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Category Archives: Cognitive Warfare (SG’s Thesis)
If it worked with the Danish Cartoons… why not let Facebook know what’s in store?
Danish Cartoon clash of civilizations continues. I’m reading Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons that Shook the World for the conclusion to my book (overdue). It is a work that strikes some as genuinely “even-handed,” but strikes me as (therefore) genuinely superficial and misleading about Islam and its many manifestations in the 21st century. Anyway, if mainstream media like Yale and Comedy Central caved, cybernautic Facebook has, so far, not. As a result, demonstrations in Pakistan that take us right back to London in 2006.
One illustration of the protests in Pakistan against Facebook’s “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”
Some of the signs displayed in demonstration in London, February 3, 2006 to protest publications of Danish Cartoons.
Note the Pakistani signs in English: This is part of a global cognitive war, in which Sharia is extended to dar al Harb in the matter of treatment of the Prophet. Infidels must, as Dhimmis in dar al Islam, respect the sensibilities of the Muslims, and the death they threaten to those who refuse to obey, is precisely what Dhimmis are “protected from” as long as they remain good subjects.
Apparently, according Waqar Hussain of AFP, the vitriolic response prompted, yet more apologies.
News Media, Arab Honor-Shame, and Operation Cast Lead: The Failures of Cognitive Egocentrism
A segment from a long essay on the Goldstone Report to appear in MERIA in January, with embedded video.
In some senses, it might be fair to argue that the news media believe that by emphasizing the humanitarian catastrophe, they contribute to peace. By putting pressure on the Israelis, they reason, they can help to stop the bombing. Christiane Amanpour quite un-self-consciously revealed the calculus in a question to Tony Blair:
Amanpour to Blair: “The civilian casualties in Gaza are obviously going to put a big pressure on Israel. How long can Israel withstand this pressure?”
Note that Amanpour asks the question with great confidence – this, she clearly feels, is a good, even shrewd question – unaware of what she reveals about her own thinking. Indeed, from her point of view, this isn’t even advocacy; it’s such a widespread attitude that it has the status of Realpolitik.
Now when such diplomatic dynamics are so obvious to the media, what’s to prevent them from thinking that the more they emphasize the humanitarian catastrophe, the sooner the violence will end?
Aside from the multiple, highly questionable, assumptions that underlie such apparently “self-evident” reasoning, the question also reveals a fundamental position of advocacy or bias – the “solution” will come from pressure on Israel, not on Hamas.
For a fascinating example of the cognitive dissonance that results from confronting Hamas, a journalist asking an Arab spokesman why Hamas doesn’t just stop the fighting, consider this exchange between “rational” BBC interviewer, Karen Ginoni, and the Arab League Ambassador to the UN, Yahya Mahmassani.
Reflections on the Global Conference for Anti-Semitism, Jerusalem, December 17-18, 2009
I attended most of the two days, but missed important events at the end of each day (including, alas, the final dinner). I missed the first day’s events at the Knesset so I could do the interview with IBA. So my remarks will be less “comprehensive.” Overall, it was well-planned, well-organized, but of limited scope. Repeatedly attendees complained about the problem of limited follow-through – there should be a dozen smaller meetings generated by the Global Forum during the year, rather than an annual meeting the inevitably has to play off “political speeches,” with informative material from researchers.
From my perspective there were two serious lacunae. First, I am now fully convinced that Israel’s (and therefore the West’s) problem is not a matter of hasbarah (explanation, clarification, PR, Public Diplomacy), but a cognitive war in which the physical battlefield (where Hamas/Hizbullah/Fatah will always lose), is an adjunct to the cognitive field (where, as every speaker attested in one way or another, the drive to delegitimate Israel is succeeding). This cognitive war must be recognized. As my guru on this subject, Stuart Green, puts it, “you can’t win the battle of the Midway if you don’t know you’re in a battle.” And it must be recognized for what it is, the systematic abuse of our hard-earned means of free communication, by people who have nothing but contempt for the principles they invoke – human rights, humanitarian concerns, “justice.”
As a result, there was a) too little on the role of the news media in this phenomenon; and b) a notable absence of Israeli military at the conference. This latter point is crucial because until the military realizes that its success on the battlefield has shifted the enemy’s strategy, and it adjusts its priorities – e.g., releasing very powerful information that could be used in the cognitive war, but which intelligence forces almost by default keep private – we will continue to lose the cognitive war. Indeed, every victory on the in the physical battlefield – Hamas’ rocket attacks have dropped steeply since Operation Cast Lead – produces a massive loss on the cognitive field. Maybe if key members of the IDF were present to hear about the disastrous situation world-wide, then they might begin to reorder their priorities. As of now, this is a MFA show, and most people think it’s their job and their job alone.
Second, there was virtually no attention to the problem of the Jewish contribution to the problem of anti-Semitism. If there is one major gaping hole in our defenses in this cognitive war, it’s the “useful infidels” like Goldstone who think they’re doing “good and right” and promoting “peace and the defense of civilians,” when they’re empowering the very forces that seek war and victimize civilians, friend and foe alike. Alvin Rosenfeld’s “Progressive Jews and the New Anti-Semitism,” remains the gold standard in this matter, taking to task Jews who, in their eagerness to perfect Israel, engage in indecent comparisons of Israel with apartheid and Nazism, that feed the forces of deligitimation the world over.
Unfortunately, the conversation has not advanced since his report was greeted by “progressives,” as an assault on “any criticism of Israel.” The inaccuracy (dare I say, dishonesty) of such a response (embraced by everyone from NYT reporter Patricia Cohen, to Lenny Pogrebin, to Michael Lerner, to Samuel Freedman, illustrates well how the ardent defense of “free speech,” no matter how indecent it might be, serves forces deeply hostile to any freedoms in this cognitive war. Anyone who can denounce Israeli apartheid, and not even mention Muslim apartheid especially against women and infidels, or talk about Israelis doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them, without noting the extensive and enthusiastic ties between the Nazis and the Palestinians to this day, is, in my book, dishonest.
This dishonesty contributes seriously to a massive epistemological crisis for everyone who does not know the situation on the ground (and ultimately none of us can know it all, we have to get it from the media in one form or other). How can outsiders, especially non-Jews who do not come from a culture in which self-criticism is learned with one’s mother’s milk, understand what it means when the Palestinians say, “It’s all Israel’s fault,” and most of the representatives of the Israeli side that the MSNM cherry picks, says, “They’re right.”
Of course, how to distinguish between legitimate, decent criticism of Israel – whether by Jews or by non-Jews – is a very delicate subject, and although the Jewish community is light-years away from the kind of suffocating intimidation that prevents Arabs and Muslims from public self-criticism, we certainly don’t want to engage in a slippery slope of squashing dissent. But rather than ignore the subject, we need to address it, seriously, with a sense of appreciation for how vital self-criticism, the ability to give and take rebuke (tochacha) is to Jewish culture, and explore what are the limits of decency.
