Is the Islamic State Propaganda a Psyop? Calls To Shut Down Social Media “Extremism” Intensify

Obama is calling for a concerted effort to shut down the Islamic State’s “sophisticated and slickly produced propaganda,” CBS New York reports.

CBS claims the IS “propaganda machine produces as many as 90,000 posts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms every single day.”

“The high-quality videos, the online magazines, the use of social media, terrorist Twitter accounts — it’s all designed to target today’s young people online,” Obama said.

As Infowars.com reported earlier this week, Congress and the White House are leaning on Twitter to censor Islamic State posts on its network.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, the chair of a House foreign affairs subcommittee on terrorism, has singled out Twitter for allowing supposed IS operatives to recruit and propagandize on the social media platform.

“This is the way (the Islamic State) is recruiting — they are getting people to leave their homelands and become fighters,” Poe said.

Obama’s latest comments coincide with efforts by British police to find three school girls who were allegedly recruited by the terrorist army.

CBS News reported on Friday the British school girls were lured by “slick, well-produced and effective” IS propaganda.

“Becoming wives of fighters seems to be a common thing; to take part in ISIL activities in that way, by marrying and producing children, jihadist children, or becoming part of the fight themselves,” said Steven Pomerantz, a former chief of counterterrorism at the FBI.

Remarkably, and unbelievably, the corporate media insists ISIS has convinced girls to join the jihadi fight by using online images of jars of Nutella, kittens and emojis.

Telltale Signs IS Propaganda is Psyop

In September Bernie Suarez, writing for Activist Post, analyzed the “scripted oddities” of Islamic State propaganda.

Suarez noted the professional camera, editing and software skills of IS and its internet sophistication and video uploading capabilities despite supposedly being targeted by the largest and most advanced military and intelligence organizations in the world.

Suarez writes that “ISIS has all the above including social media capabilities. