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.” One of the more
pointed examples, if lesser known, is the “right-wing cabal” conspiracy theory of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination. Moscow pinned the act on an alleged gang of U.S.
conservatives literally hours after the president’s death.3
Soviet active measures depended on “agents of influence,” or individuals within
the target society who facilitated the process. Jean François Revel, French author and
former director of L’Express Magazine, noted that “Disinformation is not simply lies. It
is the art of having your enemy say what you want them to say.”4 In many cases the
journalists or authors do not know they are being used. The head of Soviet active
measures in Tokyo explained that articles “…would be written by local, in many cases
prominent, journalists who would express [them] as his or her own opinion. These kinds
of things normally [would not] be traceable back to the Soviet Union.”5
Bezmenov claimed that the Soviet hopes for demoralizing the American public
had been “overfulfilled.” “The result you can see,” he said, “Most of the people who
graduated in the ‘60s, drop outs or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the
positions of power in the government, civil service, business mass media, and educational


 1

systems. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them.” The Soviet strategy’s
success was impressive, if unquantifiable.
In essence, the Soviets intended for us to do it to ourselves. I am reminded of a
Muslim Brotherhood-linked document exposed in the course of the U.S. v Holy Land
Foundation trial, a strategic memo for internal dissemination that envisioned bringing the
United States down by “its own miserable hands.”6 Like in Judo, the intent is to exert a
minimum of kinetic effort and have us collapse under our own intellectual weight. But it
is a long-term investment; Bezmenov claims it takes 15 to 20 years before the first
returns are noticeable, and it would take at least that amount of time to reverse the
process. That period, by the way, is about the length of time it takes to educate one
generation of activists.
In Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against the West, Walid Phares explores a
similar, Saudi Arabian penetration of the American education system. In this strategy,
petro-dollars fund universities, libraries, and research centers, which willingly mute
serious exploration of Islamic conquest. “In the new textbooks, there was no Islamic
conquest, no fatah, no conquered peoples…. Jihad was painted as a spiritual inner
experience, almost a yoga exercise.”7 Groups like the Middle East Studies Association of
America (MESA) would anoint “…new generations of Middle East studies graduates
[thereby putting] even more teachers in the classrooms…. From the classroom, the
graduates were picked up to serve either as teachers for future classrooms or as public
servants in agencies—State Department, Congress, embassies, and beyond.” MESA’s
presidents have included Juan Cole and John Esposito, who defined the American
discourse on jihad and Middle East studies for decades.8 Intelligentsia—including press,
policy and intelligence circles—are probably no more or less immune to this
phenomenon than the rest of the public. Jacques Ellul brilliantly argued that education is
the very precondition for successful propaganda. It is a kind of “pre-propaganda” that is
slow, constant, and paves the way for the harder stuff, when agents of influence are
triggered to action.
If jihadists have really penetrated the American discourse, then Bezmenov
predicts no amount of contrary evidence or “authentic information” can sway us. Ellul,
for his part, argued that propaganda is successful precisely because it circumvents the
thinking parts of our brains. So, without the obstacle of critical thought, which we should
have all learned in our education, jihadists can leverage Esposito’s tendency to see only
the positive in Islam in order to disguise their real intent. When raw and unfavorable
evidence turns up showing jihad to be hegemonic and violent, Muslims can dismissively
wave their hands in a manner reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kanobe in Star Wars, and suggest
that “this isn’t the jihad you’re looking for.”9 So, in the midst of an ideological war,
jihadists may have convinced Western intelligentsia that the root sources of their
ideology are just fine.

