PoliticalWarfare.org

Welcome to the land of bad grammar

The big TV screen talks down to us as we wait in the passport control line: "You've traveled a long way. And we know you're tired." It's the message of the good people at US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC. The message tells us to be patient as we undergo a three-step process to get our "ticket" to pass through customs.

Actually, our flight from Latin America was not very long - only four hours in a nice new plane with pretty stewardesses who made the trip enjoyable - and few of us appeared tired. And the CBP process wasn't bad, either. But that's not the point.

The video and the accompanying gung-ho posters are an embarrassment to all educated Americans. "Your attention and cooperation is required," the announcer says on the screen. "Attention and cooperation is required"? Since when is "is" plural? Where did the CBP scriptwriters, editors, producers, announcers and officials learn their English?

And then there's the split infinitive on the CBP posters that decorate the passport control officers' booths. A "Pledge to Travelers" proclaims, "We pledge to cordially greet you."  Again: Poor English. There is no reason why CBP publicists can't say it properly: "We pledge to greet you cordially."

More relaxed people might say that a split infinitive is no big deal, that it's part of our everyday language. But thousands of well-educated foreigners, who learned English as a second language, pass through the line every week and know that the sign is wrong. The fact is, it's a serious thing when United States government can't even use proper English in the video and signs that welcome visitors to the new, showcase international airport at the nation's capital.

Finally, on the same poster series, CBP brags that it is "A world class law enforcement agency." 

What useless boasting is this? Isn't this something that most people would presume without being told? Would travelers expect anything less at the gateway to the capital of the United States of America? Would any law enforcement agency of the US government not be "world class"?   

We might expect such silly chest-thumping in, say, Managua or Ouagadougou. But in Washington, DC?

Come on, folks. The CBP officers work really hard to keep all of us safe. Ineptly prepared welcome messages don't befit them. It's better to have no message than the foolishness on parade at Dulles.

Wahhabi propaganda? Not!

People who advocate waging semantic warfare to widen rifts among the radical Islamists and split them from their support bases are obviously doing the work of . . . the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. This blogger apparently is one of them.

That's untrue, of course, but it's the logic of a few otherwise well-informed critics out there. Meanwhile, one of the leading Americans who has promoted the concept of using Islamic terminology to split the bad guys is being accused - falsely - of taking money from the horrid Saudi Arabian regime. The rest of us, according to the false accusers, are dupes. In their view, it's much smarter for the US to unite our Islamist enemies against us - along with most of the Muslim world - than it is to split them apart from one another.

Here's the situation. Prof. Doug Streusand of the Marine Corps University, Col. Harry Tunnell of the National Defense University and I are allegedly doing the dirty work of the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. We are unwittingly helping them, according to one person, because we argue that the US should split the "jihadist" movement by taking the narrative away from al Qaeda, Palestinian extremists, and Ahmadinejad, and empowering disadvantaged Muslims who lack the inclination or will to make war on us.

We developed our ideas, according to a recent column by Walid Phares, by following the "concocted" words of a "lobbyist" whose paymaster Phares won't mention but whom the reader infers must be a really bad guy. Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch.com, however, says it outright: the alleged Wahhabi paid propagandist is our colleague Jim Guirard.

Now, I like Walid Phares and respect his work, and the guys at JihadWatch.com are doing a tremendous service even though I don't always agree with them. Here's the problem: In this particular instance, they have their facts wrong.

First, we didn't develop these ideas on our own, but got them from Muslim scholars and Arabic linguists whom I cite in my writings. No Muslim should be expected to take a non-Muslim seriously on a theological question, which is why some of us urge merely that the US in its messaging amplify what the disadvantaged Muslims - who lack state backing from Riyadh or Tehran, or the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood - are saying.

Wahhabis have been trying to lay a claim on jihad that American policymakers generally have endorsed. Interpretations by non-extreme Muslims generally have gone unheeded. Having been one of the first to write about the "Wahhabi lobby" in Washington, I never found a case of Wahhabi-backed groups in this country questioning the absolutist, Saudi-sponsored propaganda theme, with one sole exception that was in direct response to an inquiry about a definition, and was a thematical part of a message. (If our critics would like to provide documentation to the contrary, I would like to see it and will gladly post it.)

In 2001 and 2002 I researched the Saudi-funded Grover Norquist network for my friend Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy, where I am a vice president, and published copies of the very checks that Muslim Brotherhood operative and convicted terrorist conspirator Abdurahman Alamoudi wrote to fund Norquist's Islamic Institute. Having written exposes of Islamist agitprop in this country and given Senate testimony about terrorist recruitment in prisons, I take it seriously when a good man like Phares says what he says.

