As a journalist I was immersed in the news and information business, so I got a closer look at the power the media had in forming the foundation for the thinking of most people. I realized how it had been and continued to be used to manipulate and foment Arab religious animosity into social and political hatred toward the Jews, and to carry on the hatred, which since World War II has been responsible for the mass exodus of nine hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The media are now the key to brainwashing a new generation of Arabs in preparing them to fight for the destruction of Israel. This theme of Arab hatred for Jews starts almost at birth. It’s as if, as the Arabic expression goes, “They are fed hatred by their mother’s milk.” What they grow up watching on TV, reading in newspapers, and listening to on the radio reinforces what they hear at home, and vice versa. A cycle of hate and spiteful information and misinformation influences their views and opinions.
There are others who feel as I do. On December 21, 2001, the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat published a letter by Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, calling for a thorough self-examination in the Islamic world. “Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and Their Ilk,” the letter said,
The mentality of each one of us was programmed upon entering school as a child, [to believe] that [Islam] is everything. Instilled in our small heads was the [notion that the Muslim] has a right—whatever the cause—and that he will triumph—even if he is armed with a stick of wood against a tank—because he [represents] the truth and the others represent falsehood. Instilled in our small heads was the [notion] that we have a monopoly on good values. . . . They have taught us that anyone who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the West means enfeeblement, licentiousness, lack of values, and even Jahiliya [i.e., ignorance—a term used to describe the pre-Islamic era] itself. Anyone who escapes this programming in school encounters it at the mosque, or through the media or from the preachers lurking in every corner2
Luckily for the good doctor, he and this Arabic paper share the freedoms the West has to offer.
Westerners need to understand that there is no free press in the Arab world. The press is used as a mouthpiece to reinforce and perpetuate a pan-Arab Islamic fundamentalist way of thinking. According to the pan-Arab party line, Jews are the problem in the Middle East. According to the relentless message of government-controlled media in the Arab world, all Arabs should be united against all things non-Arab and non-Muslim. The drumbeat of the Arab media is distinct with pedantic rhetoric. “Drive the Jews into the sea!” This form of “journalism” has as its base an unwritten vow to protect that which is Arab, rather than to be objective in any journalistic sense. “Jews are the devil!” Objectivity, which the Western press is so proud to claim adherence to, is held hostage by religious and governmental edicts. “Jews use the blood of Arab children to make Passover bread!” These Arab dictators and rulers are free to say whatever will sustain their continued dictatorial or religious hold on power or promote the pan-Arab cause against the Jews, the West, and America. Let me repeat again: There is no free press in the Arab world. “Kill the Jews!"
The biggest threat to freedom of the press was and still is fear. One Western journalist who was stationed in Jerusalem while I was anchoring Middle East Television’s evening news had covered the Middle East for years and clearly understands the use of fear in suppressing objective and truthful reporting. In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman wrote that “physical intimidation” was always in the back of a reporter’s mind when covering a story out of Beirut, where news organizations were based in the Muslim-controlled western part of town.3 Honesty and objectivity fell prey to the threats of ruling Muslim factions and the PLO. Honesty and objectivity could get a reporter’s legs and arms broken, or get him killed outright. The most recent example of this prevailing intimidation of the press is the killing of four Lebanese journalists in 2005. One of them, Gibran Tueni, was a politician and publisher of the liberal newspaper An Nahar Three others have narrowly avoided death, suffering serious injury.4
"There were . . . stories which were deliberately ignored out of fear,” writes Friedman. “How many serious stories were written from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the PLO leadership . . . ? It would be hard to find any hint of them in Beirut reporting before the Israeli invasion."5 Self-censorship by the Western and Middle Eastern press won out over revealing all and telling the truth about corruption or atrocities against the Christians. Newspaper and magazine readers and TV news audiences worldwide were unaware of how the foreign press was sucking up to Yasser Arafat. By providing only favorable coverage of the Palestinian suffering and underreporting the massacres, rapes, ravaging, and destruction the PLO inflicted on Lebanon, newspeople gained access, received press credentials, and were able to stay alive. “The Western press coddled the PLO,” Friedman contends. “For any Beirut-based correspondent, the name of the game was keeping on good terms with the PLO."
Unfortunately, the intimidation of journalists continues today, extending to the wider Arab and Western media. There are recent examples of the press’s fearful cowering before intimidation in the Arab world. CNN’s submissive coverage of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was revealed by senior CNN news executive Jordan Eason in a post-Iraq war op-ed column titled “The News We Kept to Ourselves."6 Reporting honestly about Saddam’s atrocious, murderous rule, he argues, “would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.” After this revelation about what you, my reader, used to think was objective reporting, should you have relied on any information from any CNN stories about Saddam in forming your opinions? How much other press coverage of the Middle East have you taken at face value and let influence your thinking? Remember back during the Lebanese civil war when the Israelis entered Beirut and the world media reported it as an invasion of the country? No one mentioned how Israel and the Christians were working together to get rid of Islamo-fascist terrorists who had set up shop in Lebanon and turned it from the Paris of the Middle East into a terrorism center spinning out hijackers and terrorists throughout the world.
