The Washington Post clarifies matters in an editorial on the “state of play”*** in Georgia:

Mythmaking in Moscow
Georgia wasn’t committing ‘genocide,’ and the Russians aren’t keeping the peace.

That’s just in case you weren’t paying attention. Here are the details, with “assertions of fact” that are false in the WaPo’s original italics:

Georgia committed genocide against the people of South Ossetia. This charge was initially leveled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and has been taken up by others, including President Dmitry Medvedev, who on Thursday came up with the interesting formulation that South Ossetians “had lived through a genocide.” Mr. Medvedev has referred to “thousands” killed, and Russian officials frequently have cited 2,000 South Ossetians killed (out of a population of 70,000). They have said Georgia razed the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. These purported depredations are given as the main motivation for Russian military intervention. … Independent journalists back up the account provided by Human Rights Watch. The Wall Street Journal, for example, yesterday reported finding Tskhinvali, where most of the fighting took place, mostly intact and with “little evidence of a high death toll.”

Russians in Georgia are “peacekeepers” on a humanitarian mission to protect civilians. This formulation has alternated with repeated Russian statements, repeatedly disproved, that Russian forces were not in Georgia at all, or were leaving, or were about to leave. In fact, journalists, human rights observers and others have documented that Russian troops have ranged far into Georgia, including the city of Gori and the port of Poti. They have razed, mined and looted Georgian army bases and destroyed civilian houses and apartment buildings.

———

*** It only looks like theater. The stakes are real enough.

Do the echoes of agitprop help or hurt Barack Obama?

Meghan Daum examines the issues:

Fairey told me he thinks it’s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I’m not so sure. He’s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools — the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the color red — is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let’s be honest, most people don’t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can’t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?

Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama’s sharp divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that’s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has “radical cachet.”

But if you like Obama and you’d like to see him elected president, it’s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end. [e.a.]

One of those images was mounted on a fence around the corner from my polling place. It creeped me out—because I know agitprop, and I didn’t like it associated with Obama: it was a huge turnoff.

Daum claims there’s Hillary merchandise too, so:

It’s all commodity. As a result, no one’s commenting.

Maybe. For now. But things change.

this update lends some spice to the scenes depicted below:

Egyptian police frustrate stream of Palestinian shoppers

Barcelona weeps for Gaza:

Thu Jan 24, 7:47 PM ET

Gaza vigil : Demonstrators take part in a candlelight vigil in Barcelona to protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. (AFP/Joesp Lago)

Too bad it wasn’t the Israeli blockade of Gaza but rather a Hamas propaganda production that turned out the lights. Note that Gaza’s “leaders” are working in candlelight despite the fact that behind the curtains, there is full, blazing sunlight.

(via NewsBusters)

Palestinian lawmakers attend a parliament session in candlelight during a power cut in Gaza January 22, 2008. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

The Jerusalem Post reports:

But some of the [Palestinian] journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight.”They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage,” one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. “It was obvious that the whole thing was staged.”

Are we surprised? No. By now even the Washington Post is decrying Hamas’s media manipulation and using quotation marks when referring to the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza:

Hamas took advantage of the blockade first by arranging for sympathetic Arab media to document the “humanitarian crisis,” then by daring Egypt to use force against Palestinian civilians portrayed as Israel’s victims. …

Mr. Mubarak and other Arab leaders have to resist the urge to roll over every time they are challenged by Hamas and al-Jazeera television. Would Mr. Mubarak allow tens of thousands of Darfur refugees to illegally enter Egypt from Sudan, where a real humanitarian crisis is underway?

The Times (London) declares that Hamas just had the biggest propaganda coup in its history:

As tens of thousands of Palestinians clambered back and forth between the Gaza strip and Egypt today, details emerged of the audacious operation that brought down a hated border wall and handed the Islamist group Hamas what might be its greatest propaganda coup.