Maybe next year…
Look who’s a fan of the Goldstone Report: Jihadis spell out Cognitive Warfare 101
Elder of Ziyon posted a link to a link to the website of Islamic Jihad al Quds Brigade endorsing enthusiastically the Goldstone Report. Here’s a translation from an Arabic specialist rather than Google translator:
War Media [Office] – Gaza:
16 / 10 / 2009
Translation: Shammai FishmanThe Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine values the great efforts undertaken by the legal institutions and human rights organizations in rallying support and backing for the “Goldstone” report.
Such touching appreciation for the work of the NGOs.
The movement stresses in a statement of which the website of the al-Quds Brigades – War Media [Office] – has obtained a copy of, that the adoption of this report should be considered a victory for the Palestinian people’s will, which rejects the Zio-American dictations, as well as a victory for the blood of the martyrs and the suffering of the wounded heroes and a victory for the forces and organizations that stood in the face of attempts to be withdrawn or disabled.
Unpacked, that means, we’re delighted that our strategy of maximizing death among our own people has been handled by the Western journalists, NGOs and Goldstone in such a way as to hold the Israelis responsible, thus making successful those sacrifices in the service of the cause of destroying Israel.
The movement viewed the success of the vote on the report as “proof of the correctness of its positions with regard to the crime of postponing the previous meeting,” emphasizing that no one had any real justification for that postponement.
In other words, the “excuses” of helping negotiations by not attacking the people we’re supposed to negotiate with, are illegitimate. Because we oppose any negotiations, we’re delighted that the weaponized report has now moved to the next stage.
The view of the Islamic Jihad movement is that the condemnation the Zionist entity and its criminalization is an opportunity that must be followed by the isolation of this criminal entity and the activation of the Arab and Islamic decisions of boycott regionally and internationally. The receiving of Zionist war criminals in the Arab and Islamic states and capitals should be stopped, meetings with them should not take place and the work to bring them to the courts should be continued.
Couldn’t ask them to spell it out better. Note the complete congruency between this strategy and that of Richard Falk.
The statement concluded by warning against continuing negotiations and the political and security meetings with the enemy, because they provide him with a lifeline.
AKA, we the forces of war delight in Goldstone’s work. What a fabulously useful infidel.
Meantime Goldstone took the opportunity of an interview with the BBC to backtrack on his objections to the weaponized UNHRC resolution, here so warmly endorsed.
UPDATE: Shammai Fishman, the translator of the above notes:
I wish to add that the official translation of al-I’lam al-Harbi is Military Media – that apparently is the division of the al-Quds Brigades of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad which runs their media website and press releases.
This document is an example of the English translation of the term:
http://www.saraya.ps/Byan.php?id=2087
This is the main website every link has the logo:
http://saraya.ps/index.php
Undermining the Enemy: A report from the ICT Panel with Stuart Green
Stephen Kramer, an American-born Israeli, attended the panel we organized at the Institute for Counter-terrorism at the IDC last month. He summarized the panel’s offerings for a Jewish paper in the USA.
Undermining the Enemy
Israel’s overwhelming strength and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza deprived Israel of its favored “underdog” status.
Recently I attended the 9th World Summit on Counter- Terrorism at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). The Institute is located on the IDC College campus in Herzliya. According to ICT, its international conference has become one of the most influential annual events in the field of counter-terrorism and has achieved international recognition for its exchange of views on best practices among global counter-terror experts, security professionals and leading academic scholars.“Manipulation of Western Mainstream News Media in Asymmetrical Warfare,” a fancy description for terrorist groups’ propaganda efforts, was the subject of the workshop, one of many presented during the conference. Among the five speakers were a US naval officer, a college professor from Boston, researchers from two NGOs (non-profit organizations), and the chief editor of an Italian TV station.
Lt. Commander Stuart Green, who was quick to announce that he was speaking as a private citizen and not as a U.S. Navy representative, put the subject matter into historical context by describing how the Soviets took active measures to manipulate the conceptions of their target societies (the enemies) during the Cold War period. Their object was to set up a model which softened the enemy’s resistance to communism by persuading significant groups to consider communism as a viable alternative to democracy.
Green pointed out that in modern warfare, the terrorists take control of the intellectual “high ground,” increasing their propaganda as the conflict continues and obscuring the truth. By example, before 1967 Israel enjoyed the favorable status of underdog, but in the ensuing decades after 1967, particularly after the 1982 war, Israel’s overwhelming strength and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza deprived Israel of its favored “underdog” status. Over time, and with the growing intensity of propaganda, the empirical truth that the Arabs absolutely opposed a Jewish state regardless of its size was replaced by an “acceptable discourse,” the Palestinian narrative. This Muslim-inspired “truth” has become so engrained that the actual cause of Israeli-Palestinian strife has been obscured and almost forgotten.
Green used another example from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whereby the cause of Palestinian terrorism is attributed to checkpoints and settlements, not the longstanding Palestinian refusal to accept Israel’s existence. He described the media as a “force multiplier,” promoting the message of the underdog/terrorists and geometrically increasing its effect. The media is overwhelmingly democratic, meaning it is anti-army, prounderdog, and universalistic – assigning moral equivalence to democracies and dictatorships. Answering the question about what to do to combat the media manipulation, Green said it’s imperative that the public understand the fact that we’re at war with radical Islamists.
Investigate the investigators: A time to rebuke Goldstone
Rebuke Goldstone’s Report
[This has been published without links at the Jerusalem Post. Text in brackets was cut from the published version.]
Judge Goldstone has presented his Report on Gaza and, among other recommendations, suggested that Israel conduct its own inquiry. Israeli government officials, assuming he meant an investigation, like his, into Israel’s misdeeds, declined, noting that that they have and continue to investigate their army’s behavior on a constant basis.
But after reading most of the report, another possibility presents itself. It rapidly becomes clear to any reader not driven by a thirst for “dirt” on Israel, that Goldstone’s work represents a new low in the tragically deteriorating world of international justice. It fails on every count, from it’s handling of evidence, to its legal reasoning, to its unstated but pervasive assumptions of Israeli guilt and Palestinian innocence, to its astonishing conclusion (from someone who knows the gruesome details of Bosnia and Rwanda), that Israeli behavior was so bad it might well constitute “crimes against humanity.” As a result this report takes the army with the best record in the history of warfare for protecting enemy civilians (even by dubious Palestinian statistics), and accuses it of targeting them. Goldstone makes Kafka’s Trial seem fair.
The Problem of Cognitive Warfare: Table of Contents of Stuart Green’s (unpublished thesis)
Here is the table of contents for Stuart Green’s unpublished thesis for the Joint Military Intelligence College (Washington DC). For those who wish to contact him, contact me: rl.seconddraft at gmail dot com.
THE PROBLEM OF COGNITIVE WARFARE…………………………
Research Question, 1
Hypothesis, 1
The Issue, 1
Bias, 6
A Brief Apologia, 7
Related Literature, 9
Methodology, 13
FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS AND A POOR UNDERSTANDING OF… THE THREAT
Jihadists Inappropriately Dismissed, 16
Prohibited Analysis, 24
Conclusion, 42
MEMETICS …………………………………………………………….
