The Provocateurs
How to enrage Muslims worldwideby Justin Raimondo
Somewhere, Osama bin Laden is smiling. He has good reason to be happy. In the last week or so, the West has given his program of a relentless jihad against America new credibility, and delivered thousands of new converts to his doorstep. The Muhammad cartoon controversy, new photos of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, and a video of Iraqi kids being brutally beaten by British soldiers after a protest demonstration have all provided similar – and, more importantly, very visual – confirmation of al-Qaeda's basic contention: that the U.S. and its Western allies are embarked on a crusade to humiliate and destroy the Muslim religion worldwide – and that nothing less than a merciless war against the infidels can stop them.
The visual element is key here: all three incidents bear the earmarks of classic propaganda techniques, which are meant to inflame and provoke a target population as a prelude to an armed struggle. Whether or not it was planned that way, this triad of outrages – with more, doubtless, to come – effectively serves as the means by which both sides in a looming world war prepare their people for the coming battle – and basically ensures that such a conflict is inevitable.
Consider how the origins of all three provocations are cloaked in murk and mystery. First of all, the cartoons: deliberately insulting and gratuitously obscene caricatures of the Prophet are published in a Danish newspaper of right-wing provenance and suddenly begin appearing all over Europe. The "explanation" offered up by the pro-war media is that this is all the result of a conspiracy hatched by "hidden masterminds," as the UK Telegraph put it. The assumption is that these "masterminds" were Danish imams and activists who conducted a protest campaign against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for publishing the cartoons in the first place, but, as I pointed out here, this seems a dubious proposition at best. What Reason magazine, with predictable juvenility, calls the "Intoon-ifada," may indeed have been promoted by certain persons for reasons of their own: however, it is unlikely that the provocateurs are the same folks who are responding to the provocation.
SNIP
The idea that some agency is orchestrating these events and pushing to exacerbate increased tensions between the West and the world of Islam cannot be dismissed out of hand entirely. Governments carry out covert propaganda operations in foreign countries all the time, and given the proximity of these supposedly disparate events, and the specific context in which they occurred, the possibility that these exposures of Western perfidy are being coordinated cannot be discounted. Yes, I know this is a "conspiracy theory," but that accusation has less resonance in the post-9/11 era. After all, how else but via a good old-fashioned conspiracy did a band of 19 hijackers carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history? How did the London bombers pull it off? Or the Madrid bombers? Yet al-Qaeda is not alone in wanting to accelerate the conflicting religious and political passions that seem to be coming to a head all at once.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8578
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