A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions.fear of polio vaccines caught on, explains a doctor with the World Health Organization, because of the war in Iraq. “If America is fighting people in the Middle East,” goes the Islamist logic, “the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims.” Local imams repeated and spread the sterilization theory, which won wide acceptance despite vocal assurances to the contrary from the WHO, the Nigerian government, and many Nigerian doctors and scientists.
The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: sixteen countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease – twelve in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this “a major epidemic.”
This is what a public-relations campaign can do to people. And not only to backward people in third-world countries. It can happen here. Only instead of parents not giving a vaccine, here we give Hillary control of the production of vaccine to make it cheap and plentiful. With the result that the vaccine becomes unavailable - until suddenly there's a glut of it, after people have been convinced that they won't bother trying to get it.Daniel Pipes: A Muslim Conspiracy Theory Keeps Polio Alive
Frontpagemagazine ^ | 5-24-05 | Daniel Pipes
I'm put in mind of The Iliad. In that story, the Greeks and Trojans battle at Troy - and when a captain of the Greeks is killed, the two sides fight over the body. Back in the 1950s that seemed strange to me. But look at what's going on here - the MSM and FR are battling over, not the actual body per se, but the memory of the fallen.The MSM wants to reduce the memory of the fallen to the flag-draped coffin as an emblem of futility. OTOH we want the fallen to be remembered as part of an ongoing, and very much alive an kicking, army of liberation. An army engaged, at painful cost, in defeating the philosophy that the end justifies the means. The philosophy, that is, of which suicidal assassination is the ultimate expression.
The victory of that liberation is expressed in the fact that the assassins are reduced to murdering not presidents but mere Iraqi voters - and that Iraqi voters are legion.
In seeking to promote the flag-draped coffin, the MSM seeks to promote not the fallen hero but the fallen schlub - the fool who went into danger to implement the policies of "Shrub" Bush. We promote the living soldier, in faith with his fallen comrades, as heroic actor on the world stage. Making a difference in a way far more meaningful than the propaganda of the MSM.
Journalism promotes the negative and the supericial because that is its stock in trade. Virtue is not superficial, and memory of virtue is the opposite of journalism. Journalism has to try to undercut Memorial Day.
Good Morning America Blows it Again (Another anti-American, Bush hit) beyond the sea | 5/29/05 | self