Translation

At the top of my Google News page a couple of hours ago was a BBC headline according to which the Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, had said that if the Palestianian rockets did not cease to fall, then Israel would bring them a 'holocaust'. You can imagine the reaction, if you haven't already seen it. I thought, how inept can you get?

Trouble is, he didn't say it. Reuters buggered up the translation. As translated, the quote went:

‘The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger “shoah” because we will use all our might to defend ourselves'.

Melanie Phillips explains

Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.

The BBC has now (as of 14.58) changed both the translation and the article.

Fearful Asymmetry

This article by Anshel Pfeffer is based on a report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The point of it is that, however inferior in arms the Jihadists, Hezbollah, etc may be, in the information war, not only do they have considerable advantages, but they are using what they have very well indeed.

Pfeffer describes how open the IDF was to scrutiny even to the Arab TV networks. Just north, however, the situation was very different.

ON THE other side, Hizbullah controlled the journalists covering the situation in Lebanon with an iron fist. Media tours of Hizbullah-controlled areas, where the IDF's bombing was mainly concentrated, were tightly managed, with foreign reporters being sternly warned against wandering off and talking to local residents unsupervised. Infringement of these rules would be punished by the confiscation of cameras and disbarment from any further visits or access to Hizbullah members. According to Kalb, only CNN's Anderson Cooper openly admitted to having operated under these rules.

This is not control for its own sake. They were building a storyline.

Hizbullah also forbade any photographs of its fighters. Cameramen were warned never to show men with guns or ammunition. The only armed personnel seen during this war were IDF soldiers; Hizbullah remained throughout a phantom army.

Another scene almost never shown was the hundreds of Hizbullah firing positions and missile launch sites within residential areas and private homes, the cause of many civilian deaths and a violation of international law.

The images told the story: this war was unarmed civilians against heavily armed (Israeli) soldiers. Civilians = Victims. Soldiers = Oppressors. Simple. Clear. Wrong.

More cartoon japes

The Cartoons kerfuffle rumbles on. Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly, is on trial today in Paris accused of breaking anti-racism laws. They reprinted the 12 Danish cartoons last February and added a few of their own.

How do you tell the difference between attacks on ideas and attacks against people? If the ideas are essential elements of the way a person maintains their identity, then, for that person, there will be no distinction between the two types of attack. Thus, the Great Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France accuse Charlie Hebdo of

public insults against a group of people because they belong to a religion.

For them, it seems that you can't criticise the religion, or certain ideas within that religion, without slandering the people who follow that religion. This is obviously an impossible connection to maintain in a secular society and legal system, though if you have laws against Holocaust denial, you have already muddied the waters and set an unfortunate precedent. The real place for such 'rules' is in the realm of either scholarship or good manners and socially-useful hypocrisy.

BBC on Israel

What to expect from the BBC's coverage this year. Stephen Pollard.

A BBC mole has sent me this briefing for BBC staff from the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on what lies ahead this year.

It’s all too predictable. The "fragmentation" of Palestinian society has, in Mr Bowen’s view, nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with Israel (“the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government”). Indeed, Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.

(via Tim Blair)

Armed information

I think there is little doubt that in the Muslim world, and to a great degree in the West, the image of the US is tarnished, to put it mildly. At best, it is seen as a heavy-handed keeper of the status quo; at worst, as an oppressive imperial power willing to kill on a 'vast' scale just to ensure oil supplies and a military presence in the region that holds those resources.

Many (me, included) have blamed the media and kept gimlet-eyes on it to bore through the facade of objectivity and to pick out and hold up the weavils that demonstrate the opposite. They are not difficult to find, especially with regard to Israel. But it's not enough.

Not enough, I mean, to explain the losses we have suffered in the information war. So often it has seemed that what has been gained with vast expenditures of energy, time, wealth and blood can be lost in an instant, in the time it takes for some nutter to press a button on his belt. So often it has seemed that every move we make, no matter how successful in terms of military or economic targets reached, is a mere blundering that destroys more than it protects.

One of the reasons for my enthusiasm for that post on Blackfive that I linked to yesterday was that no only does he explain why it seems that way, but he goes on to analyse what we can do about it. Today I clicked on some of the links he supplies, including the one that is the source for a lot of his ideas (among which, the word 'disaggregation').

It turns out that we have an Australian army captain called David Kilcullen to thank for these insights. And two experiences that got him thinking.

The first was a visit in 1993 to a museum dedicated to the defeat of a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam in the sixties. He wanted to understand how the Indonesian government achieved victory (in part, by doing what the coalition is not allowed to do in Iraq). But then, as he was writing, he witnessed the rise of Jemaah Islamiya in the same region as before as well as the success of the separatist Christian movement in East Timor. The Indonesians used the tactics that had brought them success in the first war, but to no avail. Why not? What was different? Kilcullen got to thinking.

