* Responding to the current crisis in the PA, David Gerstman recounts the media’s take on Arafat’s popularity.
* Caroline Glick on the role of the media in the larger War against Terror:
the ability to harness the media and to control the images of the war is one of the chief components of the terrorist war doctrine. The enemy hides behind press credentials in order to gain operational cover. It stage-manages terrorist theater by giving “scoops” of attacks to fellow travelers with cameras, tape recorders and notepads. It reenacts battlefield defeats as victories before the cameras. It uses its video footage of its own atrocities to both frighten its foes and encourage its sympathizers.
In the strategic use of the media to advance their war aims, the terrorists are assisted by Western press agencies. “Reporters” from Al Manar, Al Jazeera, Hamas and Al Qaida websites and other propaganda organs are viewed as “colleagues” rather than agents of jihad and participants in the war.
* James Reynolds of the BBC interviewed Hussam Abdo about how and why he became a suicide bomber. Essentially, one of his friends was killed, and Abdo didn’t like school.
