sirenianshores

The Register details one of the more notorious examples of recent Islamic terrorist propaganda - a widely distributed set of online videos showing the sad spectacle of several dozen American soldiers being shot by snipers in Iraq. I haven’t linked to either of the video here on grounds of good taste. But they are available on YouTube and Google video for anyone interested in looking for them.

The only consolation is the fact that many of the soldiers shot in the video would have escaped death due to the latest advances in body armour and battlefield medical technology. In the Juba I video, an American soldier can be seen being knocked to his feet by the impact of a sniper’s bullet and then promptly getting back up again apparently unscathed. Other soldiers in the videos however were not so lucky.

The Juba videos highlight a number of interesting aspects of the war on terror:

1)  The willingness of radical Islamic terrorists to use some of the West’s greatest inventions against us. Islamic fanatics have a tendency to oppose all forms of modern technology unless it can be used to facilitate their aim of killing people who disagree with them. Presumably if they ever win the war against the West, they can abandon modern technology and return to living in their tribal Stone Age lifestyle.

2) The abdication of the mainstream media’s responsibility for reporting the actual truth of war. Much of the reporting of the real war can now be found on websites like YouTube. What eventually ends up on our TV screens is heavily filtered and sanitised - Al Jazeera being a notable exception of course. If the Vietnam War was the world’s first real TV war, then it could be said that the War on Terror is the first ‘YouTube war’. The Bush administration may have repeated many of the mistakes of the Vietnam War, but one mistake which they keenly avoided was in preventing public support for the war from being sapped by shielding the American public from the human cost of the war. Unsurprisingly, the subservient American media meekly complied with the Bush administration’s wishes.

The American side also tends to make use of YouTube as a propaganda tool. Interestingly enough many of the Jihadi videos tend to show up on some of the more right-wing US blogs and websites. In a similar way to how Frank Cappa used enemy propaganda footage in his WWII ‘Why We Fight’ propaganda films, supporters of the war on terror tend to use these Jihadi videos as justification their position by changing the context to make the Jihadis look like savages who must be stood up to at all costs. They have plenty of fertile ground to work with: the man claiming to be a sniper in Juba II video is clearly a thug with an overly high opinion of himself and a seemingly unquenchable appetite for inflicting death upon others. Many typical Jihadi videos tend to feature a backdrop of religious music combined with feverish chanting of ‘Alu Akbar’ over and over in a zombie-like fashion.

Many American troops post compilations on sites like YouTube of video footage shot during their tours of duty in Iraq. Usually consisting of soldiers kicking down doors, blowing stuff up and memorable goofy moments away from the action, all set to a pounding Nu-Metal or Rap soundtrack. The intent behind these videos seems to have less to do with propaganda and more to do with the personal aspect of the war. The message appears to be: if the media isn’t willing to tell our story, then perhaps we will simply do it ourselves instead. The propaganda value of these videos is doubtful at best: seeing a bunch of cowboys reducing much of Iraq to rubble does not inspire confidence in their ability to win the hearts and minds of the people they are supposed to be fighting for. No doubt if the roles were reversed, and a group of soldiers from the Middle East were seen kicking down doors and reducing American cities to rubble, there would be no shortage of young Americans eager to fight the foreign invaders.