Hamas, which took control of the coastal territory last June after a stand-off with Fatah, has denied that its men set off the explosions that brought down as much as two-thirds of the 12-km wall in the early hours.

I agree that Hamas’s exploits and the rushing of the crossing into Egypt of an estimated 350,000 Palestinians doesn’t make for a pretty picture for the Israelis. But it’s only propaganda if it has an effect on the desired party. And we all know that the American media—presumably, those are the folks that Hamas wants to impress—are obsessed with only one thing: the campaign for the American presidency. We know this because they barely bothered to cover Bush’s Middle East trip.

Nevertheless, Newsweek and Time also both declare this a PR victory for Hamas, and seem to be pulling for Hamas over both Israel and the United States to boot.

Meanwhile, the MSM barely pauses its campaign coverage—except when they’re descending ghoulishly on the body of a strapping 28-year-old actor, who died in SoHo yesterday, as ETP’s Rachel Sklar reports [e.a.]:

Cable news, too, reported on Ledger’s death — though only Fox covered it in the 5pm hour (MSNBC stuck with “Hardball” and CNN with “The Situation Room,” both of which seemed to stick with the Hillary/Obama spat and Thompson non-candidacy). We’ll see how those ratings stack up (indicator: The Ledger story was last night’s most-viewed clip on MSNBC, and #3 on CBS). …

The New York Times also covered Ledger’s death yesterday via its “City Room” blog; today’s comprehensive article by James Barron had no less than fourteen people listed as contributing reporters. …

The three nightly newscasts all ran segments covering Ledger’s death, with varying degrees of sensationalism: ABC teased it at the top of the broadcast with “First word is it could be drug related” and CBS’ website described the situation as “what authorities suspect is a drug-related death”; NBC stayed away from the cause of death in the tease and written description, and Ann Thompson noted that “police are looking at the possibility of an overdose,” noting the presence of bottles of “prescription drugs [and] non-prescription drugs.”

Though the day started out with the fed rate cut, Dem debate and Oscar nominations, the day’s big story was about Ledger’s death — and traditional media outlets could only run to catch up with the internet, particularly TMZ which, as usual, posted anything and everything in order to completely flood the zone. (Though I noticed the TMZ guy on with Greta Van Sustern didn’t correct her when she said TMZ had broken the story; from the looks of it, that one goes to Radar.) Not like we need any more indicators that the nature of the news cycle has changed, but this is once again evidence that the internet has muscled out the traditional media in covering — and driving coverage of — high-profile stories like this. For good or ill.

It’s definitely for ill, Rachel, if it excludes coverage of, you know, the news we actually need to know. But so it goes …

One of my favorite stories about ham acting was told (on himself) by Omar Sharif (he of the wet eyes in Dr. Zhivago). In 1995, he was interviewed for the New York Times and talked about his tendency to overdo his swooniness on camera

and the director David Lean telling him to cut the crap [e.a.]:

Mr. Sharif is always romantic. Eternally romantic.

“When we were making ‘Zhivago,’ ” he recalls, “David Lean, the director, used to say: ‘Omar, please take out the violins. I hear 28 violins.’ And I would say, ‘But I can’t!’ Then I would do the scene again and he would say, ‘Only eight violins this time.’ And I would say, ‘Eight violins is my minimum.’ “

David Lean was right, of course: less is always more—unless you’re director Jonathan Demme and you are attempting to beatify Jimmy Carter in your new “documentary” [e.a.]:

Forgive Jonathan Demme for approaching Jimmy Carter with so much nostalgia.  … [His film] mostly focuses on the publication of Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” in late 2006 and the controversial book tour that followed. The movie is a consistently fascinating, if too long, account of the unapologetic former president facing charges of anti-Semitism because of his belief that Israel is keeping the Palestinians prisoners on their own land [really? is that the meaning of "apartheid"?  ---ed.]