But in this instance his facts are wrong. Phares' most damning allegation is that Guirard is a lobbyist who, we are led to believe, created his semantic warfare concept for his shadowy client. Though he uses the term "lobby" three times to try to discredit Guirard, Phares never says for whom Guirard lobbied, or when. If he had checked, he would have found that Guirard hasn't lobbied for about seven years, and he never lobbied for any Middle East interests.

Phares apparently got the "lobbying" misinformation from Hugh FitzGerald of Jihad Watch but didn't bother to check the facts himself. On July 9, Fitzgerald flatly - and wrongly - said that Guirard is "closely connected to the Saudis," and that "some say the Saudi Embassy and the Saudi lobby, all-powerful as ever, channel their views right through him...." Fitzgerald didn't say who "some" was, but we take it as editorializing in lieu of using the first-person.

There's no truth to the story. Guirard has no connection at all to the Saudis. That leaves us to wonder, Are these allegations a deliberate smear of Guirard over a policy diffence, or are they just sloppy and irresponsible reporting? I hope it's only the latter. In which case the accusers should retract and apologize.

Now, to tip the hat to Robert Spencer, any believing Christian or Muslim knows that the mankind cannot coexist in perpetuity on earth without his respective religion being supreme. Both faiths actively seek converts and teach doctrines based on their belief in divine revelation that their own religion will dominate the world. It doesn't take a "hater" to understand this theological fact. Much interfaith dialogue has addressed the issue. The fact that Muslims are more aggressive in spreading and enforcing their faith than are Christians is reason to give any true Christian pause.

But for government policy purposes, we are not taking a supernatural view of the current war of ideas. We are looking at this war as a conflict of men. In our secular, post-Christian society that recoils in horror at the thought of our government waging ideological warfare against Islamism, we would rather pretend that the fight is all about politics and culture. Only the Islamists and their followers, and a smattering of Christians, believe that the issue is spiritual warfare. For the rest of the world, including the United States, it's all a question of superior firepower, politics and self-flagellation.

And that's too bad. The Spencers and Phareses of the world certainly do have a point: for the most part, the most militant believers in converting the world's faithful are Muslims. The other believers are patsies in comparison. Even so-called "good" jihad has world spiritual conquest as an ultimate if vague goal. So in this sense, Spencer and Phares are right. That's a long-term strategic issue, and a religious one. Speaking for myself, my policy recommendations - to break the Wahhabi/Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda narratives - are strictly tactical and temporal, as I spell out in Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

From a Christian standpoint, it's understandable why our critics like Spencer and Phares take the absolutist positions that they do. But let's win the current war first.

What is not understandable - or permissible - is that they or their sources use inaccurate and even phony "facts" as bludgeons against good people like Jim Guirard. 

Odd hearts-and-minds logic from an Army instructor

How's this for an information operations tactic: Training American troops to increase their risk of getting killed in order to win over Iraqi hearts and minds. That's what one US Army JAG instructor appears to think. Consider what Bill Gertz reported July 20 in the Washington Times under the headline, "Deadly Hesitation":

"A U.S. military officer said the Army is still putting out rules of engagement (ROE) that are dangerous and could cause U.S. soldiers to get killed in the war on terrorism. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, recently expressed concerns that soldiers fighting insurgents and terrorists do not have clear guidance on the use of force.

"One recent session at the Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School in Charlottesville included an instructor who taught one class that 'we must hesitate and be careful when we pull the trigger,' the officer said.

"'They are teaching that even following ROE, while not illegal, may not be a good idea,' the officer said. 'They are teaching that to win the hearts and minds that we may have to take casualties through hesitations.'

"A Defense official said the problem with hesitation is that it is similar to saying that if a solider is confronted by an armed terrorist, he may have a legal right under the rules to fire but that he should hesitate on the theory that the terrorist could be won over through appealing to their 'hearts and minds.'

"The official said such advice is deadly.

"'As statistics show, hesitation in a situation like this gets a soldier killed,' the official said. 'Second, 'hearts and minds' in counterinsurgency operations refers to winning the hearts and minds of the innocent civilians through protecting them from terrorists.'

"The official said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. should find the instructor and have him fired. 'Either that or teach him the words to "Kumbaya" and send him into al Qaeda territory in Iraq, unarmed,' the official said."

How politicians will help the terrorists to win

Let's not even bother speculating about the reasons why, but the House of Representatives just handed the terrorists a big win.

During a House-Senate conference meeting last week, some lawmakers tried to get a provision in a Homeland Security bill that would protect citizens who report suspicious terrorist-related activity from being sued.

