Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Resisting "Resistance": Propaganda as News on CNN

During earlier coverage on Sunday, CNN chose the word "resistance" to describe Hizbullah's actions in Lebanon – a term used by Hizbullah - as well as Hamas - to describe their own attacks - implicitly presuming that armed jihad organizations are 'resisting' and defending against aggression, rather than initiating it.
This excerpt is from a longer report on CNN's phenomenal anti-Israeli bias in its reporting from the Middle East. CNN's behavior, of course, is not exceptional. The MSM as a whole have very much taken to parroting Hezbollah's party line in the current conflict, having cheerleaded for the terrorists from the very outset of the current war, proclaiming Hezbollah as the victors even before the guns were more or less silenced yesterday.

The above excerpt is a particularly fine example of the way our language is slowly, inexorably being used to strangle the truth. By accepting the premises of our sworn enemies, the MSM become, inexplicably, a willing tool in the destruction of the west. This is the Marxist-Gramscian impulse run wild, the undermining of a culture just for the hell of it. And the media and the MSM do it every day. Wonk is beginning to seriously wonder if there is any way to stop it.

The example above is quite simple. CNN thoughtlessly parrots to its audience Hezbollah's concept of itself as a "resistance." But wait just a cotton pickin' minute here. "Resistance" to what?

In the case of the strage entity currently known as "Palestine"—in spite of the fact that there is no ethnicity that can actually call itself Palestinian—one might have legitimately described their terrorists as a "resistance" during the Israeli occupation. If you accept Palestine as currently defined as the homeland of the people who live there, you could legitimately describe those fighting against that occupation, as odious as they may be, as a sort of "resistance."

But we have a set of different circumstances operating in what I think is still called Lebanon. Here, a group of terrorist thugs calling itself Hezbollah and funded by the thugs in Damascus and the terrorists and fascists in Tehran, crossed over the border of a sovereign nation, Israel, and kidnapped two of its soldiers while murdering half a dozen more. When Israel crossed over the Lebanese border in pursuit of these thugs, and to deny them resupply of weaponry, they were within their right to defend themselves, much the way we were when we took it to the terrorists hiding in the failed state of Afghanistan.

The point to make here is that, while, due to Syrian and Iranian duplicity and the desperate ignorance of the impoverished Shiites inhabiting the south of Lebanon, Hezbollah has a couple of ministers in the current Lebanese government, they do not CONSTITUTE the legitimately elected Lebanese government which, as the government of an allegedly sovereign state, has authority over all its people.

But at base, Hezbollah regards their organization as a law unto itself, and does, in fact, not recognize the authority of the government of which they are a part. Therefore they, unilaterally, and without a thought or care as to the consequences of their actions (or possibly in spite of this), deliberately provoked the Israelis to come after them. Once having done so, they then had and have the chutzpah to call themselves the "resistance." This is not only a murderous concept. But it's the wholesale slaughter of the meaning of the term "resistance," turning it on its ear.

Were Hezbollah the legitimately elected government of Lebanon, the term might have some resonance. But acting without the authority of the legitimate Lebanese government, they provoked the wholesale destruction of an infrastructure that Lebanon has been painstakingly rebuilding for the last 5-10 years, and most particularly during the last 6, after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the south of Lebanon.

In other words, prior to the Hezbollah provocation, neither the state of Lebanon nor the state of Israel had any problems with one another per se, in spite of the lack of a treaty and in spite of periodic provocations by Hezbollah thugs.

In its blatantly provocative kidnapping of the two soldiers, Hezbollah assumed that the spirit of the status quo would prevail, and that they'd be rewarded, after a time, with yet another lopsided prisoner swap, trading the two Israeli citizen-soldiers for, no doubt, hundreds of murderers currently incarcerated by the Israelis, and for good reason. But they miscalculated, as did Al Qaeda in NYC and Arlington, Virginia. Since they don't recognize the concept of a nation-state, Hezbollah failed to note that its trespass on sovereign territory, a trifle to them, was a huge provocation to a beleaguered state. And in so doing, they provoked the wrath of a sovereign state, legitimately defending itself, upon the entirety of Lebanon, whose infrastructure had to be destroyed to prevent a massive resupply of an enemy whose supplies had been discovered to be surprisingly inexhaustible.

The point of all this is that when all is said and done, the concept of Hezbollah as the leaders of a "resistance" is as laughable and illegitimate as it is a complete contravention of international law. "Resistance" connotes a brave people fighting to regain control of their own legitimately held territory. The problem is that, in Lebanon, it is the Lebanese government that legitimately hold its own territory, not Hezbollah, which LEGITIMATELY holds NO TERRITORY. Thus, for Hezbollah to call itself a "resistance," and for the MSM to simply accept this characterization, is to accept Hezbollah's concept of itself, which again is against all known tenets of international law.

Ominously, however, in many ways, that's the point. Old line U.S. communists in the 1950s were always fond of calling themselves "patriots." And they were. What they didn't tell you that their "patriotism" was not on behalf of the U.S., but on behalf of the World Socialist Republic whose seat was then in Moscow. This sly twisting of the word fooled many, as it does today for organizations stemming from this political geneology like ANSWER, Code Pink, and moveon.org. Their "patriotism" too, far from being protected by the Constitution, is seditious and treasonous, as it does not recognize the authority of the U.S. government, only the world socialist order.

Likewise, the sinister meaning behind Hezbollah's use of the term "resistance" is that they do not and never will recognize the states of Israel and Lebanon. Or Jordan, or Egypt, or France, or the U.S., or anything. They represent the Shiite flavor (as opposed to the Wahhabi flavor) of the now nearly mythic Islamic "caliphate." They are a law unto themselves, much as is Al Qaeda. They are the SS as opposed to the Wahhabi Kremlin. They are, in the end, fascists who seek world domination through the excuse of an apocalyptic and murderous interpretation of Islam.

They are, in short, the "resistance" only if you agree with them that they can legitimately murder anytime, anywhere, in search of a restored caliphate. They are certainly not a "resistance" in any rational understanding of what this word really means.

By accepting their terminology, however, CNN and the MSM once again are proving to be even greater enemies of democracy and what is left of Western culture. For by accepting Hezbollah's depraved concept of themselves, CNN and the MSM are brainlessly paving the way for the legitimization of a New Caliphate. The masterminds behind CNN and the MSM, of course, would be horrified at this observation. But by becoming the willing stooges of the Islamofascists, and by defining the meaning of our language in their direction, they are aiding and abetting the rise of the Hitlers and Stalins of the 21st century. Stupified by the puerile left and incapacitated by a terminal case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, they are, nonetheless, leading us to an apocalypse that we don't want but are going to get.

Words matter. And we may find this out much sooner than we think.

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