[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.
There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on thetranslation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.
When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.
But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:
If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.
This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:
Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.
Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.
In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:
Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.
Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.
This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:
Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.
Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:
“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.
It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.
If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”
John Bolton accuses her of having ceded to Hezbollah under the pressure of its fauxtography campaign.
[T]he main reason for America’s retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who “changed her mind fundamentally” after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. “Rice exerted enormous
pressure on me to reach an agreement already,” he said. “Until Kana, the U.S. wasn’t interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated.”
She wanted to get the pictures off the TV screens, regardless of the cost. What an incompetent dolt.
I decried the lack of attention to fauxtography here.
I suppose we’re going to have to have a lot more experience with this new weapon in asymmetrical warfare before we get secretaries of state who stick to their guns rather than cave in to demented neanderthals like Nasrallah.
Carlos Edde, head of the National Bloc party which is part of the March 14 Forces in Lebanon, has criticized Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah for announcing that his organization was holding body parts of Israeli soldiers.
Edde said: “I never imagined that a Lebanese political leader… would shout before hundreds of children and before television cameras that he has body parts and is proud of it. The worst thing is his joy in trading in these body parts.”
“Your army left behind the remains of soldiers in our villages and fields,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, addressing the Israeli people during a speech to tens of thousands of Shiites taking part in commemorations marking Ashura.
“They [Israeli army] were so weak on the field that they left behind remains not of one, two or three but a large number of your soldiers,” Nasrallah added.
“One body is almost complete,” Nasrallah said. “What did the [Israeli] army say to the family of these soldiers and what remains did they give them?”
The Hizbullah leader’s comments sparked outrage in Israel, which prides itself on doing everything to recover the remains of its soldiers from fields of battle and has in the past freed prisoners in exchange for remains of soldiers and civilians.
And now some Israelis are calling for his assassination. I’m sure that Secretary Rice—who finds it so inconvenient to hold Israel’s enemies accountable for their destructive behavior—will find some way to condemn the “cycle of violence.”
I suspect the AP must have rewritten the story since he provided the link, because the version he posted starts like this [e.a.]:
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants with suicide vests, grenades and AK-47 riflesattacked Kabul’s most popular luxury hotel Monday evening, killing at least two people in a coordinated assault rarely seen in the Afghan capital, witnesses and a Taliban spokesman …told the AP.
The version of the story that’s up at the link starts like this:
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants stormed Kabul’s most popular luxury hotel Monday, killing at least six people as they hunted down Westerners who cowered in a gym — a coordinated assault that could signal a new era of brazen Taliban attacks.
And the story is told from the p.o.v. of the victims and survivors this time. The “militant” perpetrators’ “spokesman” is still quoted, though.
Kudos to Charles Johnson for going where the MSM won’t go: on the attack against enemy propaganda.
First the MSM was challenged by the blogosphere. I’m beginning to think that MWLs (mainstream world leaders) and political and geopolitical institutions will soon be challenged in unexpected ways by the technological revolution.
A previously unknown (at least to me) group has posted to YouTube a trailer for what it hopes is an upcoming geopolitical event. (I do not endorse the group or the trailer or the message. I am merely passing on the news about a revolutionary kind of political action made possible by the technological revolution).
A cinematic trailer serving as a tool for marketing Israeli Initiative’s political message is starring in the list of the most popular video clips on YouTube just a few days after its release. …
“The Last Fanatic depicts a would-be suicide bomber who unexpectedly calls off his attack plans – which leads the viewer to question what led him and his supporters to deviate from their path,” a statement released by the Initiative said.
This is entertainment as propaganda—the very essence of infotaiment.
We decided to translate the campaign into the language of the Internet generation and of the Web 2.0.,” said Israeli Initiative’s strategic campaign adviser, Yuval Porat.
“The use of the cinematic language of a short and rhythmic trailer and advanced marketing tools, which were used, utilize the new arena in an ideological manner, which create file-sharing websites, including YouTube, and enable exposure to millions of visitors throughout the world and in Israel,” he said.
Political philosophy packaged for the YouTube era. Brave new world indeed.