The Early Replicators, 45
Cognitive Dissonance, 56
Memeplexes, 63
Endemic v. Epidemic, 71
Conclusion, 78
THE ESSENCE OF COGNITIVE WARFARE……………………….
Relative Importance, 80
The Engine, the Discourse, and the Offensive, 84
Conclusion, 108
EXAMPLES OF RELEVANT RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL…….. ELEMENTS IN COGNITIVE WARFARE
What to Keep in Mind, 111
Types of Jihad, 116
The Legitimacy of Jihadists, 122
Who Must Participate in Jihad, 124
The Benefits of Martyrdom, 125
Dhimmitude—A Religious and Historical Imperative, 127
Taqiyya, 133
Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Face, 139
Conclusion, 150
THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: BACKGROUND………………..
Historical Background—Palestinians, 154
Historical Background—Lebanon/Lebanese Hezbollah, 165
Motivating Factors for Arab-Muslim Anti-Zionists, 170
Ideologies, 173
Conclusion, 180
THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: DECEPTION, ADVOCACY, AND VIOLENT IDENTITY FORMATION
Pallywood-Hezbollywood, 184
Other Deception, 195
Media Control, 198
Media and NGO Advocacy—Writing the Wrong, 204
Recasting History, 214
For Arab-Muslim Eyes Only, 222
The Military Effect of Civilian Casualties—Real or Faked, 227
Conclusion, 230
THE MODERATE MEME OFFENSIVE, COGNITIVE……………….. PARALYSIS, AND DHIMMITUDE
Use of Moderate Memes, 234
Cognitive Paralysis: Memetic Reaction to Unforeseen Dhimmitude, 245
Conclusion, 253
CALLING A RED SPADE A RED SPADE: THE RELEVANCE …….. TO INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS AND POLICY
Areas for Improvement, 259
Memetic Manipulation, 262
A Word of Caution, 264
For the Intelligence Analyst and the Academic: See the Red Spade, 267
For the Policymaker and Operator: Retool, 272
In Sum, 274
Leveling the Playing Field and the Retreat into Stupidity: george on Peretz on Goldstone
Marty Peretz has a short post at The Spine on how dangerous the Goldstone Commission’s Report is for the ability of democracies to defend themselves against enemies who attack from the midst of civilian populations. It elicited a hostile comment from a reader who signs as george walton, which, I think, offers a fine insight into the workings of a peculiar kind of mindset that I’d like to label according to the meme “their side right or wrong.”
george starts by quoting Peretz:
MP:The fact is that the Taliban do not fight by the rules of modern warfare which try to limit the exposure of non-combatants.
george:
Here’s what the Taliban should do. They should strike a deal with the coalition forces. If the coalition forces will agree to scale back on military hardware that is at least a thousand times more sophisticated and lethal than the terrorist’s arsenal, the Taliban will agree to back off from the civilians.
At first read, it’s hard to know if this is an Onion imitation, or serious sarcasm. The reader will forgive me for interpreting it as the latter (evidence below). Essentially, if I understand the sarcasm here, the Taliban has the right to hide among civilians because it’s the only way to fight against an oppressive external invader (who happens to be the allied forces).
Now I don’t know if george has any criteria for what constitutes legitimate resistance that is then allowed to sacrifice its own civilians for the cause, and what the chances that resistance movements that adapt such tactics might turn into “occupiers” of their own “liberated” populations, were they to succeed. Certainly the Taliban before the alliied invasion, with their policies towards women — acid in the face for not wearing the veil in public, a practice they continue even as “insurgents” — could hardly be called a liberating force. But that “sin,” however oppressive seems to be washed away as a result of the Taliban’s war against the US: their side right or wrong.
george continues:
Colonel Richard Kemp on IDF’s Moral Performance
One of the real puzzles I hope to pose in order to motivate my readers to slog through my new book is the bizarre phenomenon of the difference between the IDF’s ethical performance and the way it registers in the MSNM (my new acronym, Mainstream News Media). I first became really aware of this in Jenin, when the Israelis had sacrificed the aerial option in order to avoid civilian casualties, lost over a dozen men in hand-to-hand combat, and finally ended up killing 52 people, 47 of which were combattants, but got accused of massacres and war crimes that drove the international media into a frenzy.
Here, at a JCPA conference on Operation Cast Lead and International Law, British Colonel Richard Kemp describes the extraordinary measures the Israelis went to in order to spare civilian casualties in Gaza (cf. Sri Lanka).
The Two-State To Nowhere: Another Futile Attempt At Appeasement
Every once in a while it’s useful to consult a historian with a memory that goes beyond the “so fifteen minutes ago” of the current ADD generation. Here Alex Grobman explains why Netanyahu’s speech touched a nerve in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians. It’s not the Politically-correct Paradigm PCP — let’s compromise and get on with our lives in a spirit of mutuality — it’s the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm HSJP — we can only breathe if you die. Or, as Yasser Arafat put it so delicately:
“We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel…. For us it is shame and injustice. We shall fight on to victory. Even for decades, for generations, if necessary.”
And, suprise! they’re still fighting.
The passages Grobman cites — all expressions of the honor-shame world of Arab irredentism when it comes to Israel — shed a particularly revealing light on President Obama’s (falsely) empathic remark about Palestinian suffering being intolerable. If it were “intolerable” they would do something about it. Instead they scream foul at Netanyahu’s speech and dig in for more suffering. Obama’s inability to understand this — and I think it is an incomprehensibility that pervades Western culture which is why I’m writing my current book — is at the heart of the dysfunctional relationship we have with the Arab world. “Suffering? You pussies ain’t seem nothing yet. We can take it, and you better be ready to take it. And if you protect yourself from our misery… we’ll call you apartheid racists.”
The Two-State To Nowhere: Another Futile Attempt At Appeasement
“There is reason to believe that [the president] cherished the illusion that presumably he, and he alone, as head of the United States, could bring about a settlement – if not a reconciliation — between Arabs and Jews. I remember muttering to myself as I left the White House after hearing the President discourse in rambling fashion about Middle Eastern Affairs, ‘I‘ve read of men who thought they might be King of the Jews and other men who thought they might be King of the Arabs, but this is the first time I ‘ve listened to a man who dreamt of being King of both the Jews and Arabs.’”1 Herbert Feis, a State Department economic advisor, did not say this about President Obama’s address in Cairo in June 2009, but after Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, King of Saudi Arabia, in February 1945. Roosevelt wanted the Arabs to allow thousands of Jews from Europe to immigrate to Palestine to which Ibn Saud responded, “Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews.”2
George Antonius, an Arab nationalist, reiterated this point when he said, “no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.”3
Attempts to solve the Arab/Israeli conflict regularly fail because of the refusal to acknowledge that this dispute has never been about borders, territory or settlements, but about the Arabs refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. “The struggle with the Zionist enemy is not a matter of borders, but touches on the very existence of the Zionist entity,” declared an Arab spokesman.4
Unlike the Nazis who carefully concealed the Final Solution, Hamas and the Palestine Authority openly avow their intentions in their Charter and Covenant and in the Arab media which is available in English on the Internet on MEMRI and the Palestinian Media Watch.
