Posted on 06/25/2002 10:26:15 AM PDT by Darkshadow
Arab News
SAUDI ARABIA'S FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAILY
JEDDAH, 25 June — A number of Western cells are presently operating in Saudi Arabia, both overtly and covertly, and have launched periodic assaults on the youth of the Kingdom in the months since the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
It is time that this matter was addressed with the sense of urgency and outrage it warrants.
The Westerners who make up these cells are experts in psychological terrorism.
Although there is reportedly intense rivalry among them, they are nevertheless bound together by their lack of ethics and blind loyalty to the lost cause of breathing life into a profession dying a quiet death in their home countries: serious, objective journalism.
These Western journalists are apparently motivated by their collective misconception that because 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis, normal life does not exist in what they so love to refer to as the "oil-rich" Kingdom.
The Western journalists typically enter the Kingdom under cover of pretending that they want to learn more about what goes on here, for the benefit of international relations and intercultural harmony.
However, once they arrive they immediately shed their flimsy masks.
High on having got in, they set about doing what they really came here to do: launch psychological assaults on the local Saudi population.
Their weapons are crude, but intellectually devastating: questions of the utmost stupidity.
They invariably leave their Saudi victims with a feeling of having been insidiously violated, and doubly distressed at their later realization that they were such willing victims.
After the initial assault, the victims are betrayed again.
Their polite but persistently objective and sensible answers are wildly distorted — indeed, not unusually completely reversed — in subsequent reports filed by the Western journalists for subtle propaganda purposes abroad.
This trend was brought to light last week when a Saudi teenage girl was found in tears after falling victim to a psychological terror attack by a foreign reporter, who had been walking around under cover of looking like a total and utter idiot completely unaware of why he had been sent by his newspaper to the Kingdom.
His operation, it must be admitted, was beautifully carried out: a polite handshake that was followed, after he was sure the female victim’s trust had been earned, by a dramatic series of penetrating questions regarding her assumed oppression as a woman, her assumed Al-Qaeda sympathies, and her assumed personal adoration of someone called Osama Bin Laden the poor girl had in fact never given much thought to before.
She later recalled through her sobs that he did not so much listen to her answers as command her in a most dictatorial fashion to make stereotypical statements about Islam and other subjects he knew nothing about so he could later force feed them to his largely ignorant readers back in Britain.
His strategy was to make his victim seem as though she were crazy whenever she objected to his extraordinary and bizarre suppositions.
But that was just the first phase of his operation.
After requesting the help of an Arab News journalist, he headed straight for the Jeddah Corniche.
There he proceeded to cause pandemonium (not witnessed since last Eid) by asking locals settling down for a peaceful picnic about their presumed fondness for a man called Osama Bin Laden.
They tried in vain to explain that in fact they do not give much thought these days to that individual whose ideas and ideals have never been central to their culture and beliefs. They asked to be excused, because their little ones were not used to encountering people like this mad Westerner whose behavior was so outrageous and improper, and who seemed to have no morals whatsoever.
Sadly, by then their evening had been ruined.
Many other Saudi victims contacted by Arab News have reported similar assaults by this and other Western journalists.
Is it not time for the Saudi authorities to issue guidelines to young Saudis to be extra vigilant and exercise extreme caution in light of the reported psychological assaults on their brothers and sisters?
After all, the perpetrators are easy to single out from the crowd: they do not speak the local language, know nothing about the local culture or religion, and are not the slightest bit interested in the opinions of the locals.
It would, of course, be wrong to be alarmist.
In fact, the best advice for Saudi youths is that they should ignore anyone they think may be a member of a terror cell. Do not even look them in the eye!
After all, without the complicity of the victim, a psychological assault can never succeed.
Naahh!! It's definitely the stupidest. It's not even good propaganda.
At least that's the explanation I've heard from westerners living in the KSA (Saudi Arabia) for what seems to be the Arabs' congenital stupidity.
Don't you mean tinfoil RAGS?
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