Mike Huckabee is the new master manipulator, according to two versions of the same story (both by the same writer, Kit Seelye) in the New York Times. Here’s the one that was printed in the dead-tree paper that arrived on my NYC doorstep early this morning [e.a.]:
In a bizarre bit of political theater, Mike Huckabee told news outlets on Monday that he was not going to broadcast a negative commercial against Mitt Romney, his chief rival in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Then he showed that advertisement to the news media, which in reporting the announcement went on to give his anti-Romney message free publicity while he claimed the moral high ground.
This version—quite negative in tone, no? Note that the political theater is said to be “bizarre” and that Huckabee was “claiming” the moral high ground while rolling around in the mud—also suggests, albeit very tangentially, the author of the successful tactic (Ed Rollins, “the Brawler,” who recently signed on with the Huckabee campaign).
In the Times, Seelye notes, at the end of her piece:
There appeared to have been some dissent in the Huckabee camp over whether to attack Mr. Romney. In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee’s longtime campaign manager, Chip Saltzman, insisted the campaign planned to maintain a positive tone until the end. But on the same day, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican consultant and Mr. Huckabee’s new national campaign chairman, said he expected to begin firing back in a few days.
The other version of the Kit Seelye story, which you can find here (I got the link via Ann Althouse), made no specific mention of the fact that the strategyworkedbut made it abundantly clear that it had worked:
In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Mr. Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.
The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the journalists who watched Mr. Huckabee’s legerdemain even as they became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.
At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed. It criticized Mr. Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, saying he supported gun control, allowed a co-pay for abortions in his health plan, raised taxes and ordered no executions.
This version is a lot softer in tone. For example: “political jujitsu,” like its martial-arts namesake, is an art—something to be admired rather than loathed (like a “bizarre bit of political theater”; see above).
Kinda makes me wonder what happened between these two versions of the story. In any event, however, the strategy worked.
Huckabee made the news, and the media carried his anti-Romney message.
In a rare moment of self-reflection from a member of the MSM, Seelye explains (in the more negative piece) how this happens [e.a.]:
The circumstances of the commercial and the nature of free media, particularly now with YouTube, make it likely that the advertisement will be viewed far more often than if it had simply run. There is a long history of news coverage guaranteeing a commercial publicity that money could not buy.
In 1964, the “daisy” spot, which suggested that Barry Goldwater’s election would lead to nuclear war, was broadcast on television just once. And in 2004, advertisements by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s military record, had a limited run in a few small markets before being widely covered in the press.
If I had one wish for 2008 (and forward), I would wish that everyone in the American media—reporters, pundits, columnists, bloggers, and news and entertainment executives—would get wise to how they always risk being played not just by political enemies at home but also by those abroad: the world’s bad political actors.
Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co. … I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage-you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us.
Since our media-saturated world is here to stay, it only makes sense to focus attention on the sophisticated media strategies, PR initiatives, and PRopaganda narratives of any player (whether domestic or foreign) who would make a claim on our attention (which is itself increasingly fractured by the many channels and niches available to us—but that’s a subject for another day).
Players who seek the attention of the media—including especially the world’s bad political actors— have all learned to market themselves to us as if we were potential fans and customers, and a lot of naive but influential people fall for their act.
We Americans need to be alert to the absence of truth from much of that kind of advertising—particularly as more and more celebrities, who often have a deficit of political sophistication and also have a disproportionate influence on the public, get in on the act.
It sometimes seems as though celebrities today are obsessed with trying to move the global agenda. Like Angelina Jolie. Think of how she’s changed her image since her breakup with Billy Bob Thornton. In February, she published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur. …
Jolie is just one of many star activists. Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow — all have used their celebrity status to push their favored causes in an effort to affect what governments do and say. But why do they do it, and will it work?
Drezner’s focus is on the effectiveness of celebrities’ advocacy on policy decisions (mixed at best, since results—if any—take a long time to show up; change happens slowly in the real world). I’m more interested in their ability to influence public opinion. Drezner explains how they exert their influence—through us, their fans:
[T]he power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.
In Drezner’s formulation, cable TV (which is almost all views and no news), talk radio, and blogs are now news sources. I disagree: they’re spreaders of racy, juicy, dramatic, sensational headlines that provoke strong emotion. They are, in other words, infotainment. But I digress.
My point is that celebrities—because we fall in love with them so easily and can hardly ever fall out of love with them, because it’s their job to seduce us—have an outsize influence in this new universe of infotainment-masquerading-as-news. We should all be more circumspect about our indiscriminate fandom.
