PoliticalWarfare.org

EU makes progress on terrorism lexicon - but PC approach is counterproductive

It's only a coincidence that, just as my Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War report is released, the European Union issues a lexicon to guide officials when discussing terrorism. The EU development is the first significant step I've seen toward taking back the language from Islamist extremists by discouraging the use of words like "jihad" in reference to terrorism and other sociopathic political behavior. The guidelines, which are classified, appear to follow what my report argues in Chapter 3 about not mis-using certain Arabic and Islamic terminology. (Download fighting_the_war_of_ideas_ch_3.doc)

"The common lexicon includes guidance on a number of frequently used terms where lack of care by EU and member states' spokespeople may give rise to misunderstandings," an EU official tells London's Telegraph.

"Careful usage of certain terms is not about empty political correctness but stems from astute awareness of the EU's interests in the fight against terrorism," the official said. "Terrorists exploit and augment suspicions."

True enough. But so do secrecy and political correctness - big EU trademarks as Brussels to create a New European Person. And that's where the EU appears to be doing a disservice. As a Conservative MEP says in the same article, "It is this kind of political correctness and secrecy that creates resentment among both the mainstream in Europe and in Islam."

RAND report: Cold War experience can strengthen moderate Muslims

By drawing from the Cold War experience of uniting democratic people against Soviet communism, the world can help moderate Muslims unite against Islamist extremists. That's the thesis of a new RAND Corporation report titled Building Moderate Muslim Networks.

“The struggle in much of the Muslim world today is a war of ideas,” said the report's lead author, Angel Rabasa, a RAND senior policy analyst. “This is not a war of civilizations; it’s not Islam versus the West. It’s a struggle within Islam to define the character of Islam.”

“We cannot come in as outsiders, as a non-Muslim country, and discredit the radicals’ ideology,” Rabasa said. “Muslims have to do that themselves. What we can do is level the playing field by empowering the moderates.” This empowerment should come not as an afterthought, but as a basic element of US strategy.  Click here to order or download the report.

Wanking toward martyrdom

American forces have been capturing huge amounts of data that we can readily exploit for psychological warfare purposes against the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

While our military has battlefield intelligence exploitation teams whose job is to find direct military applications for what our troops uncover, we haven't made political and psychological use of the data on captured laptops and storage devices.

The April, 2005 video of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not being able to fire his weapon is a good example of properly exploiting battlefield intelligence for psychological purposes. But there's more.

Those supposedly devout Islamists - young, single, sexually frustrated young men - are often very addicted to pornography and, let's say euphemistically, to each other. We keep finding hard-core porn on their computers. There's a lot of drug abuse among them as well. Many of the terrorist attacks are literally aimed at random targets, carried out by joyriders high on synthetic drugs.

Relentless release and repetition of these facts, with the visual evidence to back them up (even if blurred or otherwise covered for decency's sake) will help tear apart the underdog image of these "martyrs" and expose them properly as sociopaths who deserve no sympathy and no quarter.

No doubt some of our Info Ops guys have already thought of this, but ran into more sabotage from the PAOs. We'll find out.

The Islamist attack on free speech

Islamists around the world continue to harass and intimidate their critics. Though in Europe and America they haven't resorted to systematic murder (yet), they are well on their way to silence those whose views they dislike - and they have no shortage of post-Christian bureaucrats, judges, journalists and lawyers to aid them.

Two new cases come to mind. The first is at San Francisco State University, where the school investigated student who stomped on a Hezbollah flag at an anti-terrorism rally last October. The supposed crime: Hezbollah means "Party of God" and because it appears on the terrorist group's flag (see illustration), the student insulted Muslims by stomping on the name of Allah.

Thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the university cleared the student of wrongdoing and issued a formal statement yesterday.

In France, where free speech isn't quite so free, the editor of a satirical magazine faces the prospect of half a year in prison for publishing the infamous Muhammad cartoons. French Muslim groups demanded his prosecution - and President Jacques Chirac agreed - because the editor supposedly had committed the sin of "publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion."

The Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations demanded that comedian and singer/songwriter Philippe Val, editor of Charlie Hebdo, be tried for - get this - "inciting racial hatred," according to The Muslim News. The whining hordes got their way. (We looked through the French press to find out if the Islamic Inquisitors had demanded similar prosecution of those responsible for the deadly riots and such, but found nothing.) Val writes about the issue in today's Wall Street Journal. A court is to decide his fate today.

Economic warfare a handy tool

by J. Michael Waller
Insight magazine, 29 October 2002

Al-Qaeda recently announced economic warfare against the United States and other Western countries. U.S. intelligence expects years of attacks on the economic infrastructure of the civilized world. For its part, the United States has an arsenal of economic weapons for this war, but critics fear it may have forgotten how to use them strategically — an important point, because proponents believe that strategic economic warfare thoughtfully applied by the United States could save innocent lives and avoid military conflict while achieving the same objectives as an all-out bombing or invasion.

Lessons of successful economic-warfare operations that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, veteran practitioners tell Insight, are valuable guideposts to help the Bush administration develop an integrated economic-warfare strategy. [Click here for full article]

Venezuela starts indoctrinating kids. Will parents act?

Back in 1973, Chileans were uneasy about the socialist policies of Marxist President Salvador Allende, but it wasn't until Allende started messing with children's minds that citizens demanded action.

Mothers banging pots and pans in the streets of Santiago helped encourage the Chilean military to overthrow the democratically elected president who abused his power and trampled the constitution.

Now, the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela is about to indoctrinate its first generation of school children. While that's bad for Venezuela's kids, it could be a last opportunity for the people finally to revolt and promote regime change in Caracas.

