It's Magic!
by Yitzhak Heimowitz
The British and French also have magic bombs. They have dropped hundreds on Libya without killing one innocent man, woman or child. Only Kadaffi's bullets kill civilians. The bombs and missiles save them.
If you believe this I have a Brooklyn Bridge in slightly used condition to sell you. I don't own it, but why should that matter?
What Israel can learn from this (and boy, do we need to learn it) is that today it is just as important to control the news field as the battle field.
In previous years an example of complete media control was given by Margaret Thatcher, when the British went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The British Defense Ministry offered all the journalists transportation for the long trip to the war zone on a British naval ship. Then they stranded all of them in mid-ocean until the fighting was over. The only news items that reached the world were the official releases and films of the British Army spokesman.
That coup is difficult to repeat, but the American armed forces encouraged favorable coverage by embedding journalists with various military units in the war against Saddam Hussein.
The queen in "Alice in Wonderland" said, "A word means exactly what I want it to mean." I remembered this when I watched Hillary Clinton on TV, trying to keep a straight face, while she explained that Bashir Assad sending his army to kill Syrian civilians was different from Kadaffi sending his army to kill Libyan civilians, so that the US should stay out of Syria while intervening in Libya.
Most countries, if not all, in this imperfect world are not impressed by virtue, but by strength. Thus we should not knock ourselves out trying to prove to most of them that we are the good guys, which they are programmed not to accept, but that we are the winners.
3 comments:
If the people of other countries were only impressed by strength and not morals, why would the press find it so important to skew the news so that the invading nations seem like good guys?
While the press isn't a good moral example to the rest of us, even with their cynicism they must believe and calculate that American/British citizens believe in moral causes. They are probably right about this, even if they manipulate this toward immoral ends.
I think most Americans that are not part of the cynical, brainwashed elite, respect moral causes more than strength; thats why Star Wars and other stories about the triumphant underdog are so huge here.
Shalom!
After the Six Day War Israel was the world's darling. Israel was strong and proud then. Israel has rarely combined those two attributes ever since. The results have been disastrous, and Israel's PR status is the smallest disaster.
Anonymous, as you stated, the morality of an issue can be skewed so what value does being a "moral cause" have? People aren't being impressed by what is moral. What impresses people is being made to seem moral.
But we have to keep plugging away.
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