Maybe in the new year I’ll have time to explore this topic some more.
The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).
Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:
This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University
Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].
By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.
“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”
And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.
The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopagandaTM(PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.
Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)
Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.
The Flack writes:
Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.
Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.
The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.
It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.
Al-Zawahiri accused the global media of manipulating Osama bin Laden’s most recent recording, by omitting its most important parts and by misinterpreting bin Laden’s statements. Al-Zawahiri said that bin Laden’s criticism was not directed against the ISI alone, but against all jihad fighters in Iraq, and that the jihad had shattered the monopoly held by the government and media that pretended to be independent, such as the BBC, and that the jihad was today directing “the most important media battle against the Crusader-Zionist enemy” and exposing the world to facts to which it had not previously been exposed. He added that the jihad had triumphed in this ideological battle just as it had triumphed in the battle over the Internet websites.
Imagine that—the “global media” can’t even get Osama bin Laden’s message out. What’s the world coming to?
Well, Zawahiri will have to get in line behind everybody else who’s been maligned and misrepresented by the mendacious media.
The Politico notes that the political campaigns are all revved up:
The presidential campaigns in both parties have begun reacting ferociously to real or perceived attacks from rivals, goaded by a tight campaign calendar that leaves no room for error, and a determination to show they’re tougher than John F. Kerry was in 2004.
All of the candidates have sought to exploit any whiff of negativity from their opponents by pivoting off the charges with counterattacks designed to gain sympathy or political advantage within their own party.
This is yet more evidence, for those who need it, for the validity of the Feiler Faster Thesis, in which Mickey Kaus was making an observation about momentum in politics. He suggested that with the speeding up of everything in our everyday life,
there are now simply more opportunities for turns of fortune and that voters are able, for the most part, to keep up. …
”The FFT, remember, doesn’t say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed.” [e.a.]
Campaigns are responding rapidly to attacks because they are trying to turn every moment in the spotlight—even (perhaps especially) moments of crisis—into an opportunity. They have learned the hard way that unless you answer every attack, you leave yourself open to the possibility that your opponent’s displeasing narrative about you, or his attack on your image, will stick to you.
Rapid response is about upping the ante, about fighting bad PR with better PR in the hope that you will accrue an image of yourself appealing enough for voters to cast their ballot for you. What’s amazing about it is that politicians do this even though most voters aren’t even paying attention. They just cannot afford to stand still as the river of news***rushes by them.
——————-
*** Doc Searls recently elaborated this concept. I’m still trying to process it. Totally fascinating stuff:
Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now. …
News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.
But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.
There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.
This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.
Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.
To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.
Two rabbis from the Wiesenthal Center are outraged that the precious words of Hamas representatives were recently published on the op-ed pages of the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post:
Consider Hamas’ summer hot streak. Not only has it driven Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas out of Gaza, threatened Israeli civilians and bombarded fellow Palestinians, but it has scored the ultimate media trifecta. First, the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously ran Op-Ed articles by Ahmed Yousef, a senior leader of Hamas who defended his group’s bloody putsch in Gaza. Now, the Los Angeles Times has opened its Op-Ed page to Hamas political bureau deputy Mousa Abu Marzook for his insidious take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But haven’t the rabbis heard? Newspapers are dead. Today’s op-ed is tomorrow’s Already Been MasticatedTM blogospheric flotsam and jetsam. Onward with the project of gaining supporters—i.e., PRopagandaTM—at Feiler Faster speed.
“We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem,” Mr Haniyeh told thousands of Friday prayer worshippers at Tehran University in Iran.
I can’t tell whose NYT coverage of the ascension of Sarkozy is more breathless, that of MoDo or that of longtime Europe correspondent Elaine Sciolino.
I know! I’ll let you be in judge. In fact, we’ll have a little contest.
Is it Dowd or is it Sciolino?
Dressed in a sleeveless, shiny, champagne-colored dress designed by Prada, Mrs. Sarkozy, 49, and the children lined up for the cameras on the red carpet leading into the palace.
Inside, the Sarkozys made several public displays of affection, squelching the rumors — at least for now — that they were no longer a couple. He kissed her on the cheek under the glare of the television cameras. At another point, he approached her and touched her cheek.
At a celebratory reception after he officially took office as president, she returned the affection. He leaned over to peck her on the cheek, but she turned to face him, planting a kiss on his lips.
