from WSJ's Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007397
A "MEDIA RACE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS"
"Ayman al Zawahiri and George W. Bush don't agree on much. But al Qaeda's No. 2 leader and the U.S. President are in accord on one thing: Iraq is the central battlefield."
"This is just one of the many insights into the mind of the terrorist braintrust gleaned from an extraordinary document obtained this summer by U.S. forces in Iraq and released yesterday by the White House. It is a 6,000-word letter from Zawahiri, presumably in hiding in Pakistan, to al Qaeda's commander in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi..."
...one area emerges about which the terror commander exudes great confidence: the media. The lesson he learned from Vietnam is that "more than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media." He clearly wants to use the media, in the U.S. and in the Arab world, to induce the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and default a position of strength to al Qaeda.
He actually worries about the possibility that Zarqawi will blow victory on the media battlefield: Toward this end, he gently urges Zarqawi to discontinue his habit of beheading hostages, suggesting that perhaps instead he could just shoot them. "We are in a media race for . . . hearts and minds," he writes"
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This makes all too clear one thing on which America's MSN and our Terrorist enemies agree: It's important not to show the negative side of what our enemies are doing (beheadings, murdering innocents, etc.) or to justify America's mission in any way.
Imagine what would happen - instantly - if the MSN reported what's really going on, namely that:
1. we actually do have real enemies, and
2. they see themselves as defeating us
3. largely by manipulating our own oh-so-obliging news media to suck the fight out of us by
4. making our enemies look way less enemy-like than they are, and simultaneously
5. Villifying our leadership, mission , and leadership, while
6. denigrating all the real, valid, and necessary aspects of our mission, thus
7. rendering us ripe for the plucking. If only they reported that, then we would
8. Actually know what's going on, and
9. recognize, to the MSN's greatest dismay, that "the enemy" isn't President Bush, or America's religious right, no matter how much MSN and the left generally despise both and vehemently portray them as our "real" enemies, but
10. Although you'd never even guess it in a million years of deceptive American news reports,
11. Surprise! There's something called "global jihad" - millions of dedicated fundamentalist folks.
12. The global Jihad movement and their leaders have declared America to be their enemy. Not because of American oppression (the MSN's preferred fiction) but for
13. A million reasons of their own.
These people absolutely positively "know" that:
1. the United States and everyone in it is, collectively, "The Great Satan." --
2. and very much in need of slaughtering --
3. as a fundamental religious duty --
4. for which they will receive eternal glory in an afterlife filled with
5. all the blissful and ecstatic pleasures of the flesh denied them by
6. Their own fundamentalist, extremist, religious beliefs
6. here on earth.
If the MSN reported the simple truth, Americans would very quickly
1. Unify behind the war effort, wherever and whatever it takes
2. Fight and prevail at any and all costs until our enemies' global movement is no longer a threat to our country's existence and our way of life.
But MSN doesn't report those simple truths. Global Jihad is our external enemy. By failing to even aknowledge it's existence, MSM makes itself America's de facto Internal enemy. Just as dangerous, and just as deadly, as the external one.
