RUTHFULLY YOURS

Talking Points—Battle for Our Minds

   Terrorism is about brains, not blood. Terrorists win when they capture our minds. Sadly, they have a lot of help: some of our best and brightest intellectuals.

  “Battle for Our Minds” shows how analysts in our intelligence agencies, academics at our universities and journalists in our media have helped our enemies, knowingly and unknowingly.

   It is a stinging, detailed indictment of The New York Times and CNN—leaders of print and broadcast journalism who turned trend-setters in awful journalism that caters to terrorists and tyrants. The book also flays politically correct but inaccurate dogmas that captured western universities, the CIA and the State Department.

  Facing the Middle East and terrorism,  we came to rely on “experts” without field experience in or scant knowledge of the Middle East: people who do not speak the languages, did not study the cultures and do not know the  history. Even worse, some “experts” have been forgiving and even sympathetic to the terrorists and their aims.

  Among the startling revelations in BATTLE FOR OUR MINDS: Western Elites and the Terror Threat

• ·                        Edward Said, the professor who redefined Middle East studies for Western universities, used no Arabic sources in his work and knew almost no Arabic;
• ·                        Said’s popular teachings  promoted the careers of Said “wannabes” like John Esposito at Georgetown, Fred Halliday at the London School of Economics who spoke of the “myth” of Arab-Islamic terror before 9/11, while  focusing, after 9/11,   on the supposed persecution of Muslims rather than on growing Islamic terror;
• ·                        Michael Scheuer, CIA’s “hunter” of Osama Bin-Laden, never served  as a field agent, knew no Arabic, and misidentified Islamic holy sites.
• ·                        Scheuer admired Bin-Laden, blamed the U.S. and Israel for vexing him, and called American Jews a dangerous minority that threatened America’s interests.
• ·                        Paul Pillar, a top CIA mid-east analyst showed a colossal off-base percentage for his predictions over a decade: claiming before 9/11 the US was not threatened by terror, then, that Iran was not seeking an atom bomb, and that the US should reach out to Iran and Syria, despite their terror roles and their  bloody repressive regimes. 
• ·                        Like Scheuer and Pillar, CIA director George Tenet never was a field agent, and he promoted their writings and their careers even as he censored talented field agents who said the CIA had become “too political” and was unprepared for terror.
• ·                        CNN’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Peter Arnett, producer Robert Wiener and news director Eason Jordan played ball with Saddam Hussein’s government, ignoring some of his worst atrocities;
• ·                        CNN’s Wiener removed all the Jewish mezuzahs from the doorways of CNN’s rented offices in Jerusalem. 
• ·                        Tom Friedman who got a Pulitzer Prize for directly blaming Israel  and its ally, Saad Haddad, for the Sabra-Chatilla massacre of 1982, passed up countervailing evidence,  including his own  face-to-face interview with Sa’ad Haddad.
• ·                        The book exposes Friedman’s limited knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew, his superficial analysis, and  his effort to help Saudi Arabia change its image from the main exporter of fanaticism and 9/11 terror into the “peacemaker” and “moderate.”
• ·                        The book also takes a long view of  The New York Times and its owners, the Sulzberger family. It shows how they  preferred a fuzzy focus on the actions of tyrants and terrorists from Hitler and Stalin in the 1930’s and 1940’s, to Yasser Arafat and George Habash in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and even to Muslim terror attacks in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Fort Hood, Texas before and after September 11, 2001.

Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat by Michael Widlanski (Hardcover – Mar 6, 2012)

Michael Widlanski, an Arabic-speaking former NY Times reporter,  TV and radio correspondent reveals inside information on how ward-winning journalists from Beirut to Jerusalem and from Baghdad to Amman and Riyadh, developed cozy ties  to  terrorists and their patrons.

    He writes with the vigorous descriptions of the reporter and the rigorous standards of the well-trained scholar.

    Dr. Widlanski holds five degrees from universities on three continents (three from Columbia, one from the American University in Cairo, and a doctorate from Bar Ilan (on Palestinian communications). He was strategic affairs advisor for Israel’s Ministry of Public Security and the editor of captured PLO archives in Jerusalem. He also was advisor to Israeli teams at the Madrid peace talks and follow-up talks in Washington.

  Widlanski served as Middle East correspondent of The Cox Newspapers/Atlanta Constitution, and he worked earlier as Arab affairs correspondent for Israeli Army Radio during the 1982 Lebanon War. He taught Middle East politics and communications for 10 years at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.