The Houston Chronicle reports that elder brother Adan Chavez (left, with Hugo), an ideological communist who until recently was the regime's ambassador to Cuba, is now Minister of Education - and pledges to instill socialist values" in the country's schools.

"In January, President Chávez declared education one of the five 'motors' driving his socialist revolution and named his older brother education minister," correspondent John Otis reports from the Venezuelan capital. The regime has nearly doubled per capita spending on education - not only for kids but for adults as well.

And with it, the propaganda campaign. "Last week, Adan Chavez sent hundreds of red-shirted 'brigade' members to different parts of Venezuela to hold workshops outlining the government's plans for education," according to the Chronicle. "He told Venezuelans to remain calm about the pending changes, which he said are designed to promote unity."

"We are not going to inject communism into children from the day they are born," he said on tate-run TV. "We simply plan to include in the curriculum ... the authentic values of society — which means socialism."

British poll shows optimistic Iraqis

Despite everything, most Iraqis polled now say that life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, and they are optimistic about the future of their country.

A British poll of 5,000 Iraqis shows that only 27 percent think the country is in a civil war, while 67 percent do not. One in four reports a relative murdered, one in four reports a relative kidnaped, and one in three has a relative who has fled the country.

Yet most Iraqis describe themselves as optimistic; by two to one they express confidence that the surge is working, and more than half are confident that the situation will improve after coalition forces leave. The Sunday Times of London carries the story. For more details about the poll, click here.

Islamists in US try to intimidate critic

An American Islamist group that has tried to portray itself as mainstream is trying to intimidate one of the nation's leading investigators of extremist activity.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has threatened The Investigative Project's Steven Emerson (pictured) for saying that the group told its members not to cooperate with the FBI, and that it is radicalizing Muslims in the United States.

For years, Islamists in the US have escaped scrutiny by alleging that their critics are racists and bigots, and by threatening legal action. Never cowed by such talk, Emerson recently corrected Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for meeting with radicals who masquerade as mainstream citizens, and thereby credentializing them. As CAIR and other groups have done to critics, MPAC has threatened Emerson with legal action.

True to his reputation, Emerson is unbowed. In an essay today for FrontPageMag, he explains the situation and documents his allegations against MPAC. More people should be like him.

[Note: Two people who share Emerson's courage are Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney and FrontPageMag editor David Horowitz. Gaffney has been warning for years about Islamist infiltration of the Bush Administration, only to see individuals with documented ties to Islamist groups burrow further into the US government. One such individual is Suhail Khan, a presidential appointee at the Department of Homeland Security. Khan demanded a retraction of Gaffney's allegations recently in FrontPageMag. Instead, Gaffney replied through Horowitz's electronic magazine that he had understated his allegations, and proceeded to document the Islamist connections of Khan and his parents.]

WSJ: 'Al Hurra more like Al Jazeera'

With the arrival of a CNN producer to run Al Hurra, the US-funded Arabic-language satellite TV channel has become "more like Al Jazeera," Joel Mowbray writes in the Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2004 to counter enemy propaganda and provide a good face for the US and its causes, Al Hurra has worked hard to build credibility as an objective and reliable news source.

Word is that, rather than investigate the serious allegations, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes attacked them. If true, that would be consistent with her office's response to warnings from friends of the administration.

After coming aboard late in 2006, Al Hurra chief Larry Register, long of CNN, "lifted the ban on terrorists" appearing on Al Hurra and quickly allowed the broadcast, nearly in full, of a speech by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, according to Mowbray.

"The cultural shift inside the newsroom is evident in the on-air product. In the past several months, Al-Hurra has aired live speeches from Mr. Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, and it broadcast an interview with an alleged al Qaeda operative who expressed joy that 9/11 rubbed 'America's nose in the dust,'" Mowbray writes.

"While a handful of unfortunate decisions could be isolated, these actions appear to be part of Mr. Register's news vision," according to Mowbray, who adds that Register doesn't speak Arabic, so he has no idea of what is guests are saying. Many on the Al Hurra staff reportedly delighted to allow terrorists to spew their propaganda on US-funded TV into the Arabic-speaking world.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which runs Al Hurra and the rest of US government international boradcasting, is out of control. It has destroyed programming that would mount an ideological attack on Islamist extremism; it terminated broadcasting to much of the rest of the world, including VOA's Russia service; and recycles Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) propaganda back into Iran on Radio Farda.

Even Norman Pattiz, the former BBG member who dumbed down international broadcasting and replaced it with popular culture, is discontented with Al Hurra's new direction. He says in the Mowbray piece, "Simply handing a microphone over to a terrorist and letting them spew is not what I would call good journalism."

Update, March 21: We hear that the Mowbray report sent Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes, who is responsible for public diplomacy and international broadcasting, into a bit of a dither. Rather than investigate the problem, our sources say she went on a kill-the-messenger mission, convening aides to refute the report. Another reason why she has been unable to drag public diplomacy out of its hole.

Should US government hire Putin's propagandists?

Should the United States government continue to do business with a public relations firm that takes millions of dollars to flack for the Kremlin?

Ketchum, Inc., a global PR company, took $15 million from the Putin regime to orchestrate the July, 2006 "Group of Eight" meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kommersant reported earlier this year.

CBS and the Christian Science Monitor report that the Ketchum operation was part of what they call "Soviet-style propaganda." They also report that Ketchum has been a US government contractor - for civilian agencies and for the US Army.

People are now starting to wonder why the USA would ever want to buy the services of paid propagandists for a KGB colonel and his gangster regime.