to leave countries that guaranteed their freedom to become the property of ISIS fighters. ISIS’ wildly successful propaganda campaign was long thought to be an unbreachable level of mind-twisting. But in 2023, Hamas pulled off a series of propaganda coups unseen since the work of Leni herself. Hamas’s series of successful twists of truth include an impressive list.
· First, they invaded a neighboring country and convinced huge swaths of the Western world that this was not only defensive in nature but fully justified.
· Second, the Hamas fighters (and many Gaza residents) committed a multitude of atrocities but easily convinced the world press that it was acceptable since they were committed primarily against Jews.
· Third, Hamas retreated to their prepared holdouts under mosques, hospitals, and residential complexes but twisted the minds of hundreds of thousands of people into accepting that Israel was to blame for Hamas’ planning.
These impressive successes have easily propelled them to the top of 2023’s contenders. The coup de tat for capturing the award, though, was convincing LGBTQ communities to conduct protests on their behalf. “We were highly confident we could twist the soft minds of western college students. Our past successes in pulling the wool over their eyes made that an easy win,” said Khaled Mashal. “Obtaining a handful of High School students in America was nice but really just an extension of our Operation Gullible that has had such success among the spoiled youth of Western nations. The fact that we could get LGBT-whatever people to protest on our behalf far exceeded our wildest expectations!” stated Mashal in his acceptance speech. “Don’t get me wrong; we continue to publicly torture to death any abominations against Allah that we catch pretending to have more than one of the two religiously approved genders. So this achievement was truly a gift from Allah!”
The second-place awardee was the not-surprising Russian campaign to convince the world that Ukraine is actually Russian. This effort has obtained ongoing support among both right and left-wing politicians in many Western Countries. This, of course, builds off their decades-long “Greater Russia” operation that has proven successful in supporting invasions into Chechnya, Georgia, and North Macedonia. Recent military setbacks have stymied the operation’s next steps for the rest of the former Eastern Bloc countries and certainly placed the long-sought-after goal of taking Finland in a precarious position. “We will relentlessly continue our propaganda and military campaigns regardless of losses as is the Russian tradition,” stated Vladimir Putin. The Propaganda Academy looks forward to seeing Russia’s creative next steps in 2024.
Honorable mention went to China’s attempts to expand in multiple areas across the western Pacific Ocean. Their operation “It’s all just China” has met only moderate success. The highly successful annexation of Tibet is a stale model and mostly achieved through a combination of military action and Western indifference. Recent actions in the East and South China Seas have proven marginally successful but seem to rely more on building islands than solid propaganda. The claim that it must be ours since China is in the name isn’t gaining much traction. Their “Belt and Road” initiative is proving to be very successful. This is in large part due to China’s effective propaganda efforts. The Propaganda Academy has stated some skepticism that this initiative is more of a financial honey trap than a propaganda coup. The fan base is excited to see how this plays out in 2024!