Such a display was out of the question during Mr. Chirac’s presidency: he and his wife have such a formal relationship that they call each other “vous,” even in private.
Okay, okay—it’s Sciolino who’s gaga over the Sarko and Cécilia Show. Which is kind of amazing, because she’s a fairly sober reporter. Here’s Dowd yesterday. You can barely tell the difference.
Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.
Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.
Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.
When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.
Mr. Lagardère stepped in again to kill a story in another publication he owns, Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper was going to reveal that Cécilia did not bother to vote.
On the night Sarko won the presidency, Parisians were watching Cécilia’s every move. She was not there when he won or when he made his acceptance speech, and some of her friends were saying that the marriage was over.
But her two pretty blonde daughters from a previous marriage apparently prevailed on her to show up later that night at a victory rally. She came dressed down in a gray sweater and white slacks, in what one friend said had originally been her “escape outfit,” and looked distracted as her husband spoke, plucking at her sweater.
At the post-rally party, Paris Match — now following the Sarko script — was given an exclusive on their happy reunion. They were in a hotel suite, the magazine said, behaving “like lovers.”
“And the new president, regaining for an instant the taste of rhythm that invaded him in his youth, took a step in dance,” the story said. “In front of all their friends reunited, he dances for a single person: Cécilia.”
Hallelujah! fresh meat for the global infotainment grinder!
Mr. Sarkozy appeared oddly ill at ease as the outgoing president guided his inexperienced successor up the steps. Mr. Sarkozy tried to regain the advantage by placing his hand on Mr. Chirac’s shoulder, but the choreography failed to work.
The body language spoke volumes about the tension that has characterized the two men’s relationship over the past three decades, despite efforts to bury their differences in the final weeks. The pair then spent half an hour in a private meeting in which the new president received the nuclear codes that permit him to launch a strike within a minute.
Mr. Sarkozy’s speech was heartfelt, if punctuated by nervous tics and shoulder shrugs that betrayed what his enemies claim is a worrying lack of self-control.
Mr. Sarkozy’s mother, Andrée, sat in a throne-like chair. His once estranged father, Pal, a minor Hungarian aristocrat, was also present. He is believed to have been reunited with his son only very recently. His desertion of the family and reported warning to little Nicolas that he would never amount to much is said to have sparked his son’s burning ambition.
After the pathos, the passion: Mr. Sarkozy planted a kiss on the lips of Cecilia — whose absence during the campaign had fueled rumors that the couple was going through fresh marital problems — and gave her cheek an affectionate squeeze. Then, under the glare of the cameras, it was her turn to surprise him with kiss on the lips. It is not known whether Cecilia and the children will move into the Elysée Palace with her husband.
Meanwhile, however, back at the ranch, dark plots are being hatched:
An Al-Qaeda front group in Europe has apparently threatened to launch bloody attacks in France in response to the election of “crusader and Zionist” Nicolas Sarkozy as president.
A statement posted on the internet on Tuesday purporting to be from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades claimed the group would soon carry out attacks in Paris.
“As you have chosen the crusader and Zionist Sarkozy as a leader … we in the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades warn you that the coming days will see a bloody jihadist campaign … in the heart of Sarkozy’s capital,” the group’s “Europe division” said in a statement addressed to the French people.
The U.S. Congress wants to ban use of the terms “war on terrorism” and “Long War.” I have no dog in that fight, just so long as they understand it—and explain it and contend with it—as a war, in which the American public must be engaged.
I don’t know who dreamed up the distasteful and repellent tactic of allowing the 15 British military personnel held hostage by Iran to sell their stories to the voracious British press, but I do know that the person who gave it his okay understands reality, the war, and the stakes.
The 15 Royal Navy personnel held captive by Iran are to be allowed to sell their stories to the media.
The Ministry of Defence said their experiences amounted to “exceptional circumstances” that allowed its usual ban on such payments to be lifted.
Politicians and military commentators have attacked the move, warning the crew may lose public sympathy. …
Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said: “Many people who shared the anxiety of the hostages’ abduction will feel that selling their stories is somewhat undignified and falls below the very high standards we have come to expect from our servicemen and women.”
