Nathan Pollak

According to one Hoover Institution campus fellow, "This is the first foot soldier activity that I think we've been forced to do."

A Hoover fellow who identified himself as "Marshall," explained the background of the protest: "It was basically like Noah Pollak coming in and being like, 'Look, there are these jihadis who basically support suicide bombing, and they're on a campus and you have to stop them.'"

"It's a chance to shout at Arabs," another fellow interjected.

Marshall, who is African American, divulged his fear that some media outlet might publish "a photo of Deon [another Hoover Institute fellow] and me together, and we're just like clearly identifiable. They're like, "Oh, who are these traitors who sold out to the Jewish conspiracy for money?'"

He then joked: "I'm like, 'We did! We cost $50,000 plus benefits."

Later, as the bus neared the SJP event, Marshall aired more doubts about the staged protest: "No, no, no - this is astroturfing... It's when you set up fake protests."

"It's not that astroturfing is wrong, it's just that your astroturf has to be, like, committed," he lamented.

Months before Al Jazeera's investigative unit went undercover in the Israel lobby, it interviewed me about the way the lobby operates. In the footage presented in this clip, I can be seen explaining that its outfits in Washington have been "manufacturing the image of a grassroots movement by taking corporate money and basically paying people to appear as activists."

[...]

During a private conversation with "Tony," the Al Jazeera undercover reporter who filmed the documentary with a hidden camera, Pollak explained his smash-mouth strategy: "The activism has to be very provocative and, like, attention getting and, like, total no-fucks-given. We're going to be more pro-Israel than you can even imagine. Just to, like, provoke everyone."

In arguing that his tactics were more likely to find an audience in the US than in the home country of "Tony," the Israel lobbyist unleashed a xenophobic diatribe.

"The majority of Americans are pro-Israel," Pollak said. "Whereas, if you take a poll of Israel in the UK, it's just pure hatred of Israel. You're country, like, basically let half of fucking Pakistan move in. So you have a different problem than we do here."

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