[whataretheysaying] Mary Madigan: The Media and the success of Jihad

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Posted by Mary Madigan:
The Media and the success of Jihad
http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1181842956.shtml


   Thanks to Richard Landes* of [1]Second Draft

     If you want to understand the troubling relationship between the
     MSM and the success of Jihad in the 21st Century, this film is the
     place to start. Second Draft releases the third in the series
     According to Palestinian Sources. Written, researched and produced
     by Richard Landes, a medieval historian turned media critic, Icon
     of Hatred explores how the media-created icon of Muhammad al
     Durahâs death, helped launch a new phase of global Jihad at the
     dawn of the 21st century.

     To this day, most Westerners typically greet any effort to discuss
     the Al Durah MSM scandal with: "Fuggedaboudit! It's over. History.
     Let sleeping dogs lie."

     But such is not the way with blood libels. They constantly emit
     their poison into the information bloodstream. So once the Al Durah
     "lethal narrative" entered the mainstream of public opinion
     worldwide, it exerted â and continues to exert -- an astonishingly
     noxious influence, blighting our young and global 21st century.

     Icon of Hatred explores

     1) how PA TV took the footage of what was, at most, an Israeli
     error, most likely a work of Pallywood, and turned it into an
     accusation of cold-blooded murder, a proof of Israeli intentions to
     commit genocide.

     2) how this "blood martyr" became the icon not only of the "Al Aqsa
     Intifada," but of global Jihad, catapulting Jihadism from the
     margins to the center of Muslim "street," making suicide bombing
     the weapon of choice.

     3) how Al Durah became the symbol of outraged compassion in the
     West, fueling an anti-Zionist crusade that aligned the "human
     rights" and "anti-war" left with the most murderous theocrats on
     the globe. And how, in embracing the Muslim equation of Israel with
     Nazis, European intellectuals have encouraged the surge of Islamist
     triumphalism not only in the Middle East, but within their own
     countries.

   * Richard Landes is Professor of Medieval History at Boston
   University, the animator of The Second Draft, and blogger at [2]The
   Augean Stables. Having analyzed a major dossier of forgeries around
   the dawn of the second millennium, he has turned his attention to
   another, and far more dangerous constellation, that permeate our MSM
   at the dawn of the third millennium.

References

   1. http://seconddraft.org/
   2. http://www.theaugeanstables.com/