I haven’t had time to think this through yet—it is an extraordinary turn of events. The British wartime government has decided to allow information to go deliberately out of its control. Clearly, it is a calculated strategy. To me, it looks bold, daring, risky, cunning, deeply cynical, and clever. Let us hope that it’s not too clever.
The notion of an “information war” is not limited to the battlefield of the Middle East. Increasingly, politics will be fought through PR-Bordering-on-Propaganda.
Douglas Farah reports on an uptick in media offerings from al Qaeda, which, like everyone else these days, has to struggle to remain relevant in a merciless 24/7 media environment and with an audience that has the attention span of a flea:
This past week has been interesting for the sudden re-emergence of the high-profile al Qaeda/salafist propaganda machine, showing a broad range of Islamist actions to demonstrate the movement is alive and well, and triumph is inevitable.
We get the publishing [of] a slick web zine, the “Voice of Jihad,” after a two-year hiatus, including directions from Osama bin Laden to attack oil facilities; a Zawahiri interview blasting Bush for fairly current events; the release of videos by al Qaeda in Afghanistan, supposedly showing attacks on Coalition forces; and, as Evan Kohlmann finds new video releases by Al Qaeda in Iraq, including the biographies of foreign troops killed there.
As Farah notes, al Qaeda is focused on media. These recent propaganda efforts are impressive compared to previous grainy videos from the group. This speaks to the group’s determination to communicate and spread its message globally. Which it has so far done quite successfully:
Much of what is said in this recent spate is entirely propaganda, but it cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. It shows those who visit the jihadi sites that the Islamist movement is alive and well, capable of delivering messages and combating the enemy on a sustained basis.
Then Farah veers into my favorite topic—message creation.***
Any insurgent group, fighting in an asymmetrical context for the long term, has to develop a narrative to justify itself, comfort its often-beleaguered members and attract new members. …
In this case the narrative is that Islam is on the rise, the West is in retreat, and that Allah has already granted victory to the faithful. All that is lacking are more willing recruits.
And this is where we move into the counterterrorism territory suggested by both anthropologist David Kilcullen and “Enlightenment fundamentalist” Aayan Hirsi Alik, who have both said that potential jihadis must be turned away by appealing alternatives before they sign on to the extremists’ seductive agenda.
Farah writes:
What must be developed is the counter-narrative, one that resonates, explains the weaknesses and defeats, and can help drive away new recruits.
It is hard, but not impossible. Multiple insurgencies have faced, and suffered from, effective counter-narratives that were culturally appropriate and accessible to the right population.
It is not clear we have a counter-narrative, in part because we still do not agree 1) one who the enemy is and 2) that we really are in a war.
The last point is depressing but true. I want to know more about the counter-narratives Farah is talking about. And I wish I could see evidence that others were paying attention to this subject, of paramount importance.
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s NYTimes leads with a story that says reports of al Qaeda’s death have been greatly exaggerated:
Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osamabin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.
In light of their recent calls on followers to hit oil installations across the world and to be sure to film their actions, I think it’s safe to say they want to put on a really good show.
——–
*** I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co. Today, for example, he writes:
Let’s not forget that the White House’s stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House’s political interests.
I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage—you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us. We need a guide to understanding their behavior, too.
The term “fauxtography” was coined after the events in Qana, Lebanon, this past summer. It’s a disturbing concept and an even more disturbing new reality. I just came upon a picture that illustrates (better than a thousand words) how the fauxtography sausage is made—and how hungry is the appetite for that sausage:
Jeroen Oerlemans, The Netherlands, Panos Pictures. Paramedics show the dead body of a baby to the press after Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon, 30 July 2006
Of course, war photography doesn’t have to be so extravagantly manipulated [[scroll down for the head-on version]] in order to raise controversy. When Mathew Brady exhibited some of his photographs during the American Civil War, it had the opposite effect of what he hoped: the public was shocked and turned off.
[[ I will save the subject of contemporary war photography for another day (though you can see an example of it Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses images as an enhancement to his rhetoric on his blog. And why not? I do it, too. I tend toward the satirical whereas Sullivan tends toward the shiv-to-the-kidney. What can I say? All is fair in love and war—every war: remember Johnny Got His Gun?
That’s the first thing I thought of when I clicked on the link Sullivan sent me to. Dalton Trumbo’s searing, graphic anti-war novel was published in 1939, on the long eve of our entry into World War II, and republished as we sank into the jungles of Vietnam. Everything old is new again. Unless you can pull off the Born Yesterday (TM) dodge or the Who Knew? (TM) defense, on the theory that Every Day Is Groundhog Day (TM) ]].
