In the Jerusalem Post, George Conger expounds on Marvin Kalb's Harvard study findings:
"Hizbullah won the Second Lebanon War by achieving a propaganda victory over Israel, a Harvard University study has concluded. Aided and abetted by a compliant and credulous press, Hizbullah achieved victory by convincing the world that Israel was the aggressor and that Israel's retaliatory offensive was a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers.
Israel's defeat came not at the hands of Hizbullah, however, but through the internal contradictions of being the region's sole functioning democracy in the Internet age.
"An open society, Israel, is victimized by its own openness," Marvin Kalb and Dr. Carol Saivetz of the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University concluded in their research paper, "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict."
Hizbullah was able to exploit skillfully the technological innovations wrought by the internet and the demands of the 24/7 news cycle, and constructed the narrative story line for the "first really 'live' war in history" where "the camera and the computer" were "weapons of war," they argued.
For Hizbullah, the Second Lebanon War was a "crucial battle in a broader, ongoing war, linking religious fundamentalism to Arab nationalism." Its chosen field of battle was the media and its strategic aim was to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world.
Citing US and Australian military experts, Kalb and Saivetz stated Hizbullah believed the "historic struggle between Western modernity and Islamic fundamentalism will ultimately be resolved" on the "information battlefield." Hizbullah's media strategy was crafted to achieve this end, they said.
In the Second Lebanon War, Hizbullah limited access to Western reporters, "orchestrated" events and manipulated journalists with threats of expulsion if they violated its reporting rules. And the press largely complied with the restrictions that were "reminiscent of the Soviet era," Kalb and Saivetz found. "
Read it all: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1177591166253&pagename=JPost%2FJPA...
"For the last forty years, all over the world, the Arab and Muslim propaganda machine has run circles around the naive Israelis, who seem incapable of understanding the nature of the enemy they face. Or perhaps they are unable for reasons of realpolitik to describe accurately that enemy, or even fear that doing so might damage morale: no one likes to be told that the threat to his nation is a permanent one, prompted by the immutable tenets of a belief-system with hundreds of millions of thoroughly brainwashed believers.
That same machine renamed the local Arabs, the ones in Gaza and in the "West Bank" (as the Jordanians had renamed the area of Mandatory Palestine they seized in the 1948 war), as the "Palestinian people." It had its effect. For most people, most of the time, know very little about anything. And if the area was once known, in the Western world, as "Palestine" and if there was now a group of people called the "Palestinians," well then -- that was it, wasn't it?
The Jews must have taken their land, the land of those "Palestinians," unfairly. And all those poor "Palestinians" and their justifiably outraged supporters wanted was just a little bit, just a tiny bit, of what they should have had. And thus it was that tiny Israel, existing on 22% of the land area originally planned for Mandatory Palestine, created for the sole purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home (read the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine), it is now the Arabs who, preposterously, use the exact same figures, claiming that "even if we get Gaza and the West Bank, that is only 22% of 'Palestine.'"
Someone in a Western country ought to have the courage to stand up and tell the Arab states that the “Palestinian” “refugee” “problem” is one that THEY created. And that it is up to THEM to solve.
By Shiv Malik Published: 17 July 2005
The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain's most extreme Islamist groups.
Dilpazier Aslam, who has been allowed to report on the London bombings from Leeds and was also given space to write a column in last Wednesday's edition of The Guardian, is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical world organisation which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law.
It is understood that staff at The Guardian were unaware that Mr Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir until allegations surfaced on "The Daily Ablution", a blog run by Scott Burgess. Speculation is mounting that it may have been a sting by Hizb ut-Tahrir to infiltrate the mainstream media.
Late on Friday The Guardian released a statement to The Independent on Sunday saying: "Dilpazier Aslam is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation which is legal in this country. We are keeping the matter under review." The paper refused to comment further.
In 2001 Mr Aslam wrote in the group's in-house journal, Khilafah, that: "The establishment of Khilafah [an Islamic state] is our only solution, to fight fire with fire, the state of Israel versus the Khilafah State".
The day after it was revealed that the London bombers were British, Mr Aslam wrote a column in which he billed himself as "a Yorkshire lad born and bred".
In the piece, he suggested that second- and third-generation British Muslims were prepared to "rock the boat" and that agitation against British foreign policy would build up "till it can be contained no more".
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article299681.ece