For Hamas liberating all of Palestine to establish an Islamic state requires a holy war against Israel. Anyone daring to sign away even “a grain of sand in Palestine in favor of the enemies of God…who have seized the blessed land” should have their “hand be cut off.”5
It sure looks like successful cognitive warfare: An Exchange between Weisenthal Center and Maurice Ostroff about the Ban Ki-Moon forgery
I just received the following from Maurice Ostroff, who blogs at Countering Bias and Misinformation mainly about the Arab-Israel conflict. It begins with a response from Mark Weitzman of the Weisenthal Center about the forgery we discussed last week. Ostroff warns that they may be dismissing it too lightly since Pravda has posted it as true and solicited a raft of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic vitriol in the talkbacks.
Response from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre re: Speech of Secrtry grl of the UN
I have checked into the account of the reported speech of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that was supposedly given upon the occasion of Israel’s 60th birthday. According to the Department of Public Information of the UN, the speech is “categorically a hoax”. This can also be confirmed by the account of one of the (anti-Zionist) blogs that posted the forged speech, where he admits he was fooled and took it unknowingly from a neo-Nazi site. (This is the url for the blog, and this is the url where he acknowledges his mistake). Evidently, this is another in a long line of Internet hoaxes that are passed off as real.
I hope that the information above has been helpful. Please feel free to contact us if we can be of any further assistance.
Sincerely,
Mark Weitzman
Director, Task Force against Hate
Chief Representative to the United Nations
Simon Wiesenthal Center
50 East 42nd Street, Suite 1600
New York, New York, 10017
tel. 212.370.0320
fax 212.883.0895Maurice Ostroff
5/501 Asher Barash, Herzliya, 46365 ISRAEL
Tel. +972 9 9595 261 Fax. +972 9 9509 667http://maurice-ostroff.tripod.com
To Mark Weitzman
Director, Task Force Against Hate
Chief Representative to the United Nations
Simon Wiesenthal CenterReport about the intention of UN Secretary General to ask the UN to strip Israel of UN membership!
Dear Mark Weitzman,
Thank you for your phone call. As discussed, I do not believe that this episode can be dismissed lightly on the strength of information on one or two not very serious blogs. The original report appeared on a very genuine looking UN News Center web site and it needs to be refuted prominently and officially by the UN.
Unfortunately the report and the negative references to Israel have been given credence by Pravda which alleges that the speech appeared on the official UN site but was removed under political pressure. See here.
Pravda is not uninfluential and has not issued any amendment to the report quoted above. What is more disturbing is that it is now running an additional thread on the same subject that is attracting a flood of anti-Israel talkbacks. See here.
Pravda’s claim that it received the report directly from its source at the UN cannot be overlooked by the Secretary General.
To prevent the allegations contained in the SG’s alleged speech about Israel’s conditional membership from snowballing, an urgent widely publicized clarification is needed from the UN and I respectfully suggest that in your capacity as Director of the Task Force against Hate of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, at the United Nations, you take up this matter at top level.
Sincerely
Maurice Ostroff
A visit to the site noted by Weitzman is instructive. Note how he frames the story — aha! it’s true (obviously) and it’s further proof that the Jews control the world media since they got everyone to take it down (including) the UN.
It has long been assumed that the zionists have complete control of the Corporate Media in the United States. AIPAC and its supporters have literally gotten away with murder over the past 60 years as a result of this.
But, there are still some that doubt that what I just said is a fact….. if the following isn’t enough evidence, then I don’t know what is.
On the 11th of May, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, called for Israel to be stripped of its membership in the world body. Did you read about it ANYWHERE? I know I didn’t until this morning when it was brought to my attention. The reasons….. here is just one of them;
The UN News Agency placed the Secretary General’s remarks on its official web site on May 11 and shortly thereafter, a news site in Israel called “News from Jerusalem” published the story on its web site.
Within hours however, the remarks of the Secretary General to the General Assembly were pulled off the UN site! In their place was a second address by the Secretary General, this one to the Security Council which was made the next day, May 12.
In addition, the May 11 story about ousting Israel from the UN was pulled off the “News from Jerusalem” site! In its place is a retraction challenging the validity of the source.The above (in italics) is taken from a Blog, proving once again the valuable role played by the Blogesphere as the vehicle of getting the truth out to the masses. It is more than disturbing, it is downright frightening that our lives are in such control by the zionists.
Below is the full text of the Secretary General’s speech to the General Assembly….. pass it on, it must become public knowledge.
Desertpeace posted a rapid retraction:
A post I did earlier was based on what I thought to be ‘news’ from a reliable source…. NOTHING could be further from the truth.
The Blog I cite as the source of the article is a site run by one of the most despicable neo nazis living in the United States. The Turner Radio Network ( a blog attached to the Hal Turner show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Turner#cite_note-0 ) is maybe most unreliable source on the internet.
The Turner Radio Network already spread many false news, and surely not in an innocent way: for instance:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/business/24turner.html
All of the above was pointed out to me by one of the editors of an Associate site, URUKNET.
For this I am grateful, and to you my readers, I apologise….The ’speech’ supposedly written by Ban Ki Moon was actually meant as a satirical piece, written by Greg Felton.
An irony of the Net is that the Turner Radio Network is listed as a news site on Google, while my Associate, Uruknet is not.
To which I commented:
maybe the reason you got caught was because you so wanted to believe the contents of the forgery. and despite what Greg Felton claims, he did not make a “satire” but a forgery (i.e., he copied the letterhead of a public institution and tried to pass off his ideology — which apparently appealed to you). a satire is when you take ideas you don’t believe in and make fun of them, like Swift suggesting that the Irish eat their babies during the great famine. See my post.
meantime, like Greg Fulton, you seem to have a limited grasp on the difference between “fact” and opinion. it’s far from a fact that the jews control the media, and certainly not for the purposes of spreading zionist plots, not even the media they’re prominent in like the NYT. that’s actually one of the oldest of modern conspiracy theories and it radically misreads the dynamics of jewish participation in modernity, esp the media which engages in levels of self-criticism unseen in any other “ethnic” or “religious” group.
maybe this mistake might be the beginning of a reconsideration on your part. after all, you do have the courage to admit error.
Which he duly posted.
Cognitive Warfare or Anti-Zionist Fantasy? Ban Ki-Moon calls for the revocation of Israel’s membership in the UN
I got this announcement that Ban Ki-Moon, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, had called for the revocation of the state of Israel’s membership in the UN.
If it hopes to play a meaningful role in the 21st century, the UN must do more than simply promise to enact reforms. It must search deep within its soul to redress the fundamental violations of its founding principles, which have long since ceased to have any force. That recommitment must begin now, for it was 60 years ago today, May 11, 1949, that Israel became a member of the UN. The UN cannot hope to achieve any measure of peace or justice as long as it condones war crimes, which it does every day that Israel is allowed to flout its terms of admission.
