Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
briefly ranting about that Al Qaeda training camp footage
I don’t watch a lot of t.v. that doesn’t involve cartoons or “student athletes” but I do watch enough to be sick of that Al Qaeda training camp footage that always pops up.
What I find really strange is that the same three short bits are always shown. There is the guy shooting a machine gun and some people on the monkey bars. Finally there is a bunch of them marching behind a guy waving a big black flag in a scene reminiscent of the John Phillip Sousa choreographed version of Mad Max.
Put together the footage is strange and tad creepy but hardly scary. Rather it just seems like Al Qaeda members long for an all-American childhood full of target shooting, recesses and marching bands.
What is really strange is that the television networks that for one year after September 11, 2001 successfully scared most Americans into thinking they were about to be killed Osama –as I have recently noted, they have scaled back on this as of late- can’t edit whatever raw footage exists into anything more terrifying than this. They seem to have really lost their sense of direction and skills. If they keep this up for much longer, the public might actually start to see the idiocy of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
What is interesting to note is how the pro-war spin of the t.v. differs from that of people like David Horowitz or Andrew Sullivan. On the t.v. the war is a battle to defeat forces that cause fear while to Horowitz and Sullivan it is a heroic struggle against evil and to create a new and better world and not one, but even in the current world they present Al Qaeda as a group that can easily be rolled. In short the t.v. generally has tried to promote fear while the Horowitz/Sullivan camp promotes optimism. Both lead to undconditionally supporting Bush's war against concepts, entities and people that are said to be bad and so the differences shouldn't be overstated but the motivations are quite different. posted by micah holmquist at 11/10/2002 03:00:00 PM