INFORMATION OPERATIONS IN CONVENTIONAL WARFARE

In 2007 and 2008 I developed a theory that attempts to explain this process using
the Arab-Israeli conflict as a case study. I went beyond what the Soviets would call
political warfare or active measures, though that is the closest approximation. My broad
approach reaches down to the most basic element of cognitive warfare—the meme—and


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follows it through culture to the civilizational level. In explaining how violent ideologies
can come about, I consider religion and other taboo subjects, explain how some ideas can
attack others, how cultural traits can
assist with both the cognitive
defense and attack, how entire
societies’ discourses can be made to
change, how this process can last for
decades etc. Counter-insurgency
analyst David Galula once noted that
guerilla warfare, “Is not like
ordinary war—a ‘continuation of
policy by other means’—because [it]
can start long before the insurgent resorts to the use of force.”10
But the Western approach to war is a binary one wherein there is a state of either
war or peace, but seldom both. It is either “on” or “off.”11 American IO is accordingly
limited to the time and space of the physical battlefield, with particular emphasis on
technological means and solutions, the goal being to make the soldier more effective in
combat.12

A DIFFERENT VIEW

Terrorists and insurgents

essentially flip the U.S. paradigm.
They use violence to underpin
many key activities, including IO.
A single violent act can introduce a
new terrorist organization as a
significant player, raise awareness
of or create a crisis, begin
polarizing the public into
supporting and opposing camps,
and accelerate recruitment. In The
Role
of
Violence
in
Cognitive

essence, they have turned terrorism Warfare

and violence into what has often
been called “propaganda by deed,” but it is in the supporting, rather than the supported
role.13 Moreover, cognitive warriors may recognize the impossibility of ever destroying
their enemy’s armed forces, and they consequently seek to remain in the cognitive arena,
with an apparent emphasis on terrorism and guerilla warfare. Their violent operations,
however, represent only a fraction of what goes on in a cognitive war.

COGNITIVE WARFARE (BRIEFLY)

Let us turn to a very brief overview of cognitive warfare, so that the role of the
media can be better put in its proper context.


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 Memetics
In the beginning, there is the meme. This is a replicator that behaves like a gene
or a virus, depending on how you see it, but one that lives in the mental realm. Any idea
or information passed from one human to another can be considered a meme, or a “unit
of cultural replication.” Like biological genes, memes are selected by their environments
and they can become more complicated with evolution. Some simple examples include
songs, styles of architecture, words, and popular symbols. Memetics is a tremendously
useful tool for understanding and harnessing intangible abstractions. Perfectly suited for
analyzing cognitive warfare, this approach can break down ideologies, psychological
operations, religions, cultures, discourses, and virtually any other abstractions into their
basic constituent parts. I can lay them out for examination as entities that exist—some
say live—quite apart from the needs of the humans who carry them. Richard Dawkins,
the theory’s inventor, suggested that they are semi-independent life forms. In any case,
this theory helps us understand how ideas can thrive or fail whether they are “good” for
humans and empirically true, or “bad” and/or false. Mapping large memeplexes like
religions and violent ideologies will be complicated, but it is as promising a concept for
war as the human genome project is for medicine.

Culture and Religion

We then move onto the development of violent ideology. Many have tried their
hands at creating a model to explain rebellion in universalist terms, but few allow for
more than a few factors at a time. Moreover, some of the important ones have been
shelved and removed from debate. By this I mean culture and religion, which we are
discouraged from looking at critically—unless of course they are Western. Because
honest criticism of non-
Western cultures and religions
has essentially been off limits,
we find ourselves in a position
where the root sources of a
violent ideology cannot be
seriously examined. Religions
may only by celebrated for
their aesthetic differences and
presumed to be fundamentally
the same. So, I explain why
that approach has been wrong,
give examples of cultural-
religious memes that have a
deep impact on this war, and
show how our reluctance to The
Ideological
Engine,
the
Violence­Identity

criticize other cultures factors Wheel,
and
Reinvestment
of
Energy

into the plans of our enemies.
The model allows for varying degrees of many possible factors, including religion
and culture of course. Each driver, or motivator, can be considered fuel for the
combustion chamber of an engine. The more fuel and pressure—most likely from
multiple sources—the more likely there will be combustion. In some cases, culture may


 4

be the dominant factor, as, for example in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where
Westerners have tended to project their own values and concerns onto the Palestinians.
But in cultures where it is legitimate, even required that you shed blood for the sake of
honor, honor-shame dynamics provide an explosive accelerant in already tense situations.
If a civilization sees itself as having been superior for over a millennium, having that
civilization’s lowest subjects rise to dominate is unspeakably humiliating. It can be
grounds for war. And when all those concerns find voice in a religious ideology in which
the proof of Allah’s greatness is the victory of Muslims over the infidel, you have a
conflict with little of the components Westerners might consider rational or universal.