That's a big win for Islamist extremists. The majority party bowed to pressure from supporters of the "flying imams" - the six Muslim clerics who last November made the big show of making bizarre requests for seat-belt extenders with big heavy buckles, sitting in the exit rows and center of a plane in a 9/11 hijacker pattern, violating airline safety rules by milling around the cabin and leaving their assigned seats just after takeoff, then chanting anti-American slogans and yelling "Allah, Allah."

The "flying imams" are shown in the photo at Reagan National Airport, holding hands.

House Democrats blocked the good-citizen protection language because, they say, they're afraid keeping vigilant citizens safe from lawsuits would lead to racial profiling.

"I don't see how you can have a homeland security bill without protecting people who come forward to report suspicious activity," says Rep. Peter King (R-NY) of the House Homeland Security Committee said about his colleagues' action.

A federal air marshal adds, "The crew and passengers act as our additional eyes and ears on every flight. If they are afraid of reporting suspicious individuals out of fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, the terrorists will certainly use these fears to their advantage in future aviation attacks."

The Council for an American Islamic Republic (CAIR) led a protest to demand an investigation of US Air, which removed the suspiciously-acting men, as well as a probe of airport security.

No word yet about the names of the individual congressmen and staffers responsible, but we'll print them as soon as we find who they were.

On enemy propaganda, Pentagon tells it like it is

Three cheers for Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman! With top White House officials acting like henpecked husbands as they quaver in fear of upsetting the Senate Armed Services Committee majority, the Pentagon policy chief tells it like it is.

He told a very prominent and very aggressive senator that her campaign rhetoric "reinforces enemy propaganda."

It's about time the administration took on the people who are trying to do to Iraq what they did to South Vietnam: run their mouths without a care about how they might play into the enemy's propaganda strategy.

Edelman told presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that her cut-and-run talk was helping the enemy. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman said in a June 16 letter obtained by the Associated Press.

The cut-and-run rhetoric opened the way for the Hanoi communists to conquer South Vietnam. It rewarded Hezbollah for killing more than 240 of our servicemen in a single Beirut attack. And it gave Islamist thugs the confidence that by brutalizing the dead bodies of our Army Rangers on CNN, we would become demoralized and quit. Just as it is encouraging the Islamist terrorists to murder our servicemen every day in Iraq with roadside bombs.

"Such talk," Edelman warned Clinton, "understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

If the Senate majority party is working as hard as it can to force us to withdraw, then why should our nominal Iraqi allies cooperate with us? And why should the enemy let up its made-for-TV attacks?

Calling Edelman's comments "at once outrageous and dangerous," Clinton's office says the senator is going to complain to Edelman's immediate boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Keep it up, Secretary Edelman. Don't let the growing number of bed-wetters in the administration slow you down.

A fake al Qaeda leader, a cross-dressing cleric, and a bunch of losers in the land of Sodom

It must be quite a letdown for Islamist fanatics to learn that one of their leaders in Iraq doesn't exist and that their chief "holy man" tough guy in Islamabad is a chicken who wears women's clothing.

Two more rogues in the parade of losers masquerading as moral leaders of the new revolution.

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian sociopath with a fetish for beheadings and who knows what else? Remember the captured video showing that he didn't even know how to fire a machine gun, and how his aide was such a nitwit that he didn't have the sense not to grab a recently-fired automatic weapon by its 400-degree heated barrel? There are plenty of these guys out there. We should be heaping shame and ridicule on them as generously as we fling lead and steel.

During a long standoff with Pakistani authorities in June and early July, Red Mosque leader Maulana Abdul Aziz (in picture) brainwashed young captive girls to want to become "martyrs." But when the going got tough and Pakistani forces moved in and drilled his terrorist brother, the "holy man" tried to sneak away among a group of women and children, dressed head-to-toe in a ladies' black burqa.

“Our men spotted his unusual demeanor,” a Pakistani security official told Arab News on July 5. “The rest of the girls looked like girls but he was taller and had a pot belly.”

This week in Iraq, US forces say they unmasked another phony: the leader of the "Islamic State in Iraq," an al Qaeda affiliate or subsidiary. The leader, who went by the name Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, passed himself off as an Iraqi nationalist. Over the past year, al-Baghdadi has managed to escape attack.

In fact, according to American forces cited in the International Herald Tribune, al-Baghdadi doesn't exist at all. He's an elderly actor named Abu Abdullah al-Naima who records audio messages in al-Baghdadi's name. The reason: to cover up the fact that the organization is run by foreigners.

