Fitzgerald: Can the C.I.A. Be Made Intelligent Again?

"Soon Eurabia will resemble the old Soviet Union, in which dissidents furtively distributed samizdat literature and faced stiff penalties if the authorities discovered what they were doing. Europeans who care about what is happening to them will have to travel West, buy books that tell the truth about Islamic jihad, and distribute them at home away from the watchful eye of EU bureaucrats." -- Robert Spencer

During the Cold War, no one in Washington ignored the matter of propaganda. There was propaganda aimed at the countries of Western Europe, by such measures as C.I.A. support for The Congress for Cultural Freedom, and in turn, its support for the best magazine in the Western world, "Encounter." There were subventions in the late 1940s and 1950s to the press in Italy, France, and Germany, such as the support given to “Die Monat," or to the publications associated with the non-Communist left (as well as to traditionally center and right parties) to combat the very large and very powerful Communist Parties in France (under Maurice Thorez) and in Italy (under Togliatti, with his wife Nilde Jotti).

There was propaganda beamed into the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, rightly called the Captive Nations: Radio Free Europe, right there in Munich, still today hard by the Englischer Garten, with its pagoda, and rapidly-running rivulets, and those shamelessly nudist sunworshippers sprawled on the acres of greensward in the midst of the city.

And there was propaganda beamed into the Soviet Union itself, by Radio Liberty (housed with Radio Free Europe). For years it was headed by a well-informed American of the old school, married to a German lady -- I think his name was William Bailey, same as the painter, but I could have the name wrong. Later one of the Buckley boys took over. It was an important job, and recognized as such in Washington, and also outside the government. Russians listened. It was a station staffed by defectors or those who had fled Soviet power. Al Hurra, and other broadcasting efforts paid for by Americans, are not staffed by ex-Muslims and non-Muslims, but by people largely loyal to Islam, if not to the most extreme manifestations of Jihad, and often headed by those who, if American, nonetheless are at the Karen-Hughes level of understanding.

And along with that broadcasting, there were publishing efforts, in Polish, in German, in Hungarian, in Czech, in Bulgarian and Rumanian. And of course in Russian. The C.I.A. had much cleverer people running its Cold War operations, including defectors from the K.G.B. and the Soviet Union, who understood homo sovieticus.

Does the C.I.A. have in its ranks clever "defectors from Islam" or those who grew up in Muslim countries but were not Muslims -- Maronites, Copts, Arabic-speaking Jews? Or does it not employ any such people, crazily, because the people who run it simply do not recognize the threat? They do not comprehend Islam and prefer to listen to the apologists of the esposito school. Those apologists are either deeply ignorant of Islam, an ignorance made implacable by stupidity (the armstrong level) or are not quite so ignorant, but are grateful and obedient to those who give them money, or make their lives pleasant in other ways -- including Muslim colleagues who have now infiltrated and taken over many academic departments of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, and intimidated or pressured -- or in many cases not even had to intimidate, nor to pressure, to get what they wanted -- their non-Muslim colleagues.

One example of this clandestine publishing are the editions of emigre writers put out by dummy publishing houses in France, such as Editions de la Seine, that published "Zashchita Luzhina" ("The Defense") and "Priglashenie na kazn" ("Invitation to a Beheading"), both by Nabokov. These books would be distributed to visitors from the Soviet Union who were in France or elsewhere in Europe to attend a conference or some other official meeting. The recipient would ordinarily read the book in Europe, but some were brave enough to smuggle them back to the USSR, where they were then copied (by elderly ladies typing, typing, typing) and carbon copies passed around, and around, and around. Many were involved in such efforts. Indeed, even refugees leaving the Soviet Union could, on their way to America, pick up such books at a distribution point in Ostia Antica, near Rome. In Paris a particularly effective effort went on under the intelligent leadership of Buffalo Bill's grandson. In Rome one agent was the brother of a celebrated archeologist who unearthed a synagogue at Sardis.

It all had its effect.

Oh, there were giants, comparatively, in the earth in those days. But today, what is the Pentagon, what is the State Department, doing to rescue Europe from islamization? What is the Pentagon, what is the State Department, doing to spread seeds of doubt among Muslims, possibly starting with non-Arab Muslims to whom the main appeal should be Islam as a vehicle of Arab supremacism? And who from the C.I.A. has yet talked to Ali Sina or Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, about strategies for weakening the appeal of Islam -- within Muslim countries as well as in imperilled Western Europe?

There are some in Washington who do know, or are close to knowing, what Islam is all about. They must be cultivated, allowed to teach others, even be put in charge. Yesterday's Men the people who for decades thought of Islam as our friend in the Cold War because, they kept repeating, "Islam is a bulwark against Communism" -- need to be pushed out. The people who helped supply arms to Pakistan and to the mujahideen in Afghanistan without any qualms then, and not any qualms since, have to be pushed aside to make room for those who are schooled in Islam, and who understand the problem of making what is called a "religion" understood as the menace it is to those who are immediately respectful of anything to which the word "religion" is attached. Those who know how to present the problem to others, and not least, are able to identify the main instruments of Jihad and the things that must be done to weaken each of them, must be put in positions of influence.

Such people exist. Find them. Hire them. Promote them. Put them in charge at the C.I.A. and at the secret services and other security services in every country in the Lands of the Infidels. The apologists and the terminally ignorant, and the not-clever-enough, cannot any longer be tolerated. They are a menace. They must be pushed out, and pushed out as well from any government-funded or government-supported broadcasting elsewhere in the Western world. For the Camp of Infidels has to come together, to display an intelligent solidarity, and Lord Haw-Haws broadcasting from Bush House will not do. That means the BBC has to be taken in charge by the government, and people such as John Simpson, and those in his galere, removed. It means all kinds of things.

Get cracking.

Posted by Hugh at April 2, 2007 9:04 AM
Print this entry | Email this entry | Digg this | del.icio.us