The Counter-Intuitive Effect

Curing some factors can quell anger, but it can be counterproductive too,
depending who is involved. Unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza might
have been beneficial in the earliest stages of the occupation, but now the engine is
working on its own power and such an action would likely spur more conflict. Seen as a
demonstration of good will or restitution in the West, a withdrawal today would probably
be perceived by Palestinians as a tactical “victory” and moral confirmation, pushing more
fuel into the chamber. In the Arab-Israeli case, this ensured by leaders’ skill and practice
from many decades of conflict, and a zero-sum mindset that paints concession as
weakness. The precedents for this are clear, particularly in Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s
struggle to destroy Israel did not abate after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.14 Hezbollah,
having “proven” that Goliath could be taken down with persistent violence, now had no
need to negotiate when presumably more could be won with the same strategy.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza took notice, particularly their leadership at Camp
David just a few weeks later.15

The Accepted Discourse

It is time to explain what constitutes the “strategic terrain” or “high ground” in
cognitive war. If we control this terrain, then others must work doubly hard in their
uphill battle against us. They must struggle against what we intuitively and morally know
to be true. They must endure our devastating verbal salvos, which our cognitive, or
moral high ground and the safety of numbers make so much easier to launch. If they
control this terrain, of course, then we are the ones to suffer under it. It is the “accepted
discourse.”
The accepted discourse can be considered a relatively small memeplex that roots
itself in environmental factors like culture, religion, academic paradigms, economic
traditions etc. It is, simply, what is “proper” to say, no matter the evidence at hand.
Though it is difficult to attack, it is not impervious to attack. With enough skill and a
long enough siege, control might be wrested through transparent, open debate, but
perhaps more effectively through a protracted (dis)information campaign that infiltrates
memetic vulnerabilities.
In the traditional, pejorative sense, propaganda may be considered an engineered,
infectious meme. As time wears on and the conflict’s rhetoric intensifies, propaganda
may pull away from empirical and perceived truths. Propagandists, seeking to shift the
intellectual center of gravity, attempt to obscure empirical truth by supplanting it with a
new one. The more successful the campaign, the more acceptable debate peels off the


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verifiable data, usually without the targets knowing. The goal may not be an endstate
wherein the targets believe all the propaganda. It is enough to have their perception of
reality uprooted and planted in a more advantageous spot. If, for instance, Palestinians
can convince the West that it is Israeli checkpoints that create the humiliation and the
hatred, rather than the very
existence of Israel, they have won
an immense victory.
Over time, the empirical
truth gradually becomes lost or
obscured. In the most extreme
scenarios, the gap between the
empirical truth and accepted
discourse grows so large that the
former is perceived as extreme or
unlikely. Thus, Westerners are as
reluctant to believe that
Palestinians teach genocidal
hatred to their children in every Changing
the
Accepted
Discourse