If the world had understood the goal of Islam to dominate the world back then and supported Israel and the Christians in their fight against Iran, Syria, and the jihadists infiltrating and fighting in Lebanon, Lebanon would not be a mini Afghanistan in the making today under the control of the fanatical Hezbollah, which is supported and financed by Iran and Syria. The Christian Lebanese were vilified for defending themselves and their country against the Islamists just as Israel was vilified by the world when it destroyed Saddam’s nuclear reactor, and just as America is vilified today for protecting itself and trying to fight an enemy bent on killing its civilians. America is being portrayed as the aggressor attacking poor Muslim countries. Here we were minding our own business when we were attacked. If it weren’t for the attacks of September 11, 2001, America would not be hunting down the killers of innocents across the globe.
What were your thoughts about Christian Lebanese and Israelis back then? Do you have a different attitude now that Islamists have attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and are waging a worldwide holy jihad? Our American administration is having to suffer accusation, scorn, second-guessing, and outright condemnation from these who still have their heads in the sand. Let me put nicely what a dear friend of mine says: “When you bury your head in the sand, all you do is make a big fat target out of your behind."
Anti-Western Arab factions use the media as a propaganda tool on Westerners and their own population just as the Nazis and the Communist Party used them to control and manipulate the millions they subjected to misinformation. As Islam moves to subjugate minds to the Koran, it will use the media to further its Islamo-fascist goals by creating anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiment, first in the Arab world and then in the West. It may already have played a hand in influencing your thoughts and opinions about the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. policy in th
e Middle East in a pro-Arab way. One glaring example is the film Paradise Now, which was nominated for a 2006 Academy award. Paradise Now attempts to explain away the actions behind mass murderers. In effect, it legitimizes this type of mass murder and portrays the murderers themselves as victims! Some Americans actually sympathize now with suicide bombers and blame their actions on desperation.
If you get nothing more out of reading this book, take this insight from someone who comes from the Middle East speaking to Western readers, and let the deception end here.
If you think I am politically incorrect in labeling the Islamo-fascists as radical, barbarian terrorists, try complaining to Egyptian professor Dr. Farag Fouda, who in 1992 was assassinated by a member of al Gamaat al Islamiya, an extremist Muslim organization. Dr. Fouda was an advocate of secularism whose assassin was motivated by a statement of the council of Azhar University Muslim scholars in Egypt calling Fouda “a follower of the nonreligious current and extremely hostile to anything Islamic.” The murderer said he was fulfilling Islamic objectives. Fouda was an outspoken opponent of fundamentalism and was considered one of Egypt’s leading secularists.7 Fouda publicly challenged the haphazard jihadist war Islamo-fascists were waging. His murder took place in broad daylight, sending a clear message throughout the Middle East: Don’t get in the way. Watch what you say about Islam, what you report, and how you report it.
Let me give you some background on why there is no free press in the Muslim-dominated world. The first reason is religious. Absolutely no questioning is allowed concerning Allah and his apostle Muhammad. Practitioners must adhere to, and disregard any irrationality within, Islamic teachings. The masses are taught to react violently toward anyone who questions or criticizes Allah, or Muhammad or his teachings.
A perfect example is the Muslim world’s startling eruption of violence in reaction to the caricatures of Muhammad in the Dutch newspaper ]yllands-Posten. Muslim rage resulted in burning embassies, calls to butcher those who mock Islam, and warnings to be prepared for the real holocaust. The news pictures and video of these events represent a canvas of hate decorated by different nationalities who share one common ideology of bigotry and intolerance derived from one source: authentic Islam, an Islam that is awakening from centuries of slumber to reignite its wrath against the infidel and dominate the world, an Islam that has declared intifada on the West.
Some see Muhammad’s life itself offering his followers graphic examples of his intolerance toward dissent, slight, or rebuke. Well-known and repeated stories of fact or lore discourage any interest in voicing dissent. There is the story of the murder of the poetess Asma bint Marwan, who paid with her life when she spoke out against Muhammad for having a man named Abu Afak murdered. In his displeasure toward her, Muhammad asked his followers to murder her as well. She was killed by a sword thrust to her abdomen while suckling her baby in bed.8 Abu Afak was a Jew, and used to instigate the people against the apostle of Allah, and composed satirical verses about Muhammad. Whether these stories are fact or fiction, their effect is just as chilling to journalists in today’s Arab world.
One of the most notable modern examples of the suppression of free speech is that of Salman Rushdie. For years since the publication of The Satanic Verses, fatwas calling for his death have been issued periodically by Muslim clerics and governments. It hardly registers concern from anyone in the press anymore. If a preacher in America put out a contract on some journalist who said derogatory things about Jesus, the press would be morally outraged. But Muslim clerics and governments can do it and they get a pass.
