Losing the PSYOP war

[marct]

Hi Folks,

I think it might be a healthy exercise to consider that we, the West, HAVE been attacking Islam for some time now. OUR Weapon of Mass Destruction is the internet and mass media, and Joe Jihad objects more to Britney Spears than US support of Israel. If you consider how this impacts their culture, their Point of View is very understandable.

I'm interested in what leads you to this belief. Most of what I have read from Sageman, OBL's manifesto, etc. leads me to believe that Islamists object mainly to what they perceive as military/political domination of the Muslim world by nefarious Jewish/Western interests, leading to atrocities against defenseless Muslims, i.e. Israeli occupation in Palestine, Russia invasion of Chechnya, Serb attacks on Bosnia and Kosovo, Western sanctions vs Iraq, now U.S. occupation of Iraq, etc.

I think there area couple of points that may serve to clarify things. First, there's the concept of "historical time" or "historical depth" within a culture. The "Wests'" assault on Islam goes back to the Crusades. Of course, they never talk about Islam's assault on the West... (I always approved of Charles Martel). This concept refers, in part, back to how a culture deals with its collective memory - what it chooses to remember and what it chooses to forget. Islam remembers the Crusades and tends to forget its original assaults on "Western" nations (e.g. Byzantium, the Visigoth kingdom of Spain, France, etc.).

A second concept is the distinction between current rhetoric and mythic pattern rhetoric. The distinction becomes really clear when you analyze how a current event is being structured - the content is current, but the pattern comes out of their oral history.

120mm raises a really valid point re: Britney Spears. You're absolutely right that this is a "cultural attack" but that is at he core of it - it is a cultural not a religious attack. Furthermore, it also highlights particular cultural weaknesses (on both sides, BTW ). If you look at the popular history of Western nations, you will see exactly the same type of conflict. Think about Prohibition and the Temperance movement in the US, the Suffragette campaigns, and he fights over individual control of morality vs. collective control over morality. For slightly kinetic examples, think about the Union movements, the Luddite movement in the UK, the French Revolution and the Liberal Revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

The point I'm trying to make here is that cultures are constantly "negotiated"; they are not "pristine". What the Islamists are doing is drawing on a Golden Age model of a pristine culture of Islam hat never existed.

And the stark, no #### necessity for us to be prepared to fight them to the death, because "sweet-talking" them into accepting porn, "alternative lifestyles" and abortion doesn't seem to be very realistic at this point in time.

Yup.

As an aside, Marc, as I said earlier, my wife and I support several worthy causes and often run into "American Leftists" who try to convince us to stop directly supporting these causes and start lobbying for someone else to pay for them through the gov't dole.

Well, after all, it is important to keep the unemployment rate low, and the best way to do that is to employ bureaucrats who can't even dig ditches . Yeah, I refuse to support any collectivist "charities" unless I get a look at their books. If they have more than 12% overhead, I won't support them.

Marc