In that case, you want to turn up the violins [e.a.]:

Does Demme overstep his role of fly on the wall? Probably. Note that during some of Carter’s speeches, he places a faint fiddle and piano in the background to punctuate his subject’s sincerity. That’s too bad because the director has done some of his best work in the documentary field, most recently with 2006’s “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” without this kind of fawning.

Cheap sentiment from Jonathan Demme? No a surprise. His best work is far, far behind him anyway. Now he’s just given over to cheap cinematic tricks, not to mention blind faith in Saint Jimmy’s halo and general stupidity.

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 PRopaganda^TM (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.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

[update: I added a missing link]

Roger Cohen, a NYT reporter and columnist who has spent most of his career abroad, brings home a message: in 2007, America has a “diminished ability to influence people,” there has been “an erosion of American power” and at the same time a “solidification of anti-Americanism as a political idea.”

He suggests that the solution is for the U.S. to make Al Jazeera widely available:

Counterinsurgency has been called armed social science. To win, you must understand the world you’re in.

Comparative courses in how Al Jazeera, CNN, the BBC and U.S. networks portray the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be taught in all U.S. high schools and colleges. Al Jazeera English should be widely available.

This is a good idea for those studying the media, or writing about it, or producing it—I’ve been saying so myself for a good long while. We do indeed need wider knowledge of the world, and how the U.S. is perceived.

That’s no reason, however, to call for making Al Jazeera’s propaganda widely available to an already credulous and ignorant public.

Time magazine’s Richard Stengel first exposes to the light of day Ahmadinejad’s formidable PR campaign and then acts as a force multiplier for it by falling—hard—for the charm offensive:

The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran “requests the pleasure” of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There’s Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. …

This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.

Hmmm. Angenlina Jolie is of course a gorgeous movie star, so I can see why the press slavers over her. But what’s Stengel’s excuse for drooling all over Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance when he is a seasoned reporter, who is expected—and paid—to be shrewd, skeptical, and analytical? And, of course, when the stakes are considerably higher than merely giving devoted attention—and a platform—to a run-of-the-mill fame whore.

When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently.

Why, his manners were impeccable, in contrast to our rudeness! And surely that’s all that matters when everything else out of his mouth is an odious lie!

Early on—before the “how ruuuuude” meme broke out in the MSM—George Packer had quite a different view on this [e.a.]:

Some Columbia students condemned Bollinger’s withering introduction—as if free speech should also be free of consequences. They didn’t understand that they had just witnessed a small victory for intellectual freedom and liberal values. One student who got the point, Stina Reksten, of Norway, told the Times, “I’m proud of my university today. I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.” Ahmadinejad was given a chance to hold forth, but it was not a free ride. In inviting him, the university didn’t surrender its powers of judgment: his monologue of sophistry and lies was preceded by hard truths. Bollinger demonstrated that universities don’t have to cave in to their critics on either the right or the left—that certain principles are stronger than political opportunism.

I couldn’t agree more. And here’s what one TNR commenter—who has family and friends back in Iran—had to say about that [e.a.]:

I applaud Bollinger’s rudeness, because someone has to be. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be any Iranians - those in Iran are cowed the rest of us abroad have families and friends who could be terrorised to buy our silence.

I applaud Bollinger’s candour because for far too long, we in the Liberal West have applied our “notions of hospitality” without once thinking of the broader consequences. How many tyrants and dictators have we coddled out of politeness?

No, Sir: Bollinger was right in bring to Ahmadinejad’s attention what it is that any right-thinking man or woman finds offensive about him. And, in fact, he got the answer he was hoping for, the supreme expression of Ahmadinejad’s stupidity: “there are no homosexuals in Iran, not like here.” In a sense, of course, he is right - “not like here” - because they get hanged; but it was the broader implication that was the issue, and he got the response he deserved in the laughter and sniggers of the audience.

It is not necessary to [overanalyse] what happened. Columbia should not have invited the jackass; having done so, it should not have molly-coddled him. And Ahmadinejad should know next time not to accept invitations such as this, or expect brutal candour.

Indeed.

But ETP’s Rachel Sklar had by far the best angle on this story—on what a snooze it must have been for the participants to spend hours and hours in that room while A’jad and 23 academics droned on and on.

So that puts Ahmadinejad opening his mouth to speak at about 9pm. By now, dinner is long gone, so you can’t even toy with food on your plate. You may be on your second, third, fourth cup of tea and/or water, just because it’s in front of you. Are you allowed to leave the room to go to the bathroom, or will that offend His Craziness? (But if you do go to the bathroom, at least you can be sure that no one from the Iranian delegation will play footsie with you in the stall, ’cause they don’t have gay people there). Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad is just now warming up, “with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.” Aaaaah can this even be distilled to a soundbite? I would be pinching my thighs under the table to stay awake at this point.

This message has been approved by Committee to Clarify That We Have Identified the Enemy:

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

… to embrace Islam by OBL (who has taken to dyeing his beard):

“I invite you to embrace Islam,” bin Laden said, according to a transcript posted by ABC News on its website.

“It will also achieve your desire to stop the war as a consequence, because as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and have begun to look for an alternative, and this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam,” he said.

This is one confused dude. It sounds like he’s been reading the comments at Daily Kos, HuffPo, and Comment is Free.

In the illuminating documentary Billy Wilder Speaks, Wilder, a man who came of age in Berlin in the 1920s and fled Europe with the rise of Hitlerism and was the very essence of “been there, done that” ***—talks about politics. He says offhandedly to fellow European Volker Schlondorff (I’m paraphrasing): “Republican? Democrat? Who cares! In America,” he adds, “there’s not much of a difference between parties.”

Rudy Giuliani would certainly disagree with Wilder, as he made plain in the second Republican debate last night when he attacked Hillary Clinton for her enthusiastic embrace of statism (to put it kindly):

 Without mentioning her by name, Giuliani accused Clinton of believing that the free market is “disastrous” and that the government has to take money from citizens to spend on the common good.

“There’s such a stark difference there that this election in 2008 is going to make a very big difference about whether we go in that direction - the direction of removing private choice, putting … government in charge of so many things,” Giuliani said. “Republicans should be uniting to make certain that what the liberal media is talking about, our inevitable defeat, doesn’t happen.”

Were your knowledge of the world limited only to the full spectrum of ideas and positions spouted by American politicians, from the “hard right” all the way to the “hard left,” you’d have to agree with Giuliani that there are stark differences between the Dems and the Reps.

After all, isn’t Rudy the Fascist calling Hillary a Commie? How different can two candidates get? They certainly represent the opposite ends of the spectrum in mainstream American politics (i.e., the politics of the vast center), that’s for sure.

Which is where the Billy Wilder Perspective—a wide-angle shot encompassing not just American politics but sinister and inhospitable world politics—comes in. And that’s where I must concede that Wilder’s point of view is the sensible perspective from which to look upon American politics. +++

Also, there’s this post from Andrew Sullivan, who thinks that unpleasant, nasty harassment is a sign of the “Christianism” that threatens to swallow America:

Their take-over of the military continues under the radar. This time, they have been preying on sick veterans, including an orthodox Jew with kidney stones:

“Takeover”?

“Preying on”?

Darling, get me rewrite!

————————-

*** an attitude that resonates with me, because I grew up in a milieu in which it was the prevailing attitude. My “people” were not jaded; they were experienced, in the sense of having seen everything and feeling that they’d seen too much … but at the same time knowing they had survived. Because that’s what human beings are wired, and fated, to do. 

+++ Because, obviously, Rudy is not a fascist and Hillary is not a commie. Their biggest quibble is about how much of your money the government is going to take, and whether the government is going to give you (us) value for your (our) money. Everything else—and I do mean everything—is moot, because regardless of what the hottest partisans in the hottest partisan atmosphere say, we are all American to the bone and we love our freedoms. Even when the government tells us we can’t do something, we will find a way not just to do it but to contest it.

That is what makes us American. That is what we all have in common: the deep-seated, reflexive knowledge that, yes, you can fight City Hall.

This is not your father’s war.

It’s not Vietnam.

It’s not Korea.

It’s not the Cold War.

It’s not World War II.

It’s not the Great War.

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.

A quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger about “climate change” in today’s New York Times (in Thomas Friedman’s behind-the-pay-wall column) caught my eye:

What is “amazing for someone that does not come from a political background like myself,” said Governor Schwarzenegger, is that “this line is being drawn” between Democrats and Republicans on climate change. “You say to yourself: ‘How can it be drawn on the environment?’ But it is.

[[Ostensibly, Schwarzenegger was saying that climate change is a suprapartisan issue, which is true. To the extent that climate change is happening---and it certainly seems to be happening; the question is how quickly and what we can or should do about it---it certainly affects everyone on the planet---but not equally. However, to say that “the debate is over,” which Schwarzenegger also says to Friedman, is a crafty, cunning classic triangulation political maneuver. See Frank Luntz on this matter.]]

Back to the matter at hand, however, which is the politicization of everything in our country and our culture and our national conversation—a horrible path that we should resist, not encourage.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to be going in that direction. Today, for example, Andrew Sullivan suggests that America’s finest writers and thinkers—in this case, Emerson and Thoreau and Emily Dickinson—ought to be used as cudgels in a propaganda war against those who would deny ”climate change.”

In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. “America, The Beautiful” is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.

There is also, it seems to me, an authentically religious approach to the environment that is completely orthodox and defensible.

This is the essence of demagogy, helpfully defined by Wikipedia thus:

Demagogy (Demagoguery) (from Greek demos, “people”, and agogos, “leading”) refers to a political strategy for obtaining and gaining political power by appealing to the popular prejudices, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalistic or populist themes. 

Sullivan’s deplorable and grotesque suggestion that we should plunder America’s national treasure—its glorious art and literature—for political purposes is disgusting enough in itself.

That anyone would take Andrew Sullivan, entertaining and popular as he is, seriously on anything having to do with politics is a sad commentary on how far we, as a country and a culture, seem to have fallen.

This one tells the story (in the background, which is also where the eye falls first upon seeing this carefully composed photograph) of once-upon-a-time best friends Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat.

And it seems to have helped Mahmoud, because in a recent poll, Mahmoud (Fatah) Abbas was beating his new best friend Ismail (Hamas) Haniyeh by 9%, according to the AP.

The poll, conducted by the Ramallah-based independent polling company Neareast Consulting, was conducted by telephone among 759 Palestinians and quoted a margin of error of 3.56 percentage points.

“People have probably felt that (Abbas) did more to bring this unity government together than others,” said Jamil Rabah, who heads the polling firm.

Rabah said most Palestinians saw the unity deal as primarily a tool to put internal Palestinian affairs in order, with only 4 percent of respondents saying that making peace with Israel was a priority. The majority saw that ending chaos and infighting between Palestinians as the top priority of the new government.

This is drilling down into obscure details for most of my readers, but those of you who have been following along may remember that Hamas rose to power—and belligerently stated at every opportunity—on the platform of resistance (see this post for more details).

Here’s what one Hamas official told Spiegel magazine in the June 2006:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Now Hamas is no longer only a terrorist group or a resistance group, but also a governing party. Do you think — given all the chaos since the election success — that Hamas has carried out this transformation successfully?

Abu Marzook: Our task was not to change. The Palestinian people live under occupation, so we are still a resistance movement. The people elected us because they did not get the feeling that all the negotiations by Fatah had brought them closer to having their own state. We respect their choice, but we did not seek to be in the government.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But now that Hamas is in the government: Should it not handle its conflicts with negotiations rather than attacks?

Abu Marzook: Of course. On the other hand, we are not a government like any other independent state. We are a government under occupation. And the task of such a government is to carry out resistance, in every possible way. I think that every single Palestinian should resist, and should keep it up until there is an independent Palestinian state. [e.a.]