With the international and local Arabic press being influenced by the ground rules I’ve described, whose news coming out of the Arab Middle East are you going to believe? See how the influence of fear can go all the way around the world and end up on the front page of the paper on your breakfast table? The Islamo-fascists are trying to manipulate a mass audience to believe they are the victims, and the policies of the West in the Middle East make them the aggressor and oppressors. All the while they hate our democracy, they hate our freedoms, they hate who we are as people, and they are working toward one Islamic Caliphate throughout the world with Sharia rule as law. So far they are doing a pretty good job at it.
Their tactics are simple: use the Western media to wage psychological warfare—and it doesn’t cost a dime. There are enough politically and philosophically motivated detractors who are also good-hearted and naive in the U.S. media to rely on. Where the U.S. would want the press to present a picture of hope and success, the Islamo-fascists and our detractors use it to wear down our resolve, build up frustration, and create division within Western populations. Unable to defeat Western military superiority, our enemy depends on negative themes throughout the media to create disunity, opening schisms on the home front in our communities, on our campuses, and in our government.
General Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, was asked why America was defeated in Vietnam. He said: “America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."9 This answer should be sobering to all Americans in the fight against Islamo-fascism.
The irony that always amazes me when I see people up in arms about our war against Islamo-fascism is how they don’t understand that the social freedoms they take for granted will be the first casualties of Islamic influence and control. The only social liberal thinkers in the Muslim Arab Islamo-fascist world are dead ones. Women’s freedoms and their protection under the law, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and other human rights will be the first to suffer. Oh yes, sorry, I forgot. . . there will always be the ACLU to depend on to keep the radical Muslims from taking these rights away. How foolish of me. Almost lost my head there.
One revealing phenomenon I discovered while covering the West Bank under Israeli rule was that the Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation had greater journalistic and religious freedom than they have under the Palestinian Authority today. When Israel was present in the West Bank, there were a larger number of varying viewpoints being expressed in the press. Most were anti-Israeli, but at least up to a certain point of vehemence they were freely expressed. Today under the Palestinian Authority and the newly elected Hamas, it is all anti-Israeli. Anything else could get you killed. Under Israeli rule, if you were a PLO collaborator and did an attack of some sort, you were given a trial and prison time. In Gaza or the West Bank today, if you are an Israeli collaborator, you get lynched and hung up on a telephone pole.
In the 1980s and 1990s Christians and Muslims got along together under Israeli control. I did a story in 1988 asking West Bank Christians what they thought would happen to them when the Israelis left. They were afraid to talk about it openly on camera. We had to obscure their faces and garble their voices to alleviate their fear of speaking out. They said that when the Israelis left they would be killed, persecuted, or subjugated under the heel of the Muslims, and today this is happening. Once predominantly Christian areas are being taken over by Muslims. It’s just like what happened in Lebanon when the Muslims took control.
The freedom of the press in Israel completely shocked me. Here was a small country of 5 million Jews in the middle of a sea of 150 million Muslims who wanted them killed or pushed into the sea, yet Israel let the press say almost anything it wanted, good or bad, about the government, the military, and Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza. I could not believe how the Israelis let the press have so much access. Our news crew even had a government-issued beeper so it could be contacted by the Israeli government press office to inform it of press conferences and military confrontations with the Arabs in the territories. The Israelis did require us to take stories to the censors for review, but changes were hardly ever made.
Working as a news anchor for World News gave me a front-row seat at the international theater. With an Associated Press machine in my office, faxes coming in from Beirut, calls from reporters working on stor
ies in Lebanon, and a daily satellite feed of worldwide stories, I was plugged in. With a show deadline every day, all this moved at high speed. But it didn’t stop in the office or when the show was over. My friends were journalists and bureau chiefs who worked the odd hours with me and beyond. We would go out together in the evening for dinner, sit around the table, and talk about the news. Our life was the news.
While working in Jerusalem I met an American journalist who worked for the English department of Middle East Television. Together we traveled between Israel and Lebanon, changing the Israeli license plates on his car to French ones and making sure we had nothing on us to indicate we had been in Israel as we entered Lebanon. Time spent in Lebanon often involved dodging bombs and bullets. My journalist friend, probably the only American freely moving around in Lebanon at that time, called it the Wild West and traveled with his two friends, Smith & Wesson. Once while we were passing through a checkpoint in the Christian town of Jezzine, a car behind us sped through, passing us without stopping. The guards opened fire and we ducked as it sped by. Luckily the machine-gun position that fired on the car was higher than we were, so the shots went over our heads. Other times we ducked shells and looked out for roadside bombs. Needless to say, going through the war together was a bonding experience. We became best friends.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 16