medium available to them, as
they are that the Israeli army
actually has high standards in
protecting enemy civilians during
urban warfare.
The different types of
information do not necessarily
begin in unison. It may be that
propaganda seemed extreme in the
beginning, but historical events or
changes in the intellectual
environment drew the discourse
closer to it. Stephanie Gutmann
argues, for instance, that 1967 marked the beginning of the end for Israel’s positive press
coverage. The paradigm assigning moral legitimacy to the weaker power—the
“righteous underdog” paradigm—did not change. So what caused the shift in Western
perception?
After 1967, particularly after the 1982 war, Israel’s strength and the West Bank
and Gaza occupations deprived the former fledgling state of its favored underdog status.
Although realistically Israel did not morally decline after 1967, neither could it retain the
legitimacy of the “little guy” when it had decisively trounced its most threatening
neighbors. The Palestinians now found themselves occupying the moral real estate from
which Israel had just been evicted, enjoying more than the ironic benefits of their
weakness and the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s.16 They also benefitted from the
coincidental development of aggressive political correctness, which tends to marginalize
criticism of non-Westerners. Logically, the West should have come to realize that a
nation or party can be both strong and moral, but this would have created a state of


 6

cognitive dissonance, or psychological discomfort. Giving the Palestinians their new role
avoided that discomfort as well as the need to deconstruct an old, favored paradigm.17

SOME MEMETIC VULNERABILITIES IN WESTERN THINKING

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. For a simple demonstration of this phenomenon, see the 2006 incident in
which Muslim Brotherhood-connected, Minneapolis imams appeared to deliberately
provoke “racial profiling” so that they might decry anti-Muslim oppression in America.18
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.

“Freedom of Speech”
Along with the notion of an accepted, politically correct discourse that
marginalizes anything within the West considered too “right wing”, there is a seemingly
contradictory sentiment that, when understanding and empathizing with another culture
all but pariah points of view may be at least considered and most may be deemed
“legitimate,” if different. Consequently, ideas of unequal merit are often given equal
treatment. Not infrequently, this concept is taken to the extreme, as Deborah Lipstadt
makes clear in Denying the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers play deftly on the free speech
and alternative view imperatives, “…the deniers want to be thought of as the ‘other side’
[and] have painted my refusal to debate… as a reflection of my lack of tolerance for the
First Amendment and my opposition to intellectual free inquiry.19 Their success can be
seen even today in the Spanish newspaper El Pais’ decision to interview David Irving as
part of their upcoming special on the 70th anniversary of World War II.20
In the Arab Middle East, one could argue that Holocaust denial is the accepted
discourse. In the West, deniers have not achieved control of the accepted discourse, but
they have at least achieved a level of play that exceeds the quality of their arguments.
This striking lack of rigor in making room for Holocaust denial stands in interesting
contrast to, say, the news media’s treatment of the Israeli government. Though Israeli
information has proven significantly more reliable than that derived from Palestinian
sources, Western mainstream media range between minimizing the comments of Israeli
spokespeople to treating them with open hostility, while treating Palestinian spokesmen
with considerable deference (more so in Europe than the U.S.). The apparent inversion
suggests that, despite the West’s introspective qualities and the high value it puts on
reliability of information, it is the intangible, almost playground notion of “in” and “out”
that determines who gets believed, not whether the information in question is empirically


 7

supportable or unreliable and dubious. Ellul would probably agree that this inconsistent
application of academic rigor factors deeply into the role of “education” and propaganda.

Universalism
Taking Edward Said’s and others’ criticisms to heart, the Western intelligentsia
today is quick to assume the members of every culture are fundamentally moderate
(relative to us), want similar things, and will react in similar ways to given circumstances.
Stephen Lambert, author of Y: Islamic Sources of Revolutionary Conduct, points out that
qualitative analysis in Western, particularly U.S., methodological culture, is not highly
encouraged. Studies may be conducted that do not account for significant religious or
cultural variation on key topics, or if there are such studies, they may be crudely tainted
with the academic’s overriding intent, which is often to reaffirm that cultures are
fundamentally the same. This came about partly as a corrective measure, the intention
being to avoid at any cost the ethnocentric and racism-driven inquiries of previous eras.
The problem is that culture is to humans what an operating system is to a computer; it can
lead to vastly different behavior and outputs.
For a good example of universalism, look to Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: the
Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Some claim the book to be revolutionary because it
argues that there is strategy and logic to suicide terrorism, and also that religion—
contrary to what they believe is “popular” perception—is not a significant driver. While
Pape acknowledges the fallacy of using economics alone to understand suicide terrorism,
he focuses almost entirely on another universalist driver: military occupation.
Occupation certainly can be fuel for ideological combustion, but Pape bases his thesis
entirely on data that he deliberately misreads in order to eliminate Islam as a factor.
According to his own data, Muslims belonging to a variety of groups are responsible for
69% of all suicide attacks worldwide, and once we remove the Tamil Tigers as a unique
outlier, for 99% of all such attacks. Pape, however, manages to arrive at conclusions that
could not better serve the strategy of the “other” whom he pretends to study, and whose
very identity he obscures.21