There is every reason to believe that the Palestinian people are more interested in the improvement in the conditions of their daily lives than in heroic resistance against Israel—except when they’re indoctrinated to believe that the only cause of all of their problems is the dirty Jews next door (along with the dirty Jews who rule the world in order to make everyone’s life miserable).

Let’s wait and see what happens. It’s all we can do. (Except for Dr. Rice, that is—and who knows what the hell her game is. It is almost certain that she herself has no clue.)

Rice is set to leave for the Middle East on Friday and will see both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as well as Abbas to try and get both sides to move closer to reviving stagnant peace initiatives.

 

She conceded the new Palestinian unity government, which was sworn in last weekend, “has provided something of a challenge.” But Rice said it was important for the United States to be stay engaged.

 

She reiterated a new U.S. policy that the administration would have contacts with members of the new government committed to recognizing Israel, agreeing to past Israeli-Palestinian accords and who renounced violence.

And how will this be determined? Do they pass muster if they’re “cosmopolitan” (see this post, which links to a piece in the NYT that refers to “cosmopolitan figures with whom the West is used to dealing.)
 

‘Cause there was a mountain of reasons, that’s why, and those idiotic assholes thought all the reasons would become self-evident when everything was “over,” that’s why. And the bitter, hysterical, profoundly unsettling laugh is on us (those of us who knew it was necessary to topple Saddam and who hoped against hope that those criminally negligent shitballs in power would do the right thing).

What, you don’t like that explanation? Well then one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has a rather nuanced one for you:

The fact is: we relied so heavily on the weapons of mass destruction argument because it was the easiest rung on which to hang our hat. Everyone knew that Iraq had stockpiles of at least chemical weapons. And once we got in there, who knows what we’d find on the biological weapon or nuclear weapon front? It wasn’t even a question in anyone’s minds, us or other foreign intelligence services. So we relied on that rationale, because it’s hard to make an argument that “we need to go in there and knock heads.” Even if that is what needs to be done.

Obviously, the strategy of relying on that justification was a horrible mistake. We’ve now lost total control of the narrative.

No kidding! Then the reader goes on to describe the stakes:

Walking into that bar is about demonstrating your power and credibility. If you get beat up, you’ve only demonstrated how weak you are, even if you are eventually victorious. If the sheriff manages to beat the local thugs into submission, but suffers a broken nose and cracked ribs and has to take the next few days off recuperating, then he’s lost all credibility both with both the thugs and the townsfolk.

This is basically the situation we are in now and why, instead of victory, we’re fighting for a narrow loss.

It’s so tiresome to find this nuanced, smart (reader’s) analysis on Sullivan’s blog followed by Sullivan going off, Savonarola-like, in hot pursuit of the evil in our midst.

When Dick Cheney looks weak, when he has made the U.S. look weak, we are in trouble. Weakness invites attack. If and when the next attack comes, Cheney’s failed strategy will be partly responsible. He hasn’t just undermined the soft power of the U.S. He has deeply undermined American hard power.

Not long ago it was Rumsfeld who was the Devil. Now that he’s gone, Cheney is the Devil. Who’s next? When Cheney goes, which Devil will Sullivan pursue? And will Hugo Chavez be invited to the hunt?

updated with a link and a footnote

Frank Rich wrote a long cry of anguish *** about how the Bushies sold us the war in Iraq under false pretenses—and I sympathize with his feelings of betrayal. Sort of.

If Rich were less an anti-Bush partisan and more an honest critic of the marketing culture of all of public life, he would turn his eye to other snow jobs, like the ony so ably described by Debra Burlingame in today’s WSJ:

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic “human face” on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda’s jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a “teacher on vacation” who went to Afghanistan in 2001 “to help refugees.” The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden’s chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of “bounty hunters.”

A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families’ full-service Web site which fed propaganda–unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media–aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a “war of pictures,” the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.