The past cannot be undone, but the future can change. As its newly elected Secretary-General, I promise that the UN will no longer be a passive enabler of genocide. Therefore, I will ask the General Assembly to meet in special session at the earliest possible time to strip Israel of its membership. Ordinarily, a motion to expel a member nation would have to come at the recommendation of the Security Council, but this is not an ordinary motion. Because Israel is in violation of its terms of admission, it is not a member in good standing, so the UN has every right to declare General Assembly Resolution 273 null and void. Since Israel’s membership depends on adherence to that resolution, its expulsion is automatic.
Essentially, the unavoidable, lamentable truth of the last six decades is that the UN has been a moral and political failure because it has refused to enforce its own rules and defend the Charter. Nothing the UN does will have any value as long as
this illegitimate member occupies a place in the General Assembly. I want the UN to have value.
This struck me immediately as unlikely language for Ban Ki-Moon to use. It was straight out of the anti-Zionist playbook. It had “forgery” written all over it. And there was nothing I could find with those words at the official UN site.
(I especially like the inversion of the actual situation: The UN has been a moral and political failure because it failed to enforce its own rules and throw out members who refused to abide by the rulings of the UN (e.g., the Arab block that refused to recognize Israel), and as a result of the power of large, undemocratic blocks (Arab states, Muslim states) has been sucked into a grotesque moral cesspool that has betrayed the very principles of “human rights.”)
A search for the speech produced a very impressive PDF file that sure looked like a UN document. (Note, however, that none of the other links work… sloppy work.)
Is this cognitive warfare — the power of suggestion? Or is it just anti-Zionists fantazing their wet dream?
UPDATE: The new Jewish International Commission for Jewish Legal Affairs is on the case:
UN HOAX EXPOSED
Written by the Jewish Tribune staff
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
JERUSALEM – A document purporting to be an address by Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general of the UN, delivered to the UN General Assembly on May 11, 2009 “on the 60th Anniversary of Israel’s Admission,” and widely circulated on the Internet, is a deliberate forgery, said the newly created International Commission for Jewish Legal Affairs.Brenden Varma from the UN Press Office confirmed to representatives of the commission that the perpetrators illegally copied the heading of the web site of the UN News Centre, so that the address would appear to be an official document of the United Nations.
Dr. Haim Katz, chair of the International Commission for Jewish Legal Affairs, newly established in cooperation with the B’nai B’rith World Center to help combat efforts to delegitimize the state of Israel, called upon the secretary general to immediately disassociate himself from this forged document, to condemn the dissemination of false and inflammatory information about Israel or any other member state, to commence an investigation to identify the perpetrators, and to pursue all available legal means to do so.
Dr. Katz indicated that the fake address to the General Assembly contained a complete distortion of the history of the UN resolution of 1947, which led to the creation of Israel and a pledge by the secretary general to call a special session of the General Assembly “at the earliest possible time to strip Israel of its membership.”
In his letter to the secretary general, Dr. Katz stated, “With the current climate of anti-Israel sentiment, undoubtedly hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will accept this forgery at face value. If it is not denied promptly and publicly, this false document, which clearly has the potential for violence, can produce dire consequences in world opinion. The integrity of the United Nations will be damaged as well.”
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 26 May 2009 )
Casualties of Truth: Elder of Ziyon’s unpublished editorial on Gazan casualties
For reasons unknown (as of yet), this critical piece did not make the newspaper for which it was written. Please make sure that as many blogs as possible mention it. It not only lays out the case for questioning the statistics offered by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, but it emphasizes the bald-faced abandon with which Palestinian sources openly lie to the West.
(This is the article that I wrote as an op-ed, that was inexplicably not published as planned. Much of it was beautifully rewritten by a prominent writer and author.)
For three weeks in December 2008-January 2009, Israel and Hamas fought a war in the Gaza Strip after Hamas announced it was abandoning the ceasefire and began escalated rocket and mortar attacks on Israel.
There is one fact about that war which people around the world think they know: there were about 1400 Palestinians killed in the war and most or almost all of them were civilians, mainly women and children.
This claim, however, is false and demonstrably so on the basis of careful research using publicly available and reliable materials. Indeed, a group of bloggers, including the author, have shown already that more than 30 percent of the claimed “civilian” casualties were in fact, to use the polite word, armed militants or members of Hamas-led security forces. And the number of such combatants we are discovering is rising every day.
While Hamas and other Palestinian political groups were using alleged civilian casualties to bolster their case with international public opinion, they demonstrably knew otherwise. In fact, they publicly bragged about the military activities of those they labeled innocent civilian bystanders.
Studies in demopathy: Muslims respond to Pope’s visit #1
I’m reading Nonie Darwish’s new book, Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. In it she lays out some of the problem we in the West have in understanding Islam. For us, the basic principle of dealing with the “other” is mutuality, or, as the saying goes, “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” (A nice proverb that dates back to the 17th century, with variants that go back to Rome, and serves as a point of meditation at Wikipedia for the rule of fairness.)
But among many (most?) Muslims, where Islam’s incalculable superiority to all other religions justifies the dominion of Muslims over all other people, such reciprocity not only does not exist, it actually borders on heresy (see her chapter, “Life behind the Muslim curtain”). Indeed, by some Islamic (or only Islamist?) definitions, Muslims are by definition innocent and non-Muslims are by definition guilty — they have rejected the perfect teachings of the prophet PBUH — and therefore deserving of punishment. This is the ideology behind Jihad.
For a good example of the shock of a European faced with this implacable double standard which turns the condemnation by Muslim “moderates” of “killing innocent (i.e., Muslims)” in terror attacks on its head, watch this interview on the BBC (HT/Islam in Action):
One could hardly have a better example of the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. With this in mind, here’s an article about Jordanian Muslims demanding an apology from the pope for insulting their religion.
Pope’s address disappoints Muslim leaders
AMMAN (AFP) — Jordanian clerics expressed disappointment that Pope Benedict XVI in an address to Muslim leaders on Saturday failed to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.
“We wanted him to clearly apologise,” Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak, told AFP after the pope’s address in Amman’s huge Al-Hussein Mosque.
“What the pope said (in 2006) about the Prophet Mohammed is untrue. Islam did not spread through the power of sword. It’s a religion of tolerance and faith,” Hussein said.
Now I find this fascinating. The Muslims want an apology from the pope for saying that Islam spread by the sword, when it did in virtually every place for its first three generations, and many (most?) Muslims glory in the fact. On the contrary, Sheikh Yusef abu Hussein wants the pope to acknowledge that Islam is a religion of tolerance and faith (whatever the latter term means)” when it has little history of tolerance – certainly by modern standards, the best it can do is religious apartheid with its dhimmi system.
What can such an “apology” mean? It can’t possibly be sincere, since, from the perspective of a non-Muslim, it’s clearly not true. (I except from this issue of sincerity the PCP dupes who really do think Islam is a tolerant religion, and could make such an apology sincerely.) But from the Muslim point of view, anyone familiar with the glorious place of Jihad in the history of Islam, can’t possibly take this seriously. Indeed, were the pope to repeat the words they want to put in his mouth, they’d be laughing themselves silly.
Ralph Peters on 21st Century Diplomacy and War
Oao has drawn our attention to a piece by Ralph Peters in Security Affairs. I think it’s well worth considering in terms of what has made us so vulnerable. I am personally still convinced that we can do a great deal to fight this enemy in the world of discourse, but that does not mean it does not also include some decisive victories in warfare. But Peters has some harsh words for the Western media as well.
