Footnotes from what came to be called the Middle East and beyond
OH MY …!!! Hizbullah also beats up old ladies, pollutes rives, clubs gay baby seals, rapes blind nuns, harvests the organs of healthy orphans, sodomizes senile grandfathers, and can be seen tearing the wings off butterflies across the globe … I am forgeting something? Write in with your own personal favorite and I will get in published in NYTimes. Is it a deal?
More analysis to follow …
Hopefully it won’t be long until I am home to get ready for Molly’s birthday party with a present from the Iranian people.
I wanna get taken hostage by Iran …!
More seriously, Iranian propaganda has me impressed. Yes, it is ham-fisted (when is propaganda not?), but it really does the trick. Expect the Iranians to milk the “hostage crisis” — not a crisis at all — for as long as humanly possible.
The Iranian leadership is literally talking its way into being an important country, which certainly must be a more fun way to do it than meeting with Dick Cheney and must be driving the Saudis and Israelis absolutely mad.
Bien joue!
UPDATE: Someone agrees:
Clearly, Tehran’s row with London has had immediate dividends with respect to Iran’s regional clout, causing pro-Iran sympathies in the Arab world. Arabs now see in Iran’s “heroic” standing up to “Western imperialists” a source of much-needed inspiration and hope, in contrast to their own feckless leadership. “The Arabs of the Persian Gulf are now less inclined to join the US and Israel against Iran than they were a mere week ago,” a former Iranian diplomat told the author.
The Israeli Consulate in New York has come up with an ingenious idea to promote tourism to Israel in the United States: officials there have managed to twist the arms of the most popular US men’s magazine, Maxim, to write a feature about stunning Israeli models.
Back when I was under the spell of Roman villiany, some guys from the Israeli consulate in NYC requested a meeting to push story ideas for the magazine I was editing. When I see this report, I learn that they could have been more persuasive …
PS: Going Hollywood.
Another PS by Bech (with kind permission?): yoyo check this out.
the British Daily Telegraph, that veritable font of military propaganda …?
And doesn’t chronic incontinence eventually result in dehydration?
Readers will note that the US government is prohibited from disseminating propaganda domestically by the Mundt Act, but it has a free hand overseas (thus VOA and these lovely stories in the British press). I hear that both the CIA and DOD are fairly conscientious in following these legal prohibitions, but these stories like these make the British press look like more of a lackey to US interests than even the British prime minister.
We just a few weeks ago, for the first time, engaged in Arabic on blogs. We have what’s called here a “digital outreach team” . . . that is actively going on the Arabic blogs and responding to misinformation and disinformation and propaganda and rumors with facts. And we’re very above board that it’s the digital outreach team of the State Department.
How many people are on the team?
I think it’s about four or five, and they’re supervised by a foreign service officer. And they are all Arabic speakers that do that. Then we have one young man in the rapid response center who goes on the Web sites and monitors and watches and surfs …
Remarkz 