I am not going to even try to cover all the ground he does. Just a couple of examples. He concluded, as many have in the last couple of years, that this is more an information war than a military one. He recalls listening to a bin Laden tape and his list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. Global warming? “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” He gives several examples of where the point of an action (such as 9/11) is not just to kill, but more importantly send a message to the 'constituency' and to the enemy (us). For example,

As soon as the recent fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israeli troops ended, Hezbollah marked, with its party flags, houses that had been damaged. Kilcullen said, “That’s not a reconstruction operation—it’s an information operation. It’s influence. They’re going out there to send a couple of messages. To the Lebanese people they’re saying, ‘We’re going to take care of you.’ To all the aid agencies it’s like a dog pissing on trees: they’re saying, ‘We own this house—don’t you touch it.’ ” He went on, “When the aid agencies arrive a few days later, they have to negotiate with Hezbollah because there’s a Hezbollah flag on the house. Hezbollah says, ‘Yeah, you can sell a contract to us to fix up that house.’ It’s an information operation. They’re trying to generate influence.”

Another reason that this analysis strikes me as something more than wishful thinking is its hard-headedness. No sentimental delusions.

[W]inning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest, which requires an element of coercion. Kilcullen met senior European officers with the NATO force in Afghanistan who seemed to be applying “a development model to counterinsurgency,” hoping that gratitude for good work would bring the Afghans over to their side. He told me, “In a counterinsurgency, the gratitude effect will last until the sun goes down and the insurgents show up and say, ‘You’re on our side, aren’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to kill you.’ If one side is willing to apply lethal force to bring the population to its side and the other side isn’t, ultimately you’re going to find yourself losing.” Kilcullen was describing a willingness to show local people that supporting the enemy risks harm and hardship.

There's an article from the New Yorker about Kilcullen and two pieces by the man himself: Twenty-Eight Articles - Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency (pdf) and Counterinsurgency Redux (pdf).

The Blogosphere

Richard Fernandez of PJM tries to analyse the Blogosphere and how it interacts with the MSM.

From his conclusion

The Internet revolution has created new structures of knowing, thinking and communicating. Those features are only now being exploited. They are destined to complement many aspects of the public intelligence system known as journalism over the next decade. The blogosphere contains potentially a very large number of information collectors, which raise events which occur in the physical world above a Horizon at which they become detectable on the Internet. It has also evolved a sophisticated network of watchers and analysts whose professional competence has no preset limits; analysts who are able to separate the signal from the noise. Finally, the blogosphere has a sophisticated and evolutionary system of grading the reliability and relevance of stories; it promotes stories of interest upward until they reaches the top of the Internet hierarchy within hours. From that apex, blogospheric memes can make the jump into the mainstream media and into the legal arenas of society.

... The blogosphere does not contain any preordained political or cultural bias. Structurally, however, it is extremely hostile to cant and disinformation. The political side which tells the most lies and falsehoods is likely to suffer more at its hands than one which hews more closely to the observable truth.

I wonder if the numbers are big enough yet. Though it seems absurb to say that anything between 55 and 100 million blogs may not be enough, the real point is how many readers they reach, or rather how many readers a particular meme reaches. One of the commenters (TigerHawk) points out that the Green Helmet Guy story would have been read by only about 1,000,000 people, if you calculate from the visits to Reynolds, Johnson, Malkin and Power Line. You might be able to add a few more readers if you include sites further down the feeding chain, but not a lot. I'm not sure a million is enough or even what number would be the tipping point. What would be a signal that the tipping point had been reached? The reaction of the MSM, or even of political leaders? How do you measure impact?

Will?

A crib of What the Islamists Have Learned: How to defeat the USA in future wars by Michael Novak

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war.

The main strategic aim of war today is to dominate the mind of the enemy's public, and then ultimately to dominate the mind of that public's leaders.

What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends.

In such wars, my brothers, whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins.

Bin Laden is even more correct than we knew before the last two years. The West does not have the will to resist. Those elites among them who do have the stomach to fight back, inexorably, day after day, are being undermined by their own media.

Now and in the future, the media will do our work. All we need are martyrs sufficient in number to keep a steady stream of orange flames and black smoke before their cameras, and to dump before them bodies that are stone-cold dead, and bear all over them the unmistakable blue marks of power drills and other disfigurements.

Of such martyrs, we need each day only a handful. In 365 successive days, we need fewer than one thousand.

(via Melanie Phillips)