Last week, Abu Muqawama (Andrew Exum) took part in a New York Times' hosted discussion, triggered by the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza, concerning how best to approach Civilians Caught in Urban Combat. The Editors of the Times introduced the discussion with some thoughts about Israel's conduct in the war:
Since Israel ended its assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of using excessive force that resulted in a high number of civilian casualties. The Israeli military has denied these charges, but now testimony is emerging from soldiers, indicating that some of these claims have merit.
In his comments, Andrew Exum suggested that Israel might learn from the American experience in Iraq; ie, that protecting civilian non-combatants is ultimately the best way to win a counterinsurgency. On his blog, he elicited comments and as of this morning, has received 168 comments. He noted that he had written the Times's post prior to seeing articles in the MSM about atrocities committed by Israel:
I wrote this before I had a chance to read some of the disturbing testimonies of Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza.
What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.
Ha'aretz and other Israeli newspapers promise to run more of these stories in the days to come.
[A] reserve officer who looked at the transcript Wednesday said: "This is not the IDF we knew."
Ha'aretz did its part by running an irresponsible story describing atrocities that, one week later, we now know were based on hearsay and in fact described incidents that never happened.
[Melanie Phillips, among others, has been carefully parsing this story; the original Ha'aretz story used quotes to make it appear as if the informant had first hand knowledge of the situation, which turned out to be inaccurate, and never did anything approaching journalistic due diligence. For those who have been paying attention, the Information War against the West features such slanted and invented "news" on a regular basis. For stories related to Gaza, see The Guardian goes to Pallywood and The Ha'aretz blood libel. Yaacov Lazowick notes the distortion by omission in another story inimical to Israel's interests in Look What Everyone Missed.]
There are two elements of this that are particularly important. The first is that although Andrew Exum is hardly a naif, and to my mind is one of the brightest and most worthwhile discussants of COIN in the real world, he has taken what can only be thought of as a successfully incorporated Post-Modern approach to the question of Israel's conduct in the war. Since the allegations of abusive behavior by Israel came from respected members of the MSM, such allegations must always be treated with respect. The idea that Ha'aretz or the various Human Rights NGOs involved would never allow themselves to be manipulated and that, even if they sympathize with the Palestinians, would never compromise their journalistic ethics in order to attack a Western nation, in this case Israel, is an assumption that reasonable people in the West always make.
The Post-Modernist assumption is that no viewpoint is ever to be privileged. This has devolved into a position of moral and perceptual relativism that treats all perspectives as equivalent (and, in a tacit way, assumes that all perspectives that arise from the powerful are considered uniquely invalid.) In such an environment, which suffuses the MSM, incidents like Pallywood, Newsweek's Koran flushing story, accusations of atrocities by Israelis or American Marines in Haditha, are all treated by the MSM as if they are credible until proven otherwise, since the accusers are considered to have equal or greater moral standing than those who are being accused. If the MSM then performed even minimal due diligence and learned from their failures, they might consider taking greater care in their reporting of unsubstantiated stories (which coincidentally all tend to reflect poorly on the Western powers involved) in the future. This has thus far continued to be a conspicuous omission by the MSM.
The second area in which Post-Modernism cripples the West in the information war is rather more prosaic. The enemies of the West are not "sophisticated" enough to believe in the Post-Modern fallacies but they are certainly clever enough to take advantage of the West's self-destructive idealized perfectionism, not to mention the West's utter foolishness in failing to understand that our enemies are, in fact, enemies. Arab press organs have no qualms about propaganda, or simply creating stories, if it serves their purposes and their purposes, proclaimed repeatedly and never given much credence by the sophisticates, remains the destruction of the West, starting with the state of Israel.
In effect, when it comes to the Information War we are disarming ourselves on a daily basis. This war is being fought primarily in the MSM. Jihad fighters are created every time a slanted or invented news report is published that supports the Islamist ideology, an ideology that insists that the West is trying at all times to destroy Islam. When Ha'aretz prints self-destructive stories out of some ideological posture of their own that claims to stand up for the victims of oppression, they are effectively sending missiles and suicide belts to those who would like nothing more than to destroy them. When Western Media, a primary weapon of the Islamist Information War, print the feverish fantasies of those who imagine only the worst of the West, they are aiding and abetting the enemy. Lenin once famously said that the Capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. An updated version might be that the West is willing to sell you the disinformation you need to wage an Information War against them.
Andrew Exum's intention was perfectly reasonable, to discuss what tactics might work best for the Israelis in their ongoing struggle with the Palestinians. What he does not take into account is that unlike Iraq, where the Islamists targeted their own, the Palestinians have succeeded in creating an entire society devoted to their war. They have made every man, woman, and child a Jihadi (whether they want to be or not) and their entire society is arranged toward waging and winning their war. Israeli behavior is immaterial and can have only the most minimal impact on the greater Information War and that is the saddest truth to emerge from the Gaza incursion.
Recent Comments