Al Qaeda invented al-Baghdadi to head its Iraqi front organization, then devised a plan to have its foreign members in Iraq swear loyalty to him as an Iraqi. The supposed #2 al Qaeda figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, reinforced the deception by referring to al-Baghdadi in his Internet videos.

So the pot-bellied Islamists are wearing women's clothing in Islamabad, and can't even get a real Iraqi to lead al Qaeda in Iraq. Which brings us to the last item of the day: These guys are a bunch of losers!

Why do we accord them the respect befitting a worthy adversary? Why don't our spokesmen apply more appropriate labels?  Why the morally neutral language applied to them? The Islamist enemy is scum. The leaders are cowardly cross-dressers, when they exist at all.

So why don't we apply the same labels to them as Margaret Thatcher did to the IRA? A commentator asks that question in - of all places - the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the Chronicle's July 20 edition, University of Pennsylvania philosopher Carlin Romano writes, "What might we argue in favor of calling terrorists names?

"Let's mention just one key goal: the education of the world's Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they'd have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists' intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.

"We should not minimize the thirst for respect among terrorists and their potential sympathizers. When we treat terrorists only as tactical foes, as though we're too jaded for moral talk, we raise the self-respect of terrorists and their appeal to young people."

Chopping up such vermin with bullets and bombs is only part of the fight, but it won't win the war. A most potent companion weapon is words - the unvarnished truth. If we use the truth better and more creatively, we can defeat the enemy.

It looks like our military in Iraq has caught on. Its exposure of the fake al Qaeda leader is an encouraging sign to split the terrorists and insurgent cadres from their commanders. We can defeat this freak show. Let's support our warfighters' change in approach.

Sophisticated online movie poster campaign proliferates on Islamist websites

Supporters of the insurgency in Iraq show a native fluency in American popular culture in a chilling new online propaganda campaign aimed at undermining American troops.

In an exclusive July 9 report, Sky News exhibits 14 Hollywood-style movie posters, most based on horror or action movies, satirizing the American military. The posters feature images of American troops and war casualties. The artistic quality of the posters exceeds most of the extremist propaganda aimed at Iraqi or other Muslim audiences.

While the origin of the posters at this time is uncertain, Sky News reports that the images are proliferating on extreme Islamist websites and attributes them to the insurgents. To show the type of propaganda the US is up against, we reproduce some of those posters at left and below. The full selection is available here.

The US has mounted no comparable effort, though this blogger has long advocated the widescale use of satire as a weapon in his new book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

Let's see how long it takes before more "mainstream" American and British opponents of the war start using these posters for their own political purposes.

Masterwork: RFE/RL briefing on Iraqi insurgent websites

Here's a real masterpiece of research that deserves a lot of attention: A 70-minute briefing on the insurgent and terrorist websites in Iraq.

It's relevant scholarship at its finest. I received a sneak preview of this presentation last spring, and thought it so important that I arranged a live briefing for senior-level policymakers in Washington prior to the report's completion. Now it's available to the public.

"The greatest strengths of the Iraqi Sunni-based insurgency's media strategy - decentralization and flexibility - are also its greatest weaknesses," according to a report released June 26 by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"The book-length report, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War Of Images And Ideas by RFE/RL regional analysts Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, provides an in-depth analysis of the media efforts of Sunni insurgents, who are responsible for the majority of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq," according to a release.

The 26,000-word report and a 70-minute audio briefing are available by clicking here. It's true to the highest standards of the old RFE/RL Research Institute and is one of the most relevant pieces of work to help win the war. I can't recommend this report highly enough.

Ex-Islamist says Western policies don't drive extremism - the theology does

Western foreign and military policies don't fuel Islamist extremism, a former militant says in Britain. The theology itself is the driving force, and it has little to do with the Western powers, says Hassan Butt, a former extremist who says he was part of the same terror network as July 7 London transit mass murderer Mohammed Sidique Khan.

Butt blames the extremist theologians who push murderous ideology based on anachronistic thought, and the Muslim community at large, which he says has failed to challenge the murderers.

"Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day," he says in a piece he wrote for the Daily Mail.

"I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

"Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

"If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

"And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism."

Westerners who blame their own governments unwittingly aid the terrorists, former extremist says

Westerners who blame their own governments for the rise of Islamist extremism are unwittingly doing "propaganda work" for the terrorists themselves. So says a former Islamist extremist in Britain, who blames militant ideologues who seek an Islamist state in what they see as a world of unbelievers.

"By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us," the former Islamist extremist, Hassan Butt, writes in the Daily Mail.

"More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

"The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

"And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

"For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone [pictured], said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

"I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

"And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice."