Ronn Torossian

Ronn Torossian is the communications and marketing consultant for Media Watch International (MWI), a spokesman for Aish HaTorahl, and President and of CEO 5W Public Relations, a public relations firm he founded in the spring of 2003. Forbes describes it as one of the fastest-growing 500 firms. Business Week, in 2007, said it had a staff of 85.

Zionism
Shortly after graduating from college, he moved to Israel for two years. He founded Yerushalayim Shelanu (Jerusalem Is Ours), a secular organization promoting the right of Jews to live anywhere they choose in the city of Jerusalem, with fellow Betar alumni and peers, today Likud Members of Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) and Yoel Hasson (Kadima). Within two days, " activity surrounding the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras el-Amud. Torossian accompanied the first group of residents moving into a building purchased by none other than Miami-based philanthropist Irving Moskowitz" was on the cover of every daily newspaper in Israel. The Jerusalem Post quoted him as "I feel very at home with Israel and Israelis,"  and described him as a proud Jew, who speaks Hebrew fluently. His mother was born in a post-WWII displaced persons camp in Poland, meeting his father, a Jerusalem native, in Israel. She "forced" him to join Betar in his early teens. It was a move, he says, that "changed everything: "I aspired, and still do aspire, to help the Jewish community in any way I can, whether spiritual or material." The interviewer asked him about the public relations sense of the State of Israel and of Barack Obama. "Perception and reality are two different things. The job of a good PR person is to create his own reality. It's true that I don't think Obama is good for America and business. As a Jew, I certainly don't think he's good for Israel. Does that mean that I don't think he's brilliant at PR? No. By the same token, I am a Jew and a Zionist at my very core. Israel is a part of my soul and my identity. I love the State of Israel. But does this mean that I think it has good PR? Absolutely not."

Clients
His clients include programs for rapper Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs' Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment Group, Clinique, Fox News Channel, Yankelovich Partners, Verisign, Marriott Hotels, Pamela Anderson, Tzell Travel,  the Government of Israel.

Reputation
Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic and the Center for a New American Security, detests him, calling him the "most disreputable flack in New York" and citing his involvement with the film "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West". It's said of Ronn Torossian that he represents "right-wing" Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. "Right-wing" is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.

Business Week agrees he is one of the most prominent under-40 public communicators, and "echoes the raw, unvarnished discourse of the blogosphere, which he claims to understand better than anyone. Brian Connolly, who founded the irreverent PR blog Strumpette, says Torossian represents 'what the industry has become."' Perhaps, but Torossian and his 85-person agency face a conundrum. The tactical provocations may cut through the media noise. " The article suggests he may be more of a fad, and unable to sign blue-chip clients; his clients also have conflicting messages. "one can only imagine how Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson to infuse education with 'God's glory,' feels about sharing billing on 5W's Web site with LifeStyle Condoms and Pamela Anderson. When asked, Regent put the query to Torossian, who told BusinessWeek: 'Clearly, many of our clients have nothing to do with one another.'"