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October 9, 2005
Fighting Low
The interesting thing about how we are fighting the propaganda war against the enemy and his hangers on is that we don't seem to get their worldview at all. I can kind of understand that: we at least pay lip service to being logical and reasonable1, and in the main we2 tend to actually be at least somewhat logical and reasonable. But the Arab cultures are not logical and reasonable cultures; they are superstitious, tribal, honor/shame cultures. This shouldn't be hard for us to get a grip on — our ancestors were much the same — but for some reason it is. If we want to win the propaganda war in the Arab world, we need to fight the propaganda war in the Arab world symbolically.
To get an idea of this illogic, the jihadis claim that god is on their side — sorry, for them, it's GOD is on their side — and He will smite the invaders, and cause the very rocks and trees to call out against the infidels (that's you and me), in order to bring about the global Caliphate as has been ordained. Nothing shakes that kind of faith except alternate superstitions. It's like using methodone to wean addicts from heroine. On top of that superstitious base, the Arab world is conspiracy-oriented (I think that this is the true connection between Western extremists and the jihadis), rumor based, and deeply suspicious. So to argue against this kind of thing, we have to fight on the level of rumor, conspiracy, and superstition.
It so happens that the world offered a prime example this weekend of the kind of event we should be exploiting: the Pakistan earthquake that killed, apparently, over 18000 people — Katrina math: 2000 or so. We should be playing this up as proof that god hates the jihadis, and wants the US to win in the war, and was shaking the ground beneath the feet of the heretic jihadis who have been slaughtering Muslims3, including women and children, in Iraq and, of course, Kashmir (where the earthquake hit hardest). And so on. We should also deliberately target well-known terror-supporting imams and mosques (and governments), killing the imams and desecrating the mosques.
Fighting low? You bet, but then this is for keeps, and we'd better fight to win.
1This is the reason for the intelligent design argument: the supporters know, deep down, that they cannot win an argument on the emotional or faith arguments (which are powerful in and of themselves, at least to the Abrahamic religions), because those arguments are not given credit in society. Since it is the scientific — or at least seemingly-scientific — logical and rational arguments that society tends to give credit to, the intelligent design proponents are forced to try to win the argument by the nonsensical claim that what they are doing is science. It may be true, though they would have a long way to go to convince me, but it's not science.
2Excluding the mid- to far-Left and the far-Right, anyway.
3This is apparently somewhere in the Koran, because the terror-supporting imams quote it all the damned time in their sermons.
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Comments
We should be bringing shame on them via the press but the Western press is actually on their side because of stupidity.
Islamic terrorists should be made fun of, they should be humiliated as ignorant jerks. Laughter should be a weapon.
Posted by: Xixi at October 10, 2005 12:44 PM