“War is Not the Answer”

It is commonly assumed in the academic community that there can be no military
solution to problems of this nature. Any military component of any solution is
instinctively dismissed as a negative factor and, to put it in Mia Bloom’s words,
something that “will encourage rather than discourage future attacks.” She cites no
evidence for this in her book, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism. She
demonstrates no logic leading her to this conclusion, and apparently did not check to see
if Israel's military operations have had any demonstrable effects, as, for example, the
dramatic reduction in attacks and casualty figures after Israel’s Operation Defensive
Shield.
The demonstrably false notion that military force leads to no good allows even the
most violent groups to claim that they are merely “responding” to Western use of might,
and that we “feed the problem” with aggressiveness and “disproportionate use of force.”
In other words, the Jihadi cognitive warriors and the progressive peace camp argue,
unilaterally disarming might soften jihadists’ hearts and create the basis for “dialogue.”
This meme draws particular strength from the unsupportable universalist notion that 1)


 8

both sides are equally culpable in a conflict and 2) there is a cycle of violence that the
stronger power could stop at any time by ceasing its military activities. What better way
is there to create a permissive operating environment for the weaker military power?

No Bad Guys
While some conflicts are probably rooted in crossed wires, universalists do not
often acknowledge that conflicts may be driven by lucid mutual understanding. Since the
end of WWII, but particularly since the end of the Cold War, it seems that we have
become less inclined to believe that there are enemies. Our scorn for “rogue” nations
notwithstanding, the days of demonizing the Hun, the Nazi and the “Jap” are gone. No
more are entire peoples and nations categorized as the insatiable, bloodthirsty enemy.
Players of all stripes are fundamentally rational by a common standard. As Jean Bethke
Elshtain writes about the current discourse, we seem to believe that “…there is a
utilitarian calculus by which to gauge all human purposes and actions…. [If we could
only] get the aggrieved parties to really talk to one another, because that is the way
reasonable people do things.”22 From the humanist standpoint, this is a positive and
welcome development, but in the colder memetic context of war, it is another gaping hole
in our defenses. Kenneth Ballen, head of Terror Free Tomorrow, unwittingly
demonstrates the thinking, “Our surveys show that not only do Muslims reject terrorism
as much if not more than Americans, but even those who are sympathetic to radical
ideology can be won over by positive American actions that promote goodwill and offer
real hope.”23 His view aligns fairly well with the accepted discourse today, but would
have been unthinkable in the context of previous wars, e.g. “the Germans reject Nazi
extremism as much if not more than Americans…”

“We do it too.”
Indeed, the Western intelligentsia often inflates its own cultural problems and
downplays those in the “other” to encourage moderation and avoid harmful stereotyping.
While well intentioned, it is also poor academic practice and requires an artificial
imposition of moral equivalency. When discussing the more permissive Islamic take on
lying and deception, for instance, I invariably hear, “Well, we do it too.” While at least
partly true, this is an axiom designed to paralyze the opponent and prevent the conclusion
that there are cultural differences beyond food, holidays, and fasting. This kind of
thinking is also the reason that we see so many wistful, but potentially unfounded
assumptions made about the “vast majority of Muslims” and their views on terrorism.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

