The Propaganda War

By Nicholas Stix

September 19, 2001
A Different Drummer/Toogood Reports

War is not fought on hijacked jetliners alone. It is fought through hijacked images, hijacked words, hijacked beliefs. The war that the leaders of the movement joining pan-Arabism and radical Islam have declared against America—adding us to the war they had already been waging against Israel—also functions on the level of propaganda. The propaganda war rages both in terms of fraudulent stories and images, and the censored, true stories and images they replace. And the propaganda war is being fought both in the Mideast and here at home.

For an example of the war at home, early in the “Palestinian” war against Israel, the New York Times misrepresented a picture of a bloody (American, as it turned out) Jew being assaulted by a mob of murderous Arabs, and being aided by an Israeli policeman, as that of a wounded Arab, being attacked by that very policeman.

For a more recent example, as Toogood Reports columnist L.M. Berkowitz pointed out in her August 26 column, the AP coverage of the August 9 suicide bombing that killed 15 Jewish civilians, including six children, in a Jerusalem Sbarro’s restaurant, was “balanced” by a picture by AP photographer Nasser Shyoukhi, that purported to show two Israeli settler children assaulting an Arab woman. L.M. Berkowitz pointed out that in spite of the appearance of one child pulling at the woman’s headdress, and the other kicking her leg, the woman’s headdress and posture were unmoved. Berkowitz suspected that the picture was doctored; I suspect she is right.

And yet, suppose the picture was legitimate. What professional editor with a shred of decency would run a headline about a massacre against one group, accompanied by a picture of two young children from the victimized group harassing a grown woman from the victimizer group?

In recent years, the behavior of Eric Mink, the New York Daily News’ chief TV critic, has gotten increasingly bizarre. Apparently coveting the role of “righteous white man” among his five black readers, Mink has bent himself out of shape, seeking to prove his political correctness. In 1999, he praised the NAACP’s fraudulent claims of black under representation on TV. Last fall, when Jesse Jackson was engineering the one of the biggest race hoaxes in American history, in claiming that black Floridians had been disenfranchised by racist, Republican officials on behalf of George Bush, Mink acted as attack dog against any mainstream journalist who dared to put any questions to Jackson.

“MSNBC’s designated ace anchor, Brian (Raccoon Eyes) Williams, ran hot and cold all month....

“In the exhausted earlymorning [sic] hours of Wednesday [December 12-13, immediately following the Supreme Court decisions ending the Florida recounts] for example, Williams and his producers essentially sandbagged the Rev. Jesse Jackson. (Reminder to Mr. Williams: Deliberate disenfranchisement is not a theoretical concept to African-Americans, particularly in the states of the Old South.)”

And now, Mink has decided to attack Peter Jennings and ABC News —an individual and an organization I am not in the habit of defending—for aggressively reporting on the war on Thursday, September 13 (WTC +2).

“But just hours after an outstanding expanded World News Tonight broadcast Thursday evening, the collective wisdom of ABC News cracked. Anchor Peter Jennings took an assortment of separate reports from veteran ABC News correspondents and assembled them into a terrifying—but, as it later turned out, wrong—pattern:

“The plot that produced Tuesday’s tragedy had not yet run its course, he warned. Additional terrorists were attempting to take over more airliners to hit more targets and create more carnage. Officials were tightening security even further as a result. Under the circumstances, an alarmed Jennings wondered, how could the government allow any planes into the air over the U.S.?”

According to Mink, Jennings and his team were spreading wild rumors based on “theory” alone. But as those of us following the developing stories—which includes much of the populace—are aware, Jennings was simply reporting known facts. A group of suspected terrorists had been arrested on Thursday, at New York’s Kennedy Airport, including a man who used a fake pilot’s license, and some others who claimed—again with fake ID—to belong to the ground crew. (Not to mention, that other arrests have since been made, as far away as Fort Worth, Texas, of suspects who may have been about to hijack planes.) Was Mink merely incompetent, in having missed that story, or malevolent, in thinking that by publishing disinformation, he would slow down America’s counterattack juggernaut? In any event, in the Age of the Internet, Eric Mink has made himself irrelevant.

An editor once told me that in covering a story, “You f----d up, and got it right!,” in spite of myself. And so it was, that on September 11, the major, mainstream news organizations screwed up, and got it right, in showing clips of West Bank “Palestinians” and terrorists in Lebanon celebrating the attacks on the World Trade center towers and the Pentagon. But the PLO took care of that. Its followers threatened the Associated Press with dead journalists, and AP is now a conscious, if unofficial wing of the PLO. Fox has gotten with the program, too, presenting Muslim apologists who explain that Islam’s core belief is to let a thousand flowers bloom.

On September 13, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reporter, Neil MacDonald, interviewed longtime PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi (whom her good friend, Nightline’s Ted Koppel, always inexplicably refers to as “former PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi”), who insisted, “One film that was taken is repeatedly shown as though it represents all the Palestinian people.”

But it wasn’t one film. McDonald then confronted Ashrawi with the truth:

“But there were other pictures taken this week the public has not seen, pictures of thousands of people celebrating in the streets of the Palestinian city of Nablus. Reportedly, Palestinian police even joined in that rejoicing. The television division of the Associated Press has that tape but has refused to release it. The AP says that’s because it has received death threats from Palestinian organizations. The Israelis immediately pounced, laying an official complaint to AP today about suppressing the pictures.”

In the same report, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s spokesman, Ranaan Gissin, referred to AP’s non-coverage as, “journalism in the service of terrorism.”

Neil MacDonald turned to AP: “AP Bureau Chief Dan Perry would not discuss the matter. What I’m asking you is...

DAN PERRY (AP Bureau Chief): This is totally unprofessional. I’m asking you to turn off the camera.
MACDONALD: Is it professional to suppress those images?
PERRY: I’m asking you to turn off the camera.
MACDONALD: Is it professional to suppress those images?
PERRY: That’s all I’m going to say.
MACDONALD: The Palestinians do not deny making the threats.
ASHRAWI: We are living in a situation of crisis. I do not justify anything.

But the AP story is far from over. On Friday, September 14 (WTC +3), crews from AP and other news services filmed some 1,500 “Palestinians” celebrating the attacks on America at a refugee camp in Gaza, “burning Israeli Flags and carrying a poster of Osama bin Laden,” according to the AP. PLO policemen confiscated the videotapes from “at least four news organizations,” according to the deceptively titled AP story run in the September 16 Las Vegas Sun, “Palestinians Return AP Videotape.” Sure, the PLO returned the tape – two days later, with the sections covering the celebrations erased!

Establishment media types have tried in vain to control the populace’s knowledge of events, but have come off looking as pathetic as Eric Mink. The first day, an individual appeared on WCBS-TV, to tell people not to believe what they read on the Internet, yet mainstream reporters credulously spread the laughable fiction, propagated by a Moslem web site, that Osama bin Laden was “under house arrest” by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And on day one, WCBS’ aging lefty reporter, Pablo Guzman, cautioned against stereotyping “people of a certain ethnic persuasion.” He claimed that, while witnessing the attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers from the West Side Highway that morning, he had seen men in a vehicle cheer the attacks. Guzman continued, mysteriously, that the men “wore New York Jets jackets,” and were “of a certain ethnic persuasion.” (Read: white.) He said, that he had tried to get their license plate number. But what would Guzman have done with the license plate number? Had them arrested? For what? Would he ever think of calling the authorities about blacks or Hispanics he saw engaged in criminal activities? Are you kidding?

Pablo Guzman was simply pursuing the same moronic, counterfactual demand that leftists have imposed on Americans for a generation: Ignore your experience, and focus on the least probable explanation for evil. If 90 percent of violent crime is perpetrated by blacks and Hispanics, treat all references to black and Hispanic criminals as racist. If terrorists have in recent memory tended to be Arabs, emphasize white terrorists. And so, when a truck full of men was stopped and arrested Tuesday, every time the story was told on WCBS-TV, the reporter repeated constantly that the men in question were “white.”

But nothing came of that arrest. The mass murderers were all—surprise, surprise—Arab! And yet, mainstream journalists are slaves to stereotypes when it comes to serial killers, because then the profile is of a “white male.”

The logical culmination of such opportunism is the claim that ... the Jews did it!

Next column: More on the Arab/Islamic propaganda war: Media Monitors Network and the Newest Blood Libel.