No matter how much you loathe its success and no matter how clever you are in exposing the details of it later, there is no arguing with a successful PR campaign.

Just as the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech, the remedy for a successful PR campaign for the other side is an even more successful PR campaign for your side. All’s fair in love and the culture war.

That’s all she wrote.

———

*** Interestingly, Oprah had Rich on her show to talk about the book even though she doesn’t usually do political books. For what it’s worth, she was lukewarm. She likes Rich and liked the book, but she was disappointed that it was a “rant.” Also: she questioned Rich about whether the Bushies had lied—had deliberately led us into war for bad reasons—or whether they just got “bad information.”

She wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I would consider her view the mainstream view, and I would consider Rich’s accusation of deliberate lying by the Bushies (i.e., with its innuendo of evil intent) a non-mainstream and thus off-putting point of view.
But what do I know?

Who’s afraid of big, bad Fox? Garance Francke-Ruta at TAPPED, that’s who. She dimwittedly believed (with the encouragement of Moveon.org) that John Edwards was actually going to take a moral stand against Fox News and shot from the lip and heaped praise on him before actually doing any reporting … or even thinking about it. Excuse me while I laugh myself silly:

A BOLD MOVE. John Edwards is the first Democratic presidential candidate to pull out of the Fox News sponsored Democratic presidential primary debate scheduled to take place in Nevada later this year, and kudos to him for doing so. None of the Democrats will get a fair hearing on that channel as it currently exists, and freezing Fox out of the loop early is a good way to make a play for fairer coverage later in the campaign season, as well as for fair treatment of the eventual nominee. Fox is biased, but it’s still enough of a news organization that a lack of access will sting mightily and could lead to newsroom reforms.

Oops! A few hours later, she realized the, um, error in her, um, judgment:

A POTENTIALLY AWKWARD MOVE. I’d like to revise and extend my remarks on John Edwards and the Nevada Fox News debate, as I’ve just received new information that casts Edwards’ decision in a rather different light.

That “new information”? Why, it’s that the

Congressional Black Caucus [CBC] Political Education and Leadership Institute plans to announce two debates in concert with Fox News,

and that the CBC has previously worked with Fox News, in 2003.

So I guess Fox News is okay now. ‘Cause the it’s okay with the CBC. And we don’t want any “intra-party” fighting now, do we?

I’m not part of the gun culture and I don’t know anything about it (although I do have a home in a corner of rural Red America where there is a gun culture—the local gunshop is called Big Toys for Boys—and many of the local men hunt: for food. The venison from one deer can go a long way to feeding a family).
Knowing nothing about them but their name, I have to say that “assault rifles” sound like overkill to me (no pun intended) when it comes to hunting. (I repeat: that’s how the term sounds. Hunting isn’t about “assaulting” animals. It’s about killing them.)

Now a once popular big-time outdoorsman/writer has been purged—overnight—for suggesting that assault rifles are “terrorist” weapons.

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo’s fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America’s gun culture — and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

“Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity,” Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. “As hunters, we don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

The reaction — from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association — has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo’s career appears to be over.

His top-rated weekly TV program on the Outdoor Channel, his longtime career with Outdoor Life magazine and his corporate ties to the biggest names in gunmaking, including Remington Arms Co., have been terminated or are on the ropes.

Now, someone tell me how powerful and influential the nefarious Israel Lobby is. I dare ya.

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 Osama bin 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:

(via LGF)

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:

(via EUReferendum)

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:

Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images

Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August

Which is more effective—hate-speech laws or the race-tinged animosities broadcast across the Sceptr’ed Isle in Celebrity Big Brother? The Sun tabloid isn’t waiting around for anyone to pass a law or do a study. It addresses race and class issues head-on, if shockingly.

Graham Dudman, the Sun’s managing editor, writes:

We all need to take a stand against racism, which is why we at the Sun have put the issue on the front page.

