Thursday, September 07, 2006

Scheuer on Gadahn

Michael Scheuer has an essay in Terrorism Focus about the Western media's misreading of al-Qaeda's latest videotape:

The primary theme of Western media analysis has been that the al-Zawahiri-Azzam tape is an effort—some term it a "PR campaign"—to soften al-Qaeda's image, to focus more on proselytizing than on violence. Another theme is a sense of relief that the journalists and media experts have not been able to find a blatant "threat" in the video, a theme that has been reinforced by an argument offered by unnamed U.S. officials who point out that Azzam al-Amriki is not a senior al-Qaeda leader and so his words are not as important as those of Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. Another theme that seems to accompany most new al-Qaeda videos has been again expressed about this one, namely, that the film is an effort by al-Qaeda leaders to keep the group "relevant." Finally, the fourth theme is a more or less "invisible theme" that entails the Western media's traditional ignoring of the fact that al-Qaeda's audience is as much Muslim as American.

Meanwhile, in WorldNetDaily Ilana Mercer has a parallel analysis of the same Western misreadings. Money quote:
Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict in the world. They were slaughtering innocent, pacifist Jews in Israel well before the Jewish state was a figment in the fertile mind of Theodor Herzl (and well before the "occupation" of 1967: in 627, Muhammad decapitated 900 Medina Jews. The women were only raped). Governments, abetted by the Fourth Estate (and a fifth column), have framed strife in Sudan, East Timor, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, the Balkans and Russia as sectarian or regional. The struggle in these spots, however, has more to do with the overriding refusal of the one faction to abide the others (unless they've been conquered or preferably killed).
(Hat tip: Leopoldo)

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