Both the ideological engine and the cognitive offensive require great skill in
perception management. They require the creation or reinforcement of favorable memes
and memeplexes that make up a society’s chosen “reality.” Cognitive warfare is, in fact,
based on the warrior’s ability to transform the “realities” of discourses, social
environments, and ultimately, political and military policies. There are several media in
which cognitive warriors achieve this, but the most prominent and perhaps powerful is
“the media,” traditionally understood as radio, television, and newspapers owned by
commercial or public entities and staffed by professional journalists, the mainstream


 9

news media (MSNM). As the loudest and most current voice for the accepted discourse,
the media is both a prized target and a powerful weapon. It can be what we in the
military call a “force multiplier,” or if you are on the targeted end, a devastating liability.

 A secret 1942 document from the British “Political Warfare Executive”—the
nearest British counterpart to the KGB element conducting active measures—claimed
that “the major instrument of political warfare is propaganda.” Speaking of the BBC,
they write that it must “always be borne in mind that [the BBC] was provided not as an
act of philanthropy but with a deliberate purpose – as an instrument of war.”24 Some 70
years later, Western media is still being used as an instrument of war, but the
beneficiaries have changed. Raanan Gissin, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s
strategic advisor, once told me that the Palestinians recognized the power of media
control at least as early as 1982. Before being expelled from Lebanon, the PLO
requested the return of two media vans the Israelis had captured.25 The IDF kept the
vans, but Palestinian militants continued developing their capability, particularly under
the PA in the last ten years.
Today, PA TV whips constituents into a fervor when leadership requires
violence or more ideological momentum. Indeed, any terrorist worth his salt recognizes
the central role of publicity and the media. As Brigitte Nacos notes, “…publicity—far
more than financial resources—is as essential for terrorists as the air they breathe.”26
Hezbollah’s al Manar television station represents a sophisticated and evolved form of
perception management directed to both local and international audiences. 27 Avi Jorisch
maintains that the group uses it to incite hatred and conflict with Israel, thereby ensuring
continued relevance and funding. At the local level, this kind of media activity keeps the
right amount of “fuel” in the combustion chamber for an ideology’s survival; it replicates
and reinforces the home population’s violent memes.
In foreign areas, the media is the most powerful viral-memetic delivery device.
Much of what Pallywood produces is designed for distribution through Western outlets.
The Palestinians usually set up and film the faked incidents, while outlets such as France
2, the BBC, CNN, CBS, and al Jazeera contribute by neglecting to verify or question the
material’s credibility. Instead they proliferate the images, usually without criticism and
often without the necessary context, on the contrary, because they present staged news as
real, and necessarily in the wrong context. Take, for example what Janine di Giovanni of
the London Times claimed about Jenin, “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting
from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction,
such disrespect for human life.”28 Thus the MSNM acts as a soundboard, augmenting the
Palestinian narrative rather than questioning it—the very job of the media.29
Of course, neither side in the conflict has a complete monopoly on the media writ
large, but right kind of bias can be a powerful force multiplier for cognitive warriors.
This goes beyond the type of reporting that results from mistakes, intimidation, or direct
manipulation by militants. The witting and unwitting activism of journalists with strong
and predetermined senses of right or wrong can assist propagandists in effecting new
realities and blocking or omitting pernicious memes, be they true or false. It is rare for
journalists to admit that the content of their reports is manipulated at some point of the
process, and it is entirely possible that many of those who do justify the practice through
the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance. They may think, “Yes, they control or fake


