How terrorists use our own media against us - part II

Malkin’s all over the latest in fake photography coming out of the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Post snips won’t do it justice, so just click here to read all about it.

Here’s the key link from her post: The Red Cross Ambulance Incident: How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War. It’s a devastating and detailed analysis of how Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon have utilized the super-power of the media in an effort to help their ’cause.’

PM Update: Bob Owens slaps around the Greg Mitchell, the editor for Editor and Publisher. Mitchell has written a couple of pieces recently advocating that media should actively work to undermine President Bush, and defending war photographers against widespread blogosphere criticism.

Sidenote: Owens will be on the same blogging panel as yours truly (along with Wizbang‘s Lorie Byrd and Sam from Sam’s Notes) at the Carolina Freedomnet 2006 conference on October 7th in Greensboro, NC.

Fri AM Update I: *SIGH*:

Inquiry Opened Into Israeli Use of U.S. Bombs

Prior/Related:

Severian says:

August 24, 2006 at 7:40 pm

I’ve said it before, our enemies are much much better at infowar than we are, and without the bloggers and other new media, we’d be in even deeper kimchee. One aspect of infowar that is often overlooked is the cultural aspect, too often people focus on techniques or think infowar is just “cyberwar” of computers attacking infrastructure. It’s not, infowar goes far beyond that.

The cultural aspect is critical, as it determines both the vunerability to infowar and the type of infowar to choose. One practicioner I had the opportunity to study this under pointed out that Austrailian Aborigines are invunerable to what he termed conventional infowar, as if you’re not a part of their extended family/tribe and known to them, they don’t believe anything you say no matter what. If you wanted to wage infowar on them, you’d have to modify the environment in a way they’d interpret it, you couldn’t tell them things or use news reports or such.

Unfortunately, in this war, we are far more susceptible to the more common infowar apprach of media manipulation than our enemy. We, particularly the more credible leftists, are already predisposed to believe anything bad about us evil greedy racist Westerners, it’s part and parcel of the left’s nihilism that’s spreading throughout our societies. So, the Islamofascists and terrorists manipulate the media and tell their fake sob stories confident that the press, lazy at best and complicent at worst, won’t challenge them but will present it as absolute fact with screaming headlines. They aren’t as vunerable to this, they control the media in their countries tightly, and they also, culturally, distrust the West and everything non-Islamic, just look at how many believe things like the US and Israelies kill Arabs so they can loot their bodies of organs (as if the organs of a malnourished goat herder would be of any benefit), or believe that the US attacked itself (something we’re having a problem with due to the conspiracy nuts out there). They are not as vunerable to press manipulation, so we need to determine another approach to influencing then that doesn’t rely on what might be considered traditional methods, which will require deep and dedicated study of their culture, and also the willingness to get our kit together and actually practice infowar as a serious operation, something the US and the West are both reluctant to commit to and remarkably ineffectual and incompetent at unfortunately.

Re the ambulances, I know of NO missile fired from either a helicopter or jet aircraft that would produce that little damage. About the smallest guided missile that could score that kind of a hit is a helicopter gunship launched Hellfire antitank missile, which will penetrate over 6 feet of hardened steel armor. Do you think a warhead that’ll blow thru 6 feet of armor will leave a thin skinned ambulance looking that good? Missiles fired from jet fighters all have much larger warheads, and produce much much more damage.

Israel/Lebanon Conflict / How terrorists use our own media against us - part II says:

August 26, 2006 at 5:04 pm

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