Stepping back into another era, I can attest to the power of a couple of Vietnam War photographs (and a lot of the era’s extremely successful homefront propaganda, as for example, this, but that’s also a subject for another day).
When the photo below was published in 1972, it caused a sensation. It seared the conscience and delivered a message in a way that the continuous loop of jungle-warfare scenes on nightly TV did not; if anything, those news reports deadened us to the war. With arresting photos like this, the feeling in the air was palpable. We thought we could sense the rest of the country tipping over to join us in anti-war territory. And still Nixon was re-elected.
In 1996, Charles Paul Freund wrote about “Vietnam’s Most Harrowing Photo” and the double-edged sword that is war photography:
Kim, 9 years old in 1972, had taken shelter with others in a pagoda when the American military ordered the South Vietnamese air force to attack her village of Trang Bang because it had been infiltrated by enemy forces. The pagoda was hit, killing, among others, two of Kim’s brothers. Terrified survivors streamed onto the highway, where photographer Ut snapped them. Kim is naked, screaming in fear and agony, in the center of the image.
Breaking the fourth wall behind that scene, Freund notes:
[Photographer] Ut’s was not the only camera present; the sequence exists on film as well. Because it is more dreadful physically, the film is less potent emotionally. … [T]he filmed sequence closes out the event, and gives viewers an opportunity to shrug it off. Ut’s photo is of a crowded highway winding eternally through hell, and it won’t let you go.
Indeed.
[T]he picture ran on front pages throughout America. Benjamin Spock, who chose the photo to speak for him in the 1994 exhibition “Talking Pictures,” certainly echoed many of its viewers when he wrote simply, “[I]t horrified me,” and credited it with confirming his opposition to the war.
And it worked for the North Vietnamese, too:
The image was, of course, an important piece of atrocity propaganda for the North Vietnamese, who were themselves responsible for significant suffering both before and after they attained power. Like all such atrocity material, it undermined the morale of the side responsible for the pain it depicted.
Yes, and that’s why this kind of propaganda is such an effective weapon in asymmetric warfare. However, Freund makes another crucial point:
But the political manipulation of imagery doesn’t delegitimize its content. The pain here is only too real.
Indeed—in the Vietnam photograph Freund is describing, that’s true. And that’s also what makes it distinct from the example of fauxtography I’ve been discussing, which is staged atrocity propaganda. The effect is immediate. We stop and look. We are shocked and horrified. And that is all. For: the baby is dead, all right, but we feel nothing. And not just because there are dozens of photographers in the breaking-the-fourth-wall version of the photo above.
It’s because there is a difference between authenticity and, well, faux-ness. See for example this “original” photo from the series taken at Qana:
compared to this, which won the World Press Photo of the Year and which was not staged but which is rich with meaning—the awful authenticity of glitter and doom living side by side in Beirut in the summer of 2006:
Well, if you’re Hezbollah’s would-be rock star Hassan Nasrallah, you soften your tone, admit to mistakes, cop to your own international support, clarify your opponents’ failures and your own heroism. Oh yes, and you project your 40-foot-high image on the wall of a government building so that no Lebanese need miss your TV interview.
Hizbullah supporters gathered near the government house watch on a giant screen Nasrallah speaking during an interview on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television, in Beirut, Lebanon. Photo: AP
She’s barely out of the gate and, as expected, Hillary Hatred is in full flower.*** Because I’m not a politico and therefore am not in the habit of obsessing about the (alleged) deep meaning behind each and every word that comes out of a potential candidate’s mouth, it is fascinating to see the thinking of someone who does do that kind of parsing.
For example, Matt Stoller,was a big fan of James Webb’s direct, uncomplicated “progressive populist message” in response to the State of the Union, is deeply unhappy with Hillary’s “mushy, untrustworthy glop.” +++
A progressive populist message would work in bringing us huge national majorities and a mandate for massive change. Still, if this is so obvious, why are we only hearing populism, or even a pale attempt at populism, from John Edwards (and Tom Vilsack)?