I welcome comments on any aspect of this important think-piece.
Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars
Ralph Peters
Security AffairsThe most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves.
Much has been made over the past two decades of the emergence of “asymmetric warfare,” in which the ill-equipped confront the superbly armed by changing the rules of the battlefield. Yet, such irregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win.
There are multiple reasons for this American amnesia about the cost of victory. First, we, the people, have lived in unprecedented safety for so long (despite the now-faded shock of September 11, 2001) that we simply do not feel endangered; rather, we sense that what nastiness there may be in the world will always occur elsewhere and need not disturb our lifestyles. We like the frisson of feeling a little guilt, but resent all calls to action that require sacrifice.
Second, collective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. As someone born only seven years after the ovens of Auschwitz stopped smoking, I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today.
Third, ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.
Fourth, an unholy alliance between the defense industry and academic theorists seduced decisionmakers with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war. In pursuit of billions in profits, defense contractors made promises impossible to fulfill, while think tank scholars sought acclaim by designing warfare models that excited political leaders anxious to get off cheaply, but which left out factors such as the enemy, human psychology, and 5,000 years of precedents.
Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do. Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.
Last, but not least, history is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.
By 1965, we had already forgotten what it took to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the degeneration of our historical sense has continued to accelerate since then. More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944, as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, prize-hunting reporters insist that our losses in Iraq have been catastrophic, while those in Afghanistan are unreasonably high.
We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.
One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you. Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence (often quite violent in its reality) only worked because his opponent was willing to play along. Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (or today’s) China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Effective non-violence is contractual. Where the contract does not exist, Gandhi dies.
Note that my definition of honor-shame culture states: a culture in which a man is allowed, expected to, even required to shed blood for the sake of his honor, and my definition of a civil polity is one which systematically substitutes a discourse of fairness for violence in dispute settlement. We want to act as if the social contract of a civil polity were extended by verbal fiat — a form of wishful thinking — to everyone. Unfortunately, civil behavior is at a big disadvantage where some players do not disarm, and even greater disadvantage when its own leaders are dupes of demopaths.
On Moderation and Cognitive Warfare: More from Stuart Green
Chapter 8 from Stuart Green’s thesis. Previous postings available here.
He prefaces it with the following remarks:
Richard, this is chapter eight. I hope it’s not too long, but I sense there are some conceptual problems with it that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’d love to get feedback from your readers and pick their brains. Also, some of your readers were asking about the difference between cognitive warfare and, say political warfare as waged by the Soviets and Chinese. As I continue to read more about political warfare, I do see a great deal of overlap. There are still differences, however. My theory is quite broad, perhaps too broad, as it stretches down to the basic building blocks of the idea, up through culture, ideology, and the pointy parts of PSYOP. I also need to note the importance of psychology itself.
CHAPTER 8
THE MODERATE MEME OFFENSIVE, COGNITIVE PARALYSIS, AND DHIMMITUDE
The last chapter focused a great deal on deception in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with particular emphasis on its operational applications. Delving a little more into deception, the first half of this chapter moves away from the blunt operational manifestations and toward some of the slight-of-hand, soft rhetoric used by related jihadist groups in other parts of the West, namely the U.S. and Europe. It seeks to demonstrate that jihadists have successfully targeted American and European politicians, academics, and journalists with deceptively moderate memes designed to infiltrate and disarm the Western discourse. They have managed to hide agendas that are not only pernicious to Israel, but to secular Western society as a whole. The second half of this chapter addresses the Western intelligentsia’s reaction to evidence of the uncomfortable truth: cognitive dissonance and paralysis. In the end, it argues that the failure to confront these realities as they become progressively clearer constitutes a form of modern dhimmitude. That is, the failure to confront violence, violent rhetoric, and violent ideology represents unwitting submission to an Arab-Muslim agenda.
USE OF MODERATE MEMES
In times of particularly intense conflict the accepted discourses have naturally shifted toward the extreme. During the World Wars entire enemy populations became associated with rapacious destruction and evil, as were “the Hun” during WWI and the Japanese during WWII for Americans. In the current context, however, only the Arab-Muslim society maintains that it is now (and always has been) at war with Western society. Western society, for its part, continues to think of war in confined, sporadic terms—certainly, war is not perceived as a millennial imperative. Today the accepted Western discourse, with some exceptions, does not allow for the suggestion that it is in a civilizational war—such talk is generally denounced as racist or Islamophobic. Thenceforth, “extreme” rhetoric is permitted within the mainstream, Arab-Muslim discourse, while the Western discourse remains relatively unradicalized.
Professor Anna Geifman of Boston University observes the frequent appearance of a particular question after terrorist attacks: “What did we do to make them hate us?”[1] The emergence of this question demonstrates not only that the Western discourse remains comparatively unmoved by even the violent manifestation of the war—there is little “mobilization” in the Western discourse when compared to WWI, WWII, or the current Arab-Muslim discourse—but also that it is decidedly vulnerable to hostile ideologists and their “moderate” supporters who indulge in answering the question.
Few ask the more relevant question Landes suggests, which holds particular value for our own cognitive warriors: “What are they telling themselves that makes them hate us?” The accepted pattern is to point out a variety of Western policies as the genesis of Arab-Muslim anger and conflict. This kind of thinking—not completely without value—stems from guilt-culture and maintains that we can find out “why they hate us” by opening a “dialogue,” and possibly even improve relations by admitting culpability. For this to be theoretically possible, the Western elite must find a moderate Arab-Muslim cadre to sit across the table, and because universalist memeplexes insist that there is such a cadre, cognitive warriors happily provide them.
Stephen Coughlin suggests that the moderates of respective societies interact with each other to feed temperate, sometimes “soft,” impressions of the other culture back into their own society’s discourse (see chapter 2). There are also influential individuals and groups wholly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas who use taqiyya to make themselves appear moderate by Western standards, that is, they pass themselves off as the best chance for “mutual understanding” and inter-societal progress. By appropriately aligning their memes for infiltration and infection, these groups and individuals soften Western policy-makers, academics, and journalists, most of whom are neither familiar with taqiyya nor the depth and extremity of the opposing ideology. These deceptively moderate elements are on the front lines of the cognitive war and arguably present the most dangerous, most capable threat to the West.