 10

what we see, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” or, “it’s the only way this underdog
can fight the IDF—it’s just evening things out.”
Joshua Muravchik writes that several studies “have shown that journalists,
especially in the elite media, are disproportionately Democratic in their personal party
allegiance.”30 Is it conceivable that memes associated with the Democratic Party, such as
distrust for strong military institutions, sensitivity to perceived minority oppression,
support for minorities and the perceived underdog etc., find their way into news about
Israel? Images contrasting the might of the IDF with the “weakness” of the Palestinians
proliferate, arousing strong emotions within readers and viewers, and ensuring an avid
following. When contrasted with the dearth of images showing “weaponized”
Palestinians, the impact deepens, the complexity of the situation recedes, and
ambivalence about the conflict disappears.
When the MSNM’s democratic bias combines with the fact that college and
university faculty are also overwhelmingly democratic—approximately 87% at elite
schools, according to one study—then a kind of memetic, positive feedback loop
results.31 As messages perpetually bounce back and forth between the media and
academia, the incestuous affirmation snowballs and it becomes the accepted discourse of
the times. Cognitive warriors then find themselves in a far better position to go on and
win the war.

CONCLUSION

Whether by the simple passing of decades or these attempts to recast history, the
obscuration of the empirical truth has benefitted Israel’s enemies. Even outside the
bounds of Arab society, I have had numerous conversations with educated Westerners
during which it became progressively clearer that, despite potent beliefs, the individual
did not know the most basic, historical facts about the conflict. These facts have
included: the Jewish acceptance and Arab rejection of a two-state solution in 1948 and
2000; the subsequent, repeated attempts to wipe out the nascent Jewish state by
conventional means; that U.N. administered refugee camps are not “concentration camps
run by Israel;” the pervasiveness of genocidal rhetoric in the Palestinian discourse; that
Israel’s alleged “mistreatment/oppression” of Palestinians in the occupied territories is
not the original cause of Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism; that no Arab peace
initiative includes recognition of Israel as a Jewish state; and that this last point, taken in
the context of the Palestinians’ so-called right of return, has existential consequences for
Israel.
If this type of ignorance has been increasing over the past few decades—and I
suggest that it has—it tracks neatly with the changing discourse model. Press coverage
became more critical after 1967, implying that the righteous underdog paradigm either
shifted or—more likely—that the new facts couldn’t align with it. Rather than search for
a new paradigm, we transferred legitimacy to the other party. The historical memes
which favored Israel initially aligned with the underdog memeplex, but now that Israel
occupies a new and necessarily sinister position in that paradigm, the historical memes
which favor the Jewish state are memetically filtered out. That is, the righteous underdog
memeplex “works” to ensure its own survival by culling the antithetical memes, whether


 11

or not they were once considered “true.” The basic facts about Israel’s history die or
become buried, a phenomenon that propagandists accelerate.
Both the media and academic institutions are obviously in the thick of this battle.
They are the soundboards for the accepted discourse, despite the many vulnerabilities and
biases they bring to the fight. So long as so many of them do not see that they are being
manipulated, or even that we are in a cognitive war, they will not be able to stand up,
close ranks, and defend the high ground. One has to wonder, though, if the ego would
stop an epiphany after so many years of willful and unwitting assistance as jihadist agents
of influence. As American Journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave once said about Soviet
active measures, “It’s very hard for journalists to accept that this has been going on
because otherwise they have to admit almost in the same breath that they’ve been ripping
off their readers and viewers and listeners.”32

























