On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. It’s a winning message, so why not use it? Well, it’s a winning message, alright, but only for the public. And right now, Presidential candidates are tailoring their messages for elite donors, and the rich don’t really care about inequality or Iraq. They care first and foremost about preserving the status quo, because in the status quo they are, well, rich. That’s a problem, because if your message is targeted towards the top 1% of the country, you’re leaving 99% of the country out of the conversation.
By far the worst example of this disturbing trend among 08ers is Hillary Clinton, who is rolling over donors and trying to prevent a primary from even happening by scooping up mindshare among elites before anyone else can organize. When you hear that you aren’t credible unless you can raise several hundred million dollars, realize that this is an idea planted by these elites to entrench their power, and not something that is falsifiable. It bears saying that it’s quite probable that don’t need $100M to run for President - Kerry didn’t lose the General because of a financial disadvantage, and he didn’t win in Iowa because of a financial advantage. The ‘only credible with $100M’ idea is another and more sophisticated version of the electable or inevitable meme that hurt us so badly in 2004. It’s something that Hillary Clinton wants us to believe is true. Whether it is true is a different story. [emphasis mine]
How do you “scoop up mindshare“?
How do you do it “before anyone else can organize“?
Can you teach it? Can you bottle it?
I hope so, because it sure would come in handy in the fight against global jihad, which David Kilcullen has talked and written about. The insight that struck me is that young Muslims increasingly choose the path of jihad because there are no compelling alternatives. And he says a big part of the West’s job is to create equally compelling, attractive alternatives for these young men. (At least that’s my takeaway—and I’m particularly interested in how the media helps make both jihad and its [future] compelling alternatives so attractive.)
Could some Democrats please give me an indication that they are starting to think about how to “scoop up” disaffected Muslims’ “mindshare before anyone else can organize”?
——————-
***I am not among her fans, but I am no longer among her detractors. The Eight-Year National Psychodrama drove me crazy, but time heals all wounds. Hillary has grown, and so have I. Life does that to you—or, rather, it should do that to you. If you haven’t examined your feelings about Hillary Rodham Clinton (or anything or anybody else) in the last 6-8 years or if you haven’t examined your opinions in the last 30 years, may I kindly suggest that it’s time to look inward.
At any rate, I will consider her on the merits when it comes time to cast my vote. Believe me, I had to grow (and the world had to change, too) in order to get to that point.
+++For those of you who, like me, are not politicos, Stoller elaborates on his anti-Hillary stance. It’s worth following along if you want to understand one split in the Democratic party:
In fact, everything that Hillary Clinton is doing is designed to make us think that she cannot be stopped, to pull the plug on money for others so she can get through the nomination without having to be clear on Iraq or populist in orientation. She is desperately fighting against having to do what Jim Webb did so well - spell out plainly the irresponsibility of political and economic elites. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a strategy. Or maybe, and this is what I believe, she sympathizes with the elite class more than the public, believing that the public are sheep who can be easily manipulated. She herself hasn’t lived in anything close to the real world since 1991. …
Ironically, though she is popular among some base voters and most progressive elites, few activists, bloggers, or local politicians actually want Hillary as the nominee. Local politicians are desperately afraid she will hurt downticket candidates all over the country. Progressives know she hasn’t dealt with Iraq, and will cripple the Democratic Party badly as Iraq gets worse in 2007 and 2008. And political junkies know that she has done very little that is substantive in the Senate except grant Bush the power to go to war and pander on flag-burning and video games. Politically, Hillary has passed out enough favors and kept every group atomized and fearful enough to make her seem both unpalatable and inevitable. That is why her camp is claiming that they are in the netroots primary, when they are simply not.
I believe her tending to an elite audience and ignoring the concerns of various activists explains the loathing of Hillary Clinton within a certain piece of the progressive base. I’ve noted before how one slice of primary voters is pretty similar to the netroots. This loathing isn’t based on the right-wing slime machine, though often progressives unwittingly slip into discussions about things like ‘electability’. It’s a loathing that is more ‘gut’, more about conflicting identities. Chris has noted this with his excellent series of about a year ago on class stratification between the activist class and the elites. Hillary Clinton is an establishment elitist, and we are opposed to this institutional baggage.