The idea of this front page was that it was intended to shock. We knew some people would find it offensive that we had used these words. But we had the permission of the children concerned, and their parents, and went ahead after full consultation with Trevor Phillips and the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

The point is that, whether we like it or not, this language is in our playgrounds and on the street every day. And it is absolutely wrong. What starts with this kind of racist name-calling is that people are getting marginalised. And that breeds extremism, which leads ultimately, as we saw with 7/7, to young people being willing to cause mayhem and kill innocents by blowing themselves up.

Not everyone is buying, of course:

What then, to make of today’s Sun front-page? On one level, it deserves to be welcomed and applauded. Any message which points out the values and life that we share, that prejudice based both on background and on the colour of our skin is completely unacceptable, and that children especially are often the ones that suffer the most from the unkindness and closed-minds of their peers ought to be celebrated, especially coming from a paper with such a poor history both of promoting forgiveness and tolerance. It’s just that I don’t believe the Sun means it, and there are also far more sinister undertones beneath its apparent road to Damascus-type conversion.

Such as?

[T]he very reason for the Sun running this on their front page has to be related in no small measure to the decision of Shilpa Shetty to sell her story to [the Sun's rival] the Mirror.

Ah, the pressures the free market.

Except: there is something to be said for it, of course. And for pop culture as well, as the brilliant Charles Paul Freund noted in 2003:

A different sort of conflict broke out this summer in the Middle East — one involving reality TV [an Arab American Idol clone called Superstar]. While it offers more evidence that the region is in the grip of a liberationist pop culture frenzy (see “Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah,” June), it also demonstrates that even the region’s pop fandom can fall prey to conspiracy theories and divisiveness. …

Supposedly, the entire Jordanian army had been ordered to vote for Jordan’s contestant. Supposedly, Lebanese leaders had failed the nation by not mobilizing support for Zein. Supposedly, Syria, which controls Lebanon [not anymore, of course --ed.], had exerted itself to control Superstar as well.

And that was a good thing, said Freund, because:

as fan-based cultural identity grows in the region, it expresses itself in terms of the area’s traditional nationalist or sectarian divisions, engendering group enmity and suspicion. The effect of commercial culture, however, is to dissipate conflict by lowering the stakes. Modernist identities (drawing on such influences as fandom) are fluid and changeable; the resulting communities of interest are numerous and temporary. Zein’s fans have now contented themselves with creating a Web site in his honor.

Superstar’s winner, by the way, was Diana Karazone, the singer from Jordan.

Commercial culture dissipates conflict by lowering the stakes—that is a brilliant insight on Freund’s part and a useful one when you throw it into the mix with what Aayan Hirsi Ali and David Kilcullen have to say.
And then you start to think about things in a different way: the aura of rock stardom that, for example, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah has created for himself and his movement: he seems to be seeking (and gaining) fans more than converts.

And then you start to think about the description “[r]ising al-Qaeda star Abu Yehya al-Libi” that Abu Aardvark used (with good reason) the other day when describing a propaganda video.

And then you remember back when France was threatening to ban head scarves in the public schools, Jeremy Harding suggested that maybe somehow the French were less culturally evolved than the British when it came to manipulating cultural “signs”:

In Britain, we know how to nurture an ironic infatuation with signs of difference, status and style. Maybe the flummery and camp of our political institutions and our enthusiastic approval of layering and posturing have helped us to achieve our multiculturalism. That we got usefully from Black Rod’s tights to Ali G’s tracksuit (probably via Dad’s Army) is not going to help us understand the French position, whose Jacobin demand for the transparent citizen is something we recoil from.

And then your head explodes.

In case you happen to be in Iran and catch wind of this news,

Israel Massacres Lebanese by Poisonous Balloons

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Genocide by poisonous balloons is the new method employed by the Israeli army for killing people in southern Lebanon

It’s not true.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Are you allowed to nap in a mosque?

Why, yes, if you’re the president of Iran. How sweet.
The Sandmonkey has something to say about this, though:

Of c