"When it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight, with them, a narrative battle," said [presidential spokesman Josh] Earnest "And what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight, in a war against the West, in a war against the United States. That is a bankrupt, false narrative. It's a mythology. And we have made progress in debunking that mythology."
Yeah, I hate it when their narratives blow up in our trash bins.
So before the Obama administration came along, the myth of jihadis representing all Moslems in a war against America was strong?
It took hope, change, and a lovely presidential outreach speech in Cairo to make progress--so it is not nearly complete, apparently--in debunking that mythology?
Sadly, I think the narratives are that ISIL (and other jihadis) want to kill us; and our administration's narrative is that we need to understand more fully why they hate us and want to kill us so we can stop provoking them.
While it is true that long-term victory requires Moslems to reject violent jihad, we can't break the jihadi narrative while they are winning and killing us.
I think we take a big step to breaking their narrative by first defeating and killing them so decisively that the jihadis and proto-jihadis cheering the jihad on over the Internet no longer love death as much as we love life:
Give our enemies all the death they love until they love death no more.
Narrative, indeed. Too often those all-in on the narrative aspect think it is the only fight we need to wage.
