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Michael Anbar , PhD, is a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Buffalo. Formerly a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, he is the author of , published by iUniverse.
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By Michael Anbar
October 13, 2002
We all are familiar with the ancient story about the Greeks who used the gullibility of the Trojans to bring about the devastation of Troy, breaking down the defenses of that city from within. If the Trojans had perceived the intent of the Greeks, their city would not have been destroyed.
History repeated itself when Al Qaida trained its terrorists in American flight schools and effectively used American aeronautical transportation and navigational technologies to murder thousands of people, destroying major symbols of American stature. Luckily, the Capitol and the White House were spared. This was the first violent salvo we experienced on our side of the Atlantic. We hear that Al Qaida operatives also intended to use American nuclear technology as means of destruction and terror, by flying an aircraft into a nuclear plant and spreading lethal radioactivity over large populated areas. There are indications that they also planned to use American agricultural technology to spray our population with deadly biological warfare agents. The latter tactics would have been Trojan horses of different colors.
Another Trojan horse was the Oslo Accords agreement. The recently deceased Faisal Husseini, a member of Arafat's cabinet, stated in a 2001 interview with an Egyptian journalist:
"We must distinguish the strategies and long-term goals from the political-phased goals which we are compelled to accept due to international pressures... the ultimate goal is the liberation of all historic Palestine from the river to the sea. Oslo had to be viewed as a Trojan horse... We are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as 'temporary' procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them." (1)
In his recent essay, Joseph Farah elaborated further on this deceitful aspect of PLO's policy. (2) Husseini confirmed Arafat's statements in Johannesburg, South Africa (May 10, 1994), a short time after the "historical" Rabin and Arafat handshake at the White House. Arafat affirmed that the Oslo agreement was aimed to deceive the American and Israelis. "This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Mohammed and Koraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and [considered] it a despicable truce," Arafat said.
These historical examples have a common denominator: One of the adversaries abuses the value system of the other, which believes that everyone has the same value system. The Trojans did not imagine that the Greeks would be deceitful. The "success" of the 9/11 attack was based on our belief in the universality of sanctity of human life and of fairness in combat, which prohibits intentional killing of innocent unarmed civilians. It took the horrific 9/11 experience to make us fully aware that Al Qaida, Hamas, Hizbullah, Fatah, or Islamic Jihad terrorists are ready to commit suicide if it helps them to murder "infidels" who seemingly "ought" to be killed just because they do not practice Islam (in addition to the atrocities in Israel, remember the recent murder of Christian innocent worshippers in Pakistan, and the massacres of Lebanese Christians by Palestinian Arabs in the 70's). (3) The Oslo Accords were flagrantly violated because Muslim Arabs consider agreements with "infidels" as nonbinding. This seems to be also Saddam Hussein's "Islamic" justification of blatantly violating the signed agreements following his defeat in the Gulf War.
Let us discuss another Trojan horse, which is far more dangerous than those described above. The Arabs have been systematically hijacking the American media to break down the morale of the American public. The prime purpose of destroying the World Trade Center was to cause panic, confusion and dissent in American society. That attempt has failed, by and large. However, the Arab and Islamic propaganda assault, mediated by American press and TV, has been much more successful. By "hijacking" American media, our adversaries use American communication technology, combined with the huge difference between their value system and ours, to confuse us and break our resolve. For whatever reason, our "hijacked" media are receptive to this hostile propaganda. They emphasize any real or contrived flaw in the ethical behavior of the West, while not mentioning, minimizing, or even excusing flagrant violation of human rights by our adversaries.
For example, Iraq, which has indiscriminately murdered a million of its own citizens, (4) is often presented in our media as a victim of American sanctions that have caused starvation and death of Iraqi children (children have a particular soft spot in American psyche, unlike their minimal value in the Arab world). The same ploy has been used by the Palestinian Arabs who use children as human shields invoking the sympathy of American TV viewers. Sudan, which has been massacring and enslaving hundreds of thousands of its Christians and other non-Muslim citizens, is often depicted as a pathetic victim of famine; never as a flagrant violator of human rights. (5) When Syria became member of the UN Security Council, spearheading the well-publicized allegations that Israel is violating human rights (the fictitious massacre in Jenin), ABC, NBC and CBS did not comment that the Syrians have indiscriminately massacred 20,000 of their own citizens in Hamma.
