We Con the World

A video called “We Con the World” which spoofs the 1985 charity single “We Are the World” has received over one million hits.

The song satirizes the Gaza flotilla, showing the ship’s captain (called Captain Stabbing in the video) and members of the flotilla singing to the tune of “We Are the World.”

The video was created by the satirical news website Latma TV (www.latma.co.il), run by Jerusalem Post deputy managing editor Caroline Glick.

Some of the flotilla members are depicted wearing keffiyehs, speaking in fake Arab accents. They brandish knives in the air while singing about how they are going to convince the world to “create the greatest bluff of all.”

“We’ll make the world abandon reason” and believe that “the Hamas is Momma Theresa,” they sing.

They also sing, “We’ll stab them at heart. They are soldiers, no one cares. We are small and we took some pictures with doves.”

The video has been a massive hit since it was posted after the flotilla crisis took place. It has been widely discussed in the Israeli media and has been featured on CNN, Spiegel Online and many prominent blogs, including those from the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly.

Noam Jacobson, the 35-year old musician who plays Mavi Marmara’s Captain Stabbing in the video, told the Jerusalem Post that the video has received countless positive feedback, which he has been moved by.

Jacobson participated in the video during a break from IDF reserve duty beside the Lebanon border. He said that the video is not meant to be provocative. “In my eyes, what we were saying is the mainstream of the Israeli mainstream. It’s satire and satire that doesn’t aggravate isn’t satire.”

“We Con the World” has also generated some controversy after the Israeli Government Press Office accidentally distributed an email containing a link to the spoof song. On Sunday, the head of the GPO, Daniel Seaman, said the email was an “honest mistake” as it had been unintentionally sent to foreign press members on Friday as part of hundreds of routine daily emails. He added that the video is not the official view of the GPO and that the link was not supposed to be sent out to the agency’s general email list.

“We only send out videos that are officially from the government. This was a private video so it was not something that we could send out. We have corrected the mistake, but we understand that making a mistake and then correcting it is something that foreign journalists in Israel aren’t always familiar with,” Seaman said in an interview with theJerusalem Post on Sunday.