A Big Budget Anti-Suicide Bombing PSA – Newsweek The War on Iraq – MSNBC.com
Remember the egg, the frying pan and the message? “This is your brain,” the ominous narrator told us before cracking an egg over the sizzling skillet. “This is your brain on drugs.” Public service announcements have changed a lot since that foreboding culinary lesson. They now include exploding cars, flying Matrix-style stuntmen and exceedingly dire messages like “Don’t Suicide Bomb.” A new, American-made PSA aimed at discouraging these deadly attacks is currently in production. The ad is slated to air as a 60-second spot on Iraqi television this summer.
And, of course, because of those anti-drug ads, the drug problem is over!
Well, gee. We’ve got 20 permanent military bases there, now, and a 5,000 person embassy in the green zone. Oddly, those for and opposed to bringing the troops home never mention the ones who will necessarily be stationed permanently in order to staff these facilities.
So now we’re gonna try and get kids in Iraq to believe their peers will think that they’re uncool and conformist if they blow themselves up?
Of course this would be the first demonstration of any long-term strategic planning.
Congradulations, guys; I haven’t spent this much time compulsively posting to anything or had as much fun doing it since before I got on the interweb. =D
If anything, seeing the “carnage” of the bombing just might encourage more suicide bombings.
Wow, I was totally going to blow myself up, but that 60 second commercial changed my mind! Now I just want world peace!
Is “cultural misunderstanding” too lightweight of a term to describe this idea? I don’t anything about mid-eastern cultures, but you’ve got to think that if a person is dedicated (arguably crazy, but dedicated) enough to blow themselves up, it might take more than some television ads to change their minds.
#4
I agree. But why crazy? If you accept that some people have a true faith, then it makes sense to be blown up for a higher cause and go directly to the VIP section of heaven.
Of course, not every believer will set himself up with C4. There are many paths to get to that state. And they all have something in common. But mainly is the lack of pluralism that does it. If people only see one view of the problem, one side of an issue, they get into a desperate state. A boy in a Madras school memorising scriptures instead of a getting a real education or some other boy growing in the streets of a city in a war zone where some of his friends and brothers are killed or maimed, these people have a very biased and desperate view of the situation.
It’s not the sight of violence and destruction (a every day experience for them) that will shock mentalities. Not even for a US audience, where teenagers grow on action films
If there’s one thing that America can show to the world is pluralism. USA should be the epitome of multiculturalism ( the melting pot and stuff…) but it isn’t actually. And it’s not because of the government either. They are there, arguably, because they are more or less a reflection of the country’s thinking.
If you have a flock of spooky, superstitious louts running the farm — who managed to get themselves into power through ad campaigns targeting a population of spooky, superstitious louts — well, of course, they would think that something like this works everywhere else.
Through the last couple of decades, America has learned how to solve almost every problem through TV. Why should solving suicide bombing be any different?
I still think it should be standard practice to desicrate the bodies of suicide bombers. This may seem cold-hearted. However, the promise of paradise in heaven comes crashing down if you tell Muslims that any suicide bombers will be buried wrapped in the corpse of a pig.
Unclean pig burial = no heaven = no incentive to commit the act
If “friendly” Muslim states enacted this policy I believe the suicide bombing culture would screech to a halt.