UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

Joel Fishman, European historian and student of cognitive warfare, describes Hizbullah's success in the media theater of the Lebanon War (2006).  The article so pleased Hizbullah that they put it up at their English site.

Joel Fishman

Makor Rishon

07 July 2007

Stopping the Man in the Green Helmet:  How Israel could lose the Next Battle of the Media War

A year has passed since the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War and there could be another round soon.  The Winograd Commission of investigation has published its report on the first days of the war last July. Hopefully, the second part of the report will deal with Israel's failures in the media.  For the present, it is worthwhile to devote some attention to the public debate on the subject.  Shortly after the cease-fire in mid-August 2006, retired ambassador Zvi Mazel published a critique entitled "Tsipi, you failed" (Y-net, on 24 August 2006).  Mazel accused Foreign Minister Livni of not doing her job in presenting the government's position in the media during the war.   And, Ra'anan Gisin, former Spokesman for the Prime Minister, published "Want to win the media war? Don’t Apologize,” Y-net, 11 September 2006. 

More recently, two important articles appeared in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs:  one by Zev Furst, an American media expert, and the other by retired ambassador Zalman Shoval.  Separately, the veteran American journalist and media expert, Marvin Kalb, with Carol Seivitz, published  The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media As A Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict (February 2007).  This partial selection of literature indicates an awareness and concern that Israel has failed to make its case in the media and that there is an urgent need for rethinking and improvement.

Jan 11, 2009 21:28 | Updated Jan 12, 2009 11:46

NGOs aid Hamas PR campaign

By ANNE HERZBERG

Since the beginning of the war with Hamas, human rights organizations have accused Israel of "genocide," "willful killings," "targeting civilians" and "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions." Taken at face value, these statements appear to describe flagrant violations of international law and horrific abuses of human rights. Yet, upon closer inspection, these condemnations must be seen as part of a wider campaign to promote the Palestinian cause.

In a talk he delivered to the Institute for Counter-Terrorism Conference in September of 2009, Stuart Green summarized some of the basic themes of his thesis on Cognitive Warfare and applied them specifically to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  In it he reviews a number of the Western (post-modern) memes which those waging cognitive warfare on the West (demopaths) systematically exploit.

Western discourses are particularly vulnerable to fracture because of the premium placed on pluralism, political correctness, and the self-examination of guilt culture. For all the benefits of self-examination and sensitivity to other cultures, guilt and political correctness also leave gaping holes that cognitive warriors happily infiltrate with their memes.  Richard Landes has devoted considerable attention to the function of the “demopath,” one who uses the progressive values of Western democracy in order to destroy it...  I will now go through some examples—by no means an exhaustive list—of some vulnerabilities that facilitate jihadist infiltration of the accepted Western discourse.  In each case, because the Westerners who accept these memes fail to apply their principles to the “other,” they end up becoming – in the name of progressive values and love of peace – agents of influence and a major aid to belligerent authoritarianism.

For more from Green on cognitive warfare see:

PC, Prohibited Analysis, and the “Arab Mind”

The Discourse and the Cognitive Offensive

On Moderation and Cognitive Warfare

Cognitive Warfare and the Role

of Mainstream Media

By Stuart Alexander Green

September 2009

INTRODUCTION

In an early 1980s interview, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov claimed that the Soviet intelligence service only spent about 15% of its effort on intelligence collection.  The rest was spent on the slow process of ideological subversion, or “active measures.”  More than a simple dump of leaflets or strident use of loudspeakers, it was the alteration of “…the perception of reality in America to such an extent that… no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their communities and their country.”1 The targets become so demoralized, so contaminated, so “programmed to think and react to stimuli in a certain pattern” that their minds cannot be changed, even if exposed “to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black.”

This psychological condition is not induced with truth or at least by truth alone, but by a decades-long bombardment with propaganda, disinformation and lies.  Unlike the American doctrinal concept of employing only truth in psychological operations, the Soviets imposed no such restrictions on themselves.2 Latislav Bitman, former Deputy Director of Czechoslovakia’s Intelligence Service Department of Disinformation, explained that “Deliberately distorted or manipulated information [was] leaked into the communication system of the opponent [to] be accepted as genuine information and influence either the decision making process or… public opinion.”