1
Yuri Bezmenov, interview, accessed at http://cicentre.com/videos/yuri_bezmenov.html
2
This is not to say that Americans have never used deception—for they clearly have—rather that it has not been an accepted industry
standard as with other nations. In U.S. Information Operations doctrine, deception is clearly limited to military actions. PSYOP itself
may support military deception, but it does not doctrinally involve the use of disinformation even in that objective. See Joint
Publication 3-53, Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations, 5 September 2003.
3
Online Soviet media archive,” University of Rhode Island, URL: http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/History/WC_Period/Soviet_broadcasts/
Soviet_broadcasts.html
4
“Soviet Active Measures, 1984” National Archives, ARC: 54826, 306.9798
5
“Soviet Active Measures, 1984” National Archives, ARC: 54826, 306.9798
6
U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” 22
May 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0003 3:04-CR-240-G.
7
Walid Phares Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against the West, (Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2005), 140-142.
8
“A Different View of the Middle East,” Inside Higher Ed, 02 November 2007,
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/02/mideast, accessed 26 March 2009.
9
Star Wars, starring Mark Hamill, Alec Guinness, and others, directed by George Lucas, 20th Century Fox, 1977. In the referenced
scene, Obi-Wan Kanobe influences two guards with his psychic powers, making them believe the machines they are staring at are not
the items they have been searching for, although they plainly are. Obi-Wan Kanobe says calmly, “These aren’t the droids you’re
looking for,” to which the guard responds, “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for… move along.”
10
David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 3-4.
11
U.S. President, “President’s Address to the Nation,” 10 January 2007, URL:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html, accessed 30 May 2007.
12
Pascale Combelles Siegel, “Perception Management: IO’s Stepchild?” Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 13, no. 2 (2005):
117.
13
Stuart A. Green, Lieutenant, USN, “Introduction to Israel Research Trip,” unpublished research paper funded by JMIC, 7 February
2007, 3. See also Thomas X. Hammes, Colonel, USMC (Ret.), “Fourth Generation Warfare Evolves, Fifth Emerges,” Military
Review, May-June 2007, URL: http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/ MayJun07/Hammes.pdf
14
Asher Kaufman, “Understanding The Shebaa Farms Dispute: Roots of the Anomaly and Prospects of Resolution,” Palestine-Israel
Journal, Vol. 11, no 1. (2004): 41.
15
Ronen Sebag, “Lebanon: The Intifada’s False Premise,” Middle East Quarterly, no. 9-2 (2002): 13.
16
Americans have a history of at least rhetorically supporting minorities oppressed in foreign lands. This stands in obvious contrast to
civil rights abuses within U.S. borders, but in several cases the oppression of minorities in the Middle East fired early American zeal
for universal justice. Such was the case with Jews in the Ottoman Empire, as well as Armenians and Greeks as they endured their own
struggles. See Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., New York 2007.
17
Please note here that I have assumed Israel’s Western moral character—in all its ups and downs—to be more or less constant over
the course of the last 60 years, and in this instance I am judging it only relative to itself. Post-1967 mistakes or perceived
transgressions appear to be balanced by at least as many pre-1967 black marks, and one could easily make the argument that Israel has
become more sensitive to civilian casualties and more “liberal” in its attitudes towards its enemy population, especially given the


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development of popular peace movements. The notable point is that perception of Israel appears to have dropped with no discernable,
radical change in its behavior—wherever that lies on the moral spectrum.
18
“Minneapolis Airport Incident Update,” Little Green Footballs, 21 Nov. 2006,
19
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Plume, 1994), xiii.
20
Herb Keinon, “Spanish Paper: Irving ‘Expert on WWII,’” Jerusalem Post, 3 September 2009,
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804476311&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
21
Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York, Random House, 2006, 15.
22
Jean Bethke Elshatain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic Books, New York
2003).
23
Kenneth Ballen, “The Myth of Muslim Support for Terror,” The Christian Science Monitor, online ed., 23 February 2007, URL:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0223/p09s01-coop.html, accessed 14 May 2007.
24
“The Meaning, Techniques and Methods of Political Warfare,” Political Warfare Executive, 1942. http://www.psywar.org
25
Raanan Gissin, Strategic Advisor to Ariel Sharon, interviewed by the author, December 2006. Cited hereafter as Gissin.
26
Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 193.
27
Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah’s al-Manar Television (Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, 2004).
28
“U.N. Reporting on Jenin,” Honestreporting.com, 2002, URL:
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/mediaobjectivity/UN_Report_on_Jenin.asp.
29
Roni Kitri, Brigadier General (Ret.), former IDF Spokesman, former Head of Central Intelligence School, interview by the author,
14 December 2006.
30
Muravchik, Joshua. Covering the Intifada: How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising. Washington D.C.: The Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, 2003, 59.
31
Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 29 March 2005, C01
32
“Soviet Active Measures, 1984” National Archives, ARC: 54826, 306.9798


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