Al-Jazeera and Cultural Jihad 
By Robert Maynard

A couple of week’s ago the True North Radio show featured Defender’s Council of Vermont President John Stuart and Robert Spencer on the topic of Al-Jazeera as a propaganda tool for the spreading of jihad. A couple of callers raised the issue of Americans being too smart to fall for Al-Jazeera's propaganda effort and that it might even be a good idea to let them on the air as a way of exposing their ideas.  One questioned the notion that they would be successful in inciting Americans to violence.

I think that they were totally missing the point.  The nature of the propaganda threat posed by AJ English differs from that of AJ Arab.  There are two forms of jihad, violent jihad and "Cultural Jihad".  I think that AJ Arab is inciting the former, but that AJ English is more likely to facilitate the latter.  Furthermore, much of the propaganda groundwork needed for this effort has already succeeded and a significant number of Americans have already fallen for it.

I am referring to our ideology of "multiculturalism" with its lumping into of individuals into groups of "Oppressors" vs. the "Oppressed".  A strategy of cultural jihad positions Arabs/Muslims as a member of the oppressed group deserving of special protections.  This starts with a bastardization of our constitutional notion of rights.  A process that is already underway with the assumption by so many Vermonters that by refusing to carry Al Jazeera, we are violating the 1st Amendment right to free speech.  There is also a voice expressing the notion that opposition to AJ constitutes racial and religious hatred of Arabs/Muslims.

If Arabs/Muslims are a victim of hatred by an ignorant population, the logical conclusion is a combination of hate crimes/speech legislation as well as education efforts designed to allow us ignorant Americans to become more familiar with Islam and Arab culture.  The so-called "education efforts" are already happening in some parts of the country where students at local schools are encouraged to dress up as Muslims and learn about Muslim culture. Take a look at the five part history text being taught in California.

In the name of "Diversity", the Koran is made into a significant part of the course, yet let the bible be brought up in a classroom and we have a problem with the "Separation of Church and State". At the level of higher education and think tanks, the Whabist ideology is being promoted by Saudi Oil money. Needless to say, this is where the source of what we teach about Islam in the lower levels of our education system comes from. It is highly likely that any education programs designed to cure our ignorance of Islam would be propaganda in disguise.

There is also the Supreme Court and legal decisions to consider.  It is already the case that a lot of judges make decisions based on legal standards rooted in other cultural traditions than our own Judeo-Christian tradition.  Out of fairness, why not insist that they consult Sharia Law in such decisions?

Another approach to cultural jihad would be propaganda aimed at undermining confidence in America’s cultural heritage. It is one thing to constructively criticize our socio-political shortcomings, but quite another to cross the line into deliberate propaganda aimed at discrediting that heritage. In an interview talking about the reasons why he quit, David Marash points out that the parent station would insist on airing programs slanted with a blatant anti-American bias which were such shoddy (his own word) examples of journalism, that the planning desk in Washington refused to go with them.  The response from the parent company: "the planning desk in Doha literally sneaked a production team into the United States without letting anyone in the American news desk know, and they went off and shot a four-part series that was execrable." (Direct quote from Marash.)

One such example was on the problem of poverty in America, which he characterized as "so stereotypical and shallow that the planning desk in Washington said that we think this is a very bad idea and recommend against it and won’t do it."

Marash points out that:

"Now, there is poverty in America, and there is a very wide gulf between rich and poor in America and that is a trend for which there are stories to be reported. But this series reported nothing beyond the stereotype and the mere fact that there were homeless people living on the street in Baltimore, for example. Well, were they there as a consequence of mental illness that was not properly cared for because of a generation of a policy of de-institutionalization? Al Jazeera didn’t know because they didn’t ask. Frankly they didn’t know enough to ask. It was enough for them to show poor people living in wretched conditions in a prosperous American city and decry it. Then they went to South Carolina and found a town that—I know this is going to shock you, Brent—had very rich people and, on the other side of the railroad tracks, very poor people. And the wretchedness of the poor people’s living conditions was enumerated. In fact this memorable question and answer exchange occurred:

Q: What’s it like to live with rats in your home? 
A: Bad. [laughs]"

Robert Maynard is the Editor of the True North website