Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Eric M. follows the trail of the Humiliate and Defeat Islam line much parroted in autoerotic frenzy by many a Warblogger:


There's a line in the neo-con circles about defeating Islam. Basically that with a really crushing defeat, Islam will then realize how wrong and misguided it has been, and reform itself into constitutional democracy.

The warbloggers usually point to Stephen Den Beste as the originator of this idea, that Islam had to be defeated to the extent Japan and Germany were:


Now the warbloggers are all happy that the Defense Policy Board, headed by Richard Perle, is considering their crazy ideas to humiliate Islam by occupying the country with the Islamic holy places:



The thing is, the idea did not originate with Stephen Den Beste. As far as I can find, the idea appeared in print in Feb 2002 issue of Commentary (sorry it's pay):


.. by none other than neo-con grand-daddy Norman Podhoretz, who advocating smashing five or six Muslim countries (the exact number didn't really matter) in order for the Muslim World to get the message. The connection? Perle and Podhoretz are like peas in a pod. Bob Woodward also reported how Perle's protege Paul Wolfowitz took the opportunity of Sept. 11 to approach Bush with a proposal to bomb six or seven Muslim countries immediately.

Warbloggers see affirmation of their views in the Defense Policy Board in July. I doubt Perle would stoop to cite warbloggers as a source of anything, but perhaps in their own way, they have helped spread this poisonous idea. The groundwork was laid long before. It's simply come full circle. Certainly the path of this idea on-line offers us psychological documentation of how propaganda works. People are provided with certain facts as the code, and all they are have to do is unconsciously run the program and marvel at their creative and original output.