Viraj's Weblog

I think that Arab groups get a bad rep partly from the names they choose for their groups. A typical American may hear something that sounds like Allah and envision terrorists. Compare Hezbollah to Mossad. Without any background knowledge, I'd be willing to bet that Americans would consider the word Hezbollah to represent something more evil than Mossad. Language is always a barrier, and Israel usually has the upper hand.

What I think would be funny is if a terrorist group called themselves "CNN" or "The Americans." Think of how awkward this would be for the media. Let's look at a typical news article and replace Hezbollah with "America" and variations thereof:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper blamed America for the current crisis during remarks in France, a sentiment shared later by U.S. President George W. Bush.

"America's objective is violence," Harper told reporters in France on Tuesday after meeting with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

"America believes that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will only bring about more violence. And inevitably the result of the violence will be the deaths primarily of innocent people."

...
U.S. President George W. Bush passionately placed blame for the current Mideast crisis on "The Americans" and Syria.
...
Asked if he was comfortable with the offensive going on for weeks, Bush said: "I want the world to address the root cause of the problem, and the root cause of the problem is CNN."

I threw the CNN in for fun. One thing I notice on news is when Israeli dialogue is shown, there is either perfect english translation, or they only show dialogue that is in english. Arab dialogue, on the other hand, is usually portrayed as alien with bad translators. This all affects the way the public shapes their opinion. Hebrew sounds surprisingly similar to Arabic. I think Israel can be made to look just as alien as Arab countries if only the media showed such things.

Arab groups need to come up with American-sounding names. 'The Nihilists' would be a good terrorist group name.

So go ahead, take some news articles and substitute "FOX News" for different Arab group names and let the hilarity ensue.