The Campus
Schleifer demonstrates that their activities represent one of the more “mastered” elements of cognitive warfare. During the first intifada, Palestinian leaders broke down their PSYOP target audiences into several subcategories. Western democratic audiences, for instance, were divided between Arab-American/Europeans, opinion makers, Muslim groups, Jewish liberals, and the general public.[2] Walid Shoebat’s anecdote above gives some clue as to the extent of Fatah’s message tailoring in the U.S., but Schleifer notes that Palestinians also study in Israeli universities. “One notable example is Ibrahim Karaeen, a leading Fatah member who in 1978 opened the Palestinian Press Service in East Jerusalem,” to translate publications and give foreign correspondents a new, Palestinian perspective. [3]
Steven Emerson highlights some of the activities of the more infamous jihadists in the U.S., including Sami al Arian, a University of South Florida professor with strong ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and who has been taped shouting “death to Israel” in Arabic. Arian established two organizations dedicated “exclusively for educational and academic research and analysis, and promotion of international peace and understanding,” which could easily have attracted the interest of unsuspecting students and academics.[4]
There is a multitude of organizations on Western campuses dedicated to boycotting Israeli products and Israeli academics. Their prevalence and several recent events have demonstrated the extent to which the Palestinian narrative has penetrated some campuses.[5] Palestinian “trade unionists,” representing a wide variety of professional, often leftist, associations in the territories, agitate internationally for Palestinian causes (they may do so on behalf of the PA, although this requires additional investigation), most commonly calling for intellectual and commercial boycotts of Israel on humanitarian civil rights grounds.
Recently, they received a significant moral boost when at least two British unions—the British University and College Union (UCU), claiming to speak for 120,000 British educators, and “UNISON,” a union claiming to represent 1.3 million public sector workers—passed similar resolutions calling for anti-Israel intellectual and military boycotts. They pledged support for the Palestinian “people’s right to self-determination and to establish a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with its capital in Jerusalem.”[6] Unions and activists such as these do not generally intend to support the violent activities of Palestinian ideologists, but from the ideologist’s perspective, that type of support is a tertiary concern. By way of international pressure, cognitive warriors seek only to trigger Israel’s self-imposed military restraint, which subsequently allows jihadists more freedom for their own military operations.
Lest the substantive connection between militants and apparently moderate organs like the trade unions mentioned above be doubted, it is important to remember the previous sections of this thesis which established the level of militant control over the Palestinian discourse. Even for genuinely independent groups with specialized causes, only memes that are in line with or beneficial to “radical” ideology may be permitted. Moreover, many jihadist groups have used deception to establish new groups that appear independent and moderate, but remain connected to and work for the benefit of their parent organization.
The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood?
The Muslim American Society (MAS) is one such example. Formed in 1993, its “leadership was instructed to deny their affiliation with the [Muslim] Brotherhood, their strategy was to operate under a different name but promote the same ideological goals: the reformation of society through the spread of Islam, with the ultimate goal of establishing Islamic rule in America.”[7] Like several other organizations claiming to serve as conduits for dialogue with American Muslims, the MAS was in fact established by the global Muslim Brotherhood movement, which, according to an internal memorandum made public at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Texas, wages
a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”[8]
Perhaps the best known Brotherhood scion and arguably the most influential American Muslim organization is the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Established in 1994, this organization descended from yet another influential offshoot, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). According to another internal memorandum, the IAP “absorbed most of the [Muslim Brotherhood’s] Palestinian energy at the leadership and grassroots levels in addition to some of the brothers from other countries,” and it developed the Palestine Committee and Hamas, often described as a sister organization by the IAP’s leaders.[9]
PC, Prohibited Analysis, and the “Arab Mind”: More from Green’s thesis
In the version I’m revising for publication, this section is now called “Discouraged Analysis.” This section is taken from a chapter called “Flawed Assumptions and a Poor Understanding of the Threat”, which opens by explaining that the National Security Strategy (2006) is based on some PC, but probably incorrect notions about Islam. Hence the below…
PROHIBITED ANALYSIS
The national security strategists do not make their assumptions in a vacuum. They do so in the context of an intellectual environment that pre-ordains some conclusions and discourages others. In essence, there are accepted judgments Westerners may levy with or without support, and there are judgments deemed unacceptable despite support. It is the unintended byproduct of a benevolent, intellectual environment designed to correct a human history filled with uninformed, unjustified, and unfortunate bigotry. However, rather than removing moral judgments from intellectual pursuits altogether — and this would be a prudent philosophy for achieving objectivity — Western intelligentsia, including mainstream media and academia, allows penetrating, sometimes derisive critiques of its own culture while disallowing it of other cultures.
Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind has to be the most enduring example of a solid, if imperfect, work routinely rejected by modern scholars as “emblematic of a bygone era,” Orientalist á la Edward Said’s definition, racist, “lurid,” and, like Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, too general to be accurate or of any use. Critics deride neo-conservatives in the current administration for reading it; some of the more polemic critics claim it “…provided the intellectual backdrop for the torture and sexual abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib.”[1]
Rejecting Patai’s work as a disfavored “type of thinking,” one anthropologist ironically dismisses it as “culture talk,” while another claims “[Patai] can no longer be taken seriously.” In true, universalist form, critic Emram Qureshi suggests, “Rather than plumbing some mythical ‘Arab mind,’ we should affirm the shared humanity that transcends our differences and binds us all together.” Lee Smith, whom National Public Radio interviewed without contest, eloquently demonstrates the accepted discourse on Patai:
The very title of The Arab Mind suggests that it’s possible, and desirable, to reduce a set of cultural ideas and circumstances to a single concept. Patai’s term is more than the vulgar shorthand of mass politics (e.g., “the black community”). It belongs to an old tradition that classified races according to their ostensibly characteristic traits, a field pioneered by 19th-century European writers and shared by, among others, T.E. Lawrence. “They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.”[2]
Racism-driven inquiry certainly did leave an indelible mark on “the academic mind.” The rejection of obviously flawed and bigoted analysis from the 19th century, however, has produced its own problems. Analysts are now required to assume the universality of human character and prohibited from inquiries like Patai’s, lest they be lumped in with the likes of 19th century bigots.
The problem, of course, is that there are differences between cultures and religions that affect behavior and judgments—this cannot be gainsaid. Moreover, it deprives such terms as “Arab” and “Western” of any utility by picking them apart with incessant particularization. It could be inappropriate to use the term American, for instance, because there are fifty diverse states, hundreds of counties in some of them, thousands of towns and cities, as well as a wealth of cultures and subcultures — in the United States alone. Because it would be difficult to find many U.S. citizens who conform to every character trait considered quintessentially American, the term American can have no use, so the argument goes.
Cognitive Warfare: More from Stuart Green’s thesis
More from Stuart Green’s thesis, The Problem of Cognitive Warfare, this time from chapter 3.
The Discourse and the Cognitive Offensive
Any discussion of the cognitive offensive must begin with a discussion of the discourse, for it is the accepted discourse cognitive warriors see as the strategic target. Limited to the issue or conflict at hand, the discourse may be considered a relatively small memeplex that finds its anchor in larger environmental memeplexes such as culture, religion, prevailing academic paradigms, economic traditions etc. It can, however, be manipulated by outside influences through transparent, open debate, or a protracted information campaign that makes skillful use of propaganda, violence, and knowledge of the adversary’s environmental vulnerabilities. The degree to which the accepted discourse is vulnerable to destruction from the outside depends on the nature of the contributing environmental factors.
Information and “Information”—The Accepted Discourse. It is important here to discuss the transformation of information into “information.” There must be a careful distinction between information meant to persuade and “information” meant to persuade. That is, there must be a way to differentiate between “information” cynically distributed for effect and information—less the quotation marks—distributed for effect but believed by its propagators to be true and free of exaggeration, regardless of the reality.