Our National Public Radio (NPR) has recently presented a distorted image of Zionism, depicting the State of Israel as an oppressor of Arabs and usurper of Arab land. Preparing this biased reportage, NPR selected anti-Zionist Jewish and Arab historians as interviewees. (6) On the other hand, we never heard NPR reporting that black African slaves are still being traded and exploited in Saudi Arabia and in the Sudan. NPR must consider this not to be "politically correct," as it might offend African American activists, many of whom sympathize with Islam and what it stands for (e.g., the cell of African American active supporters of Al Qaida, recently uncovered in Oregon). The numerous reports about the fictitious massacre in Jenin are another example where the American media was fast to embrace false Arab claims.
Is it a coincidence that among our media reporters some demonstrate animosity toward American financial, commercial and industrial enterprises, especially when it comes to the American role in global economics (they share the views of Osama Bin Laden and Hussein), (4) or have they been "hijacked" by our enemies? We need highly sophisticated radar to identify such hijacked messengers before they hit us.
Some of these messengers are real Trojan horses while others, like Cornel West may be just Trojan colts. The militant African American activist, Cornel West, may be hijacking the Jewish Tikkun movement. (7) Professor West had to move recently from Harvard to Princeton because of his active involvement with the political machine of Reverend Al Sharpton (who has been notorious for his racist and anti-Semitic broadcasts). The small, California based, Tikkun movement, which has been advocating most aspects of Arafat's positions, may now become even more militantly anti-Zionist and possibly anti-American, confusing and demoralizing some Jewish and non-Jewish University students.
A democratic society is strongly dependent on a free press. Our adversaries, who may not even know what a free press means, understand that we depend on it, as much as we depend on air transportation. So they are trying to subvert our press by sophisticated propaganda. They seem to be in a win-win situation. If we believe the lies they feed our press, they win. But if we stop believing in what the biased American media tell us, they also win, because they have managed to undermine the credibility of the media on which our democracy depends. Public-supported NPR is a good example. Most NPR reporters seem not to realize how well our enemy knows the soft spots of their ethical upbringing and their ideological orientation, and how our adversaries use these sensitivities to create Trojan horses aimed at unsettling the American public.
As for Middle East politics, it must be realized that the key for coexistence of Arabs and Jews in the Land of Israel is the democratization of the surrounding Arab states. Arab dictatorships will continue to use Israel and the Jews as a diversionary scapegoat. (Arabs usually name Jews "Zionists" - as if being a Zionist is a shameful attribute). As long as they maintain their despotic regimes, they will continue to support "Palestinian" terrorism aimed at demoralization of Israeli Jews, hoping that it will lead to the eventual demise of the Jewish state. Regrettably, in Israel, just like in America, certain elements in Israeli media have been acting as Trojan horses, disheartening the Israeli public during critical times of a bloody war of existence.
The vehement objection of the Arab states in the region to a regime change in Iraq, advocated by President Bush, is well understood - a democratic Iraq would be just as threatening to their regimes as democratic Israel. So they launch a propaganda campaign against the existence of Israel and against the potential democratization of Iraq. A major aspect of that campaign is an intensive but subtle psychological assault to confuse and demoralize the American public. Our problem is how to recognize, expose and muzzle the Trojan horses that are in our backyard.
(1) Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick "Twenty Facts about Israel and the Middle East" Jewish World Review, May 21, 2002.
(2) Joseph Farah "The Trojan Horse" 2002 WorldNetDaily.com March 7, 2002.
(3) Robert Hatem "From Israel to Damascus: The Painful Road to Blood, Betrayal and Deception" Chapter 1, Pride International Publications, La Mesa, CA, 1999.
(4) Micha Odenheimer "Vicious Circles Closing In" haaretzdaily.com, October 7, 2002.
(5) Charles Jacobs "Why Israel and not Sudan, is Singled Out" Boston Globe, October 5, 2002
(6) Alex Safian "Back to the Future: NPR Rewrites Israel's War of Independence" CAMERA, October 9, 2002
(7) Felicia R. Lee "Seeking Campus Dialogue, Not Diatribe" New York Times, October 5, 2002
Views expressed by the author do not
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