World War Three

The anti-US propaganda mechanism in the Middle East - centered in the Moslem/Arab world and partially in Europe - is a combination of political leaders, religious leaders, media companies and personnel, and ‘intellectuals’. What they purvey is a collection of conspiracy theories. People in the Moslem/Arab Middle East have no other access to opinion. [What they hear has some credibility because the same views are promoted by a small minority of Americans, however no one will change the opinions of these Americans, nor should the government be involved in propaganda directed against US citizens.] In any country there will always be some who are conspiracy believers, but we have to change the percentages so that only the extremists in any country believe them.
The further one gets culturally/geographically from the US, the easier it is to believe these conspiracy theories: they are believed only by a few in the US, believed by half the Europeans and by virtually all Moslem Arabs in the Middle East:
· we're in Iraq to steal their oil (I hear this all the time from radical Democrats);
· we are in a crusade against Islam (some radical African American groups and some extreme US Moslem groups: they also believe the Mossad ‘did’ the world trade center);
· Abu Ghraib is a reflection of Bush's policy (seemingly hinted at by one of your callers today);
· it's all a plot by US industrial interests (Halliburton/Cheney etc: I hear this all the time);
· US policy constitutes terror as bad as Bin Laden's (Chomsky etc)
· We are constantly wantonly killing innocent Iraqi civilians; it is our policy to humiliate Iraq and other Moslem countries.
· Just as the US does in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel wantonly kills innocent Palestinians by the thousands, just because they are Moslems/Arabs, as policy; Israel creates walls to starve the Palestinians, and roadblocks to humiliate them, these are not security measures they are deliberate acts of terror against Palestinians, just like the US actions in Iraq; and the US supports Israel in all this because they share the same goal: a Jewish-Christian crusade against Islam.

These are all untrue. But as long as people believe that our bombing of terrorists are actions against Islam, they will be motivated to volunteer as terrorists and we won’t be able to defeat terror (and eventual nuclear terror) just by killing terrorists. We of course have to continue our war against terrorists everywhere, but it has to be coupled with a policy of regime change in specific regions and information change everywhere abroad.

We have to find ways to get our message across. The US conducted regime change in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere, and these populations are better off for it, glad it happened, it is not a mark against their pride that the US helped them in this way, nor was it in order to steal their resources or humiliate them.

And there is hope: for example: A free government in Afghanistan and Iraq will be a start in their own countries, when people there will begin to see the difference between what they were told previously, and the truth. They will see the sympathetic way in which the Arab media, intellectual and religious leaders portrayed the terrorists who enslaved Afghanistan, and how they portray those Iraqis dedicated to preventing Iraq from being a free country. And eventually satellite TV stations in Afghanistan and Iraq can begin to bring a more balanced perspective to the rest of the ‘greater middle east’. But in the meantime we need to concentrate resources on explaining US goals, and showing how our actions are indeed directed towards fulfilling these goals rather than the goals attributed to us.

The bottom line is: our policy is good, our actions are good, our intentions are good, but we can’t win as long as the collective enemy can manipulate their masses - who they control and want to continue to control - into thinking the US is fighting a war against THEM, the people and their beliefs.
re Israel.

There are American citizens living in NY City who are convinced that Jewish residents of their own city were behind the WTC attack. If people in NY can believe this about people they see every day, clearly there is little likelihood of convincing Muslims living far away that this is not true.
It is often stated that the reasonIsrael is hated is due to mistreatment of Palestinians.
However, the enmity of the Palestinians has absolutely nothing to do with humiliation and other mistreatment; it would certaibly be aggravated if there were indeed mistreatment, but even without it they would be fighting Israel just the same. Making this connection is similar to the ‘logic’ of Hamas statements after each ‘targeted elimination’/assasination of one of their terrorists to the effect that they will send more terrorists ‘in revenge’ as though otherwise they would not have done so. The eliminations are justified or unjustified actions taken to prevent such attacks, and not the reverse (the attacks are not responses to the eliminations); similarly the actions of the army and often of the settlers, whether justified or not, are not the cause of the enmity and terrorism, but are justified or unjustified responses to it. The hatred is not ‘because’ of it. And, their hatred is not because of actual events as depicted for example on Israeli media reports, but is based on the biased and twisted versions presented by Arab and Muslim media, and in some local US newspapers read by minorities.
I saw Syrian and Palestinian TV ‘documentaries’ on Israel, filled with vicious lies and even occasional false ‘clips’ of soldiers shooting Palestinian civilians en mass like SS troopers in occupied Europe. The Palestinians are constantly claiming that all the settlers and the army are shooting civilians deliberately and systematically, continuously. The Israelis are called Nazis. The image of the situation in the minds of the listeners is identical to what they are told of the Holocaust, and this is of course deliberate. No wonder they hate Israel, and Jews. They are not told the truth. Based on the lies they fabricate and the distorted images they provide of the conflict, the various media outlets, TV stations and local newspapers government and private are inciting minorities in the US, Palestinians in the territories, as well as Muslims worldwide, to hatred of Israel. Any normal caring person would hate Israel and want it destroyed, and perhaps support terror against it if they believed this propaganda.
If Palestinians, world Muslims and Arabs (and American Israel-haters,) read Ha'aretz every day, and trusted its reporting, would they think that the actual actions of the Israel is the root of the problem? Would they hate Israel? I believe not. They would realize that they could make peace with Israel easily. SInce what actually happens is far closer to what Ha'aretz reports than what the anti-Israel media reports, it is clear that the problem is not the issues but the hate-propaganda. The antisemites blend Jews and Israelis, create lies about both, and hate all, settlers and kibbutzniks alike, and fabricate lies about both. Would those who spread this vicious propaganda relent if Israel were to simply withdraw from the territories: would they then portray Israel as a peace-loving nation, to be accepted by Islamic/Arab peoples? Perhaps. But I do not believe so.

http://pages.nyu.edu/~air1

# posted by Physicist @ 1:31 PM