That was quick! A CNN Jihad video the whole family can enjoy!

October 19, 2006

It only took a day — one day! — after Tom Friedman confirms the existence of jihadist literature that says:

The jihadists follow our politics much more closely than people realize. A friend at the Pentagon just sent me a post by the Global Islamic Media Front carried by the jihadist Web site Ana al-Muslim on Aug. 11. It begins: “The people of jihad need to carry out a media war that is parallel to the military war and exert all possible efforts to wage it successfully. This is because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations to make them either support or reject an issue.“

It then explains that for jihadist videos of attacks on Americans to have the biggest impact, “Some persons will be needed who are proficient in the use of computer graphics including Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, or other programs that the people of jihad will need to design … video clips about the operations.”

Finally, the Web site suggests that jihadists flood e-mail and video of their operations to “chat rooms, television channels, and to famous U.S. authors who have public e-mail addresses … such as Friedman, Chomsky, Fukuyama, Huntington and others.” This is the first time I’ve ever been on the same mailing list with Noam Chomsky.

. . . for CNN to step in the poop pile with their sniper videostory. We’ve known such videos are out there (YouTube, Google, Metacafe, etc), so why does CNN feel the need to mainstream these propaganda films right now, before an election? Oh, see above.
As CNN editors try to explain here, they feel that it is their journalistic responsibility to present the unvarnished truth, however gruesome it is. Or however ORCHESTRATED it is. Do these editors have any sense? It is not unreasonable to ask where these people’s loyalties reside.
Why not show some footage of our guys blasting away some jihadists holed up in a latrine? They can’t because that would be, well, propaganda, of course. Woudn’t want to be engaged in cheerleading, because it’s improper to take sides.