Demographics aside, one way to theorize about our ideology is that we have seen and rejected the triangulating model of politics. It’s not that Clinton wasn’t a good President in the 1990s, it’s that he failed to enact anything that outlasted him. He got nothing done on, say, global warming, and failed to establish a firm post-Cold War framework that Bush didn’t detonate in five minutes. More relevantly, the Clintonistas performed horribly in the 2000s, acting as lobbyists and warhawks, and just generally working against progressives until they realized they couldn’t overtly beat us in the PR game.
So it’s not surprising that the Hillary Clinton campaign is working to convince the DLC that she’ll do the 1990s over again, only this time with an extra helpings of the strategies that failed. …
I asked anti-Clinton people if there were ways that Hillary Clinton could get your support. A few argued that if she apologized for her war vote they would consider her, but surprisingly, a number of people said, flat-out, no. I’m beginning to understand why. There is almost no common ground between progressive activists and elitists like Hillary Clinton. Either you are in the elite stream of discourse, the place where health care can be debated without anyone in the room fearing the risks of being uninsured but where the fear of your client losing his business model is real, or you are with the plebes who are worried about their personal health care. You are either angry about being lied to about Iraq, or you are one of the unapologetic liars. We’re on one side. The elites are on the other. We can’t handle someone who enabled the war and now won’t be straight with us on Iraq after four years of watching our America slowly die. It just isn’t possible anymore for us to be in the same conversation because there is nothing to discuss. I won’t be that surprised if Clinton wins the nomination, but what she needs to fear is if the various entities that loathe what Hillary Clinton stands for start talking to each other. Right now, there’s a reticence to criticize Senator Clinton because of the legacy of the right, and because we don’t like to go after Democrats. I doubt that reticence will continue as the candidates attack each other. Hillary Clinton is a tragic figure, …
Our enemies are masters of media manipulation. But “information victories” without on the ground success are thin facades.
I agree that “information victories” are thin facades. They are better, however, than no victories at all. What’s more: score enough of them that are “sticky” (per Malcolm Gladwell) and you can actually change a narrative. That makes “information victories” very important in a hearts-and-minds war such as the one that Hezbollah continues to wage. We shouldn’t underestimate their importance.
It is dispiriting to watch various jihadi and Islamist groups, in the West and everywhere else, manipulate the media again and again. It is way past time for the West to start scoring some “information victories” of its own—particularly in the (seeming) absence of “real” victories.
We cannot afford too many “information victories” for jihadis and Islamists. l
I can’t believe I’m posting about this, but everyone’s kvelling and schvitzing over where to position themselves on Iraq is just too amusing to ignore. I’ll start with Mickey Kaus, and I note only that it’s a rare day when Mickey gives Howie Kurtz a nod, as he does here:
Logic says we should be able to separate support for the war from support for or opposition to the surge, as H. Kurtz has noted. But politics seems to often dictate surge-bashing as a sort of emotional and political make-up call for failure to oppose the decision to go to war in the first place.
The link to “H. Kurtz” takes you to Glenn Reynolds, who’s got a bunch of other links to reactions to Pam Hess’s appearance on Reliable Sources yesterday, which I wrote about here.
I hope Hess’s appeal to reason gets through. I fear it won’t, but I hope it will.
But perhaps you live in Lebanon and have a yen for different scent, one that reminds you of Hezbollah. How about buying “Resistance Perfume”? It’s unisex, it sells for only $1, and it
comes “exclusively” with a political message and a picture of Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Apparently, the scent of resistance is a strong and musky one that comes with a single pledge - “a truthful” one.
“You are the truthful promise … and I have great faith in you and I promise you divine victory,” is the perfume’s slogan, borrowed from one of Nasrallah’s speeches during the July-August war with Israel.
A digitally manipulated picture of a sinking ship, meant to represent the Israeli warship damaged by a Hizbullah missile during the conflict, along with reprints of Nasrallah’s speeches and messages from the “Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons” - are all part of the perfume’s package, turning a cover into a political message.
It’s the “green” choice too, by the way:
“We can put popular European brands” in the “Resistance” bottles, he said. “Versace, Chanel, Escada, white musk, floral scents, whatever scent you want, you can get.”
*** The headline refers to Hezbollah’s propaganda campaign, begun immediately following Israel’s smashing of Hezbollah strongholds to smithereens. The ad campaign proclaimed, in French, Hezbollah’s “divine victory” over Israel. I wrote about it here, and I’ll be writing more about propaganda and PRopaganda(TM). They go hand in hand with infotainment.