One could argue, for instance, that the Palestinians’ uttered beliefs are no more propaganda than those of many Jewish settlers who feel a strong emotional and historical connection to the land. Nonetheless, in the context of cognitive warfare and the pressing need for persuasion, there comes a point at which information ceases to be the heartfelt, honest articulation of one’s views. Disconnected from the desire for expression or articulation and no longer parallel to the propagator’s perception of the truth, it emulates propaganda in the traditional, pejorative sense and may be considered an engineered, infectious meme.
As time wears on and the conflict’s rhetoric intensifies, propaganda may pull away from empirical and perceived truths. Its propagators, seeking to shift the intellectual locus of legitimacy, attempt to obscure empirical truth by supplanting it with a “new” truth—in other words, manipulation and deception. Brodie offered the Trojan horse and repetition—discussed briefly in chapter three—as just two means by which minds may be deceptively changed. The more successful the campaign, the more acceptable debate peels off the empirical truth, hopefully, from the propagator’s perspective, without the constituents knowing.
The passage of time and the growing intensity of propaganda increase the gap between the acceptable discourse and the empirical truth, which gradually becomes lost or obscured. In the most extreme scenarios, the gap between the empirical truth and acceptable discourse grows so large that the former is perceived as extreme or unlikely.
Figure 1: Changing the Accepted Discourse 1
In their campaign to expose “alternative” points of view, for instance, Holocaust deniers have benefited from time’s passage and the death of most survivors. As the evidence literally dies off and memories fade, the idea that far fewer Jews died during World War II seems less extreme and therefore more acceptable, particularly when that idea is pitched as a moderate alternative to the notion that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, Holocaust denial is a common theme in the Muslim world (see chapter seven). It presents a major memetic threat to Israel’s legitimacy in international eyes, as much support for the state’s existence is predicated on the Holocaust and the perceived, tenuous survivability of the Jewish race.
Taqiyya: A brief analysis by Stuart Green
In the comment thread of another post, a former student of mine who has completed a thesis for the National Defense Intelligence College. For an abstract and table of contents, see here. Below, a discussion of a critical issue in the world of intelligence in both senses of the word, the Muslim principle of Taqiyya.
TAQIYYA
Do Arab Muslims lie on the same order of magnitude and for the same purposes? Are they prohibited by tradition from lying in all the same circumstances as Westerners? Although there is overlap in the two cultures’ approaches to lying, there is also great divergence. During brief service in Iraq in 2004, for instance, I noticed most of the translators working for a particular unit were not Muslim, as one would expect, but Assyrian Christian—an Iraqi minority whose dwindling percentage is in the single digits. When the author asked why this was so, a unit interrogator explained that, based on experience, they had determined the Christian translators were more reliable and less prone to deceit.[1] Why did the Muslim translators lie? Moreover, why did they lie to protect individuals associated a regime despised as much locally as internationally?
In this case, as in many others, the answers at least partially rest in the religious duties of all Muslims. According to the faith, it is anathema for Muslims to be ruled by or even allied with non-Muslims. Koran 3:28 clearly states, “The believers should not make disbelievers their allies rather than other believers….”[2] As discussed in a previous section, it is doctrinally vital to protect a fellow Muslim before aiding non-believers, no matter how hateful the Muslim’s character or reputation. Although it may seem counter-productive to the Western mind, it has also been traditionally accepted that Muslim tyranny is better than anarchy or disorder. Thus, in the Iraqi context as in many others, the honorable end of community defense legitimizes and necessitates deceiving non-Muslim employers.
The practice is effectively codified in the Shiite doctrine of taqiyya, or dissimulation. Most Islamic doctrine that allows for dissimulation finds its roots in Koran 16:106, “Any one who, after accepting faith in Allah, utters Unbelief, except under compulsion, his heart remaining firm in Faith… theirs will be a dreadful chastisement.”[3] The Shiites developed this historically defensive (though that aspect clearly varies) practice over the course of many persecuted generations, and their Sunni brethren often deride them for it. The Sunni, however, are by no means purists when it comes to truth-telling. One classical Sunni jurist stated, “If anyone is compelled and professes unbelief with his tongue while his heart contradicts him, in order to escape his enemies, no blame falls on him….”[4] In at least the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, it is considered prudent to lie for an honorable objective when telling the truth would be detrimental to the cause.
… Scholars say that there is no harm in giving a misleading impression if required by an interest countenanced by Sacred Law that is more important than not misleading the person being addressed, or if there is a pressing need which could not otherwise be fulfilled except through lying.[5]
According to the same school, one is not encouraged, but required to lie if the honorable objective cannot be achieved by telling the truth. Honorable objectives can include smoothing over relations with one’s wife, settling disagreements, or most honorably, defending Muslims against unjust (infidel) authorities. Interestingly, one may also lie if the particular sin, such as fornication or drinking, affects only the individual and is known only to him and Allah.
…if a ruler asks one about a wicked act one has committed that is solely between oneself and Allah Most High ([if] it does not concern the rights of another), in which case one is entitled to disclaim it, such as by saying, ‘I did not commit fornication,’ or ‘I did not drink.’[6]
There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anecdotal evidence demonstrating the prevalence of Muslim lying, particularly in the midst of war, some of which will be explored in chapter seven. The analytical quandary, of course, is that one can easily say the same about Western lying. Those feeling uncomfortable with a comparison between the two cultures will again assert that, “we do it too,” and again, this is at least partially true. Sissela Bok explores the Western aspects of the practice in great depth. She recounts the absolute philosophical positions of Immanuel Kant and St. Augustine, both of whom believed all lies are abhorrent but differed in their practical approaches, and she contrasts them with the ethics of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, where “violence and deceit are portrayed with bravado and exultation.”[7] She notes a well-known Catholic textbook that advises doctors to deceive seriously ill patients, and she describes numerous other pragmatic examples paralleling the Islamic positions outlined above. Even Martin Luther rhetorically asked,
What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church[…] a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.[8]
I believe there is a difference in the volume of lies between the two cultures, but it is impossible to systematically exhaust the supply of anecdotes on either side. Additionally, any quantitative studies of deception—if there are indeed any—run the risk of being corrupted by the very phenomenon they seek to explore.
An honest intellectual must therefore consider two qualitative points. Is there a difference in societal approval for the lies? Is there a difference in the philosophical or religious sanction for the lies? Societal derision for Yasser Arafat’s frequent and profound lies about peace with Israel was virtually non-existent in the Muslim world, while a U.S. president was impeached for lying about a personal affair (examples of Arafat’s tactics in the context of cognitive warfare will be given in the following chapters). In contrast, even Bok noted in an updated preface to her book, that a raging debate about the ethics of lying and dishonesty had erupted in the U.S. during the 1980s.
I can no longer subscribe, therefore, to the claim I made in the Introduction, that [the issue of lying has] received extraordinarily little contemporary analysis. Questions of truthfulness and deception are now taken up in classrooms as in the media and in scholarly literature. Codes of ethics, such as the 1980 “Principles of Medical Ethics” of the American Medical Association, have incorporated clauses stressing honesty.[9]