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[ by Charles Cameron — some recent game references with seriously playful intent ]
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Jihadists and RAND agree. As Omar Hammami puts it:

I believe that these kuffar, despite being from amongst the most misguided of creation, have actually put their finger on something that is extremely beneficial for us to ponder. This important idea that I am referring to here is found in the beginning of the long quote I just read to you all … The authors of this RAND research stated that the ideology of al-Qaida is in reality its center of gravity…

On the US side of things, DangerRoom tells us a report recently requested by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs considers the battle of minds to be pretty important, too:

Ten years of war have given the U.S. military more than its share of frustrations. According to an internal Pentagon study, two of them were as fundamental as they were related: Troops had terrible intelligence about Iraq and Afghanistan, and they told their own stories just as badly.

Those are some preliminary conclusions from an ongoing Pentagon study into the lessons of a decade of combat, authorized by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the multi-tour Iraq veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The study doesn’t single out any sensor or spy platform for criticism. Instead, it finds that U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations.

“We were slow to recognize the importance of information and the battle for the narrative in
achieving objectives at all levels,” according to a May 23 draft of the study, which InsideDefense
obtained, “[and] we were often ineffective in applying and aligning the narrative to goals and
desired end states.”

Okay?

Ideology, thought, aqueedah, narrative, mind, mind, mind. That’s — what can I say — a hugely influential consideration regarding whether the war is won or lost…

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So when GEN Robert Crone visited Small Wars Journal ahead of the Unified Quest Army Future Game, I posted a comment quoting Hammami as saying “the war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalms, and knives” and posed my question:

how will words and narratives – not so much in terms of propaganda and deception but as recruitment lit, as moral suasion, as scripture, and as poetry and song — figure into your game?

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How did that go, guys?

I know public relations figured into the game, one of the reports I’ve seen tells me that:

Though the wargame addressed issues ranging from cyberwar to terrorism, from interagency coordination to public relations, central to the scenario was the challenge of deploying US forces to countries where they have not operated before.

But that’s about it — the rest seem to be all about things like seabasing — “putting an entire Army Stryker brigade afloat on ships and then landing them at minor harbors” — and AirSea Battle — “the Air Force and Navy concept for projecting US power overseas in the face of increasingly sophisticated defenses”…

Materiel, not morale…

And besides, this goes far deeper than PR, doesn’t it?

The respective “force multiplying” impacts of martyrdoms and rumors of martyrdoms, of sacrileges and rumors of sacrileges, of bombed out weddings, poetry, ahadith — such things are difficult to assess, aren’t they? And as Klaus Klostermeier observed, “Theology at 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade seems after all, different from theology at 70 degrees Fahrenheit…” — even the weather can make the difference between a few stragglers and an enraged crowd…

So. Take a look at those guys around the table (above).

In game terms: have the game designers figured out an impact ratio for bullets to beliefs yet?

[ by Charles Cameron — fictitious peoples (Israelis, Palestinians), approved and disapproved scriptures (Hindu, Falun Gong), religious violence (Afghanistan, Nigeria, Bethlehem) ]
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So, is there some sort of contest going on between Iranian and American ex-Speakers? Perhaps Elliott Abrams‘s response to Gingrich, quoted in the Washington Post piece, applies equally well to Haddad-Adel?

There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood.

Next up…

And okay, what’s the point here? Is it that the Russians want to please both the Chinese and Indian governments — or that they don’t like new scriptures but are okay with old ones? Or is the problem that they haven’t decided yet on a “one size fits all” approach to unOrthodox religions?

Sigh. Next…

This is brutal — and apparently intercontinental.

You might think it’s obvious what the wrong answer is, and who’s doing the killing, in Nigeria. But these things can cut both ways:

Even here, it’s not clear who threw the bomb into the madrasa, although one could hazard a guess…

And even the site of the Nativity is infected. The Guardian’s account of events there this Christmas season is harsh in tone — but consider whose Nativity is supposedly being celebrated…

I’d say the Qur’an offers a better image of Christian monks than that experienced by those Palestinian riot police… who, in the event, although they themselves were also assailed with broom-sticks, declined to arrest anyone because, as Palestinian police lieutenant-colonel Khaled al-Tamimi put it:

Everything is all right and things have returned to normal. No one was arrested because all those involved were men of God.

Still, things could be worse. It was a squabble along similar lines in which nine several Orthodox monks were killed that triggered the Crimean War: details in Raymond Cohen, Conflict and Neglect: Between Ruin and Preservation at the Church of the Nativity — h/t Juan Cole, who also has video of this year’s brouhaha.

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Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

[ by Charles Cameron — jihadist pop ]

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You’ve no doubt seen the reports of a Jihadist animation movie nearing completion, at DangerRoom if not on Jihadica:

It seems like a logical development to me — we’ve already seen that you can get bin Laden DVDs:

And Hezbollah even produces its own video games:

What else?

Will McCants suggested “Now they just need some action figures” in his blog post — action figures! — but then he saw the new Inspire magazine, #6, and tweeted, “New Awlaqi action figure in Inspire looks like the Jewel in Jewel of the Nile” — with a link to a nice image — so that part’s taken care of…

So okay, back to the cartoon — here’s the next big question — what does this remind you of?

And I just have to admit — they remind me of this:

That’s what the jihadists in the cartoon are — mutant teenage turtles.

So sorry…

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Yesterday, I stumbled on the account of pole dancing for Jesus with the accompanying graphic. I was a little taken aback, I’ll admit, but Jesus didn’t confine his ministry to the pious and scholarly, he befriended women of questionable morals and enforcers from the Roman mob as I recall, or “publicans and sinners” to give them slightly more pleasant names – so I sat up, took notice, downloaded the image, and re-sized it to fit in the top position of one of my DoubleQuotes – while wondering if I’d have to wait till Doomsday to find a suitable companion piece.

All in a day’s screen-gazing, I wound up watching the Wong Kar-Wai film, Fallen Angels, last night, and lo: the screen-shot in the lower part of the DoubleQuote revealed itself.

There are interesting paradoxes embedded in each image, of course, pitting what you might call “deep” theology against pious expectation – but they also illustrate another matter of some interest to me, the degree to which religion is now richly integrated into popular culture.

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My second DoubleQuote, which contains today’s haul, deals with the same theme, I suppose — this time showing how what used to be the separate realms of science fiction and religion are now intermingled, with Minister Farrakhan speaking of an “end times” space craft that is an integral part of NoI eschatology in his annual Saviours’ Day speech, while alien aircraft flown by religious robots feature in a tongue-in-cheek news report about the war over Libya from Spencer Ackerman at the Wired War Room.

It is perhaps not surprising that Minister Farrakhan also cites Scientology with approval in the same speech, nor that that religion was itself the offspring of science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard. We are in a fertile period for the religious imagination, I believe, grappling to find new ways to answer the age-old questions — and science fiction and “signs in the skies” are among the vehicles, along with new religious movements and old religions renewed, by which we are coming to terms with life in this post-nuclear age…

I’m not much of a prophet, but I predict that the confluence of science fiction with religion will prove to be one of the keys to an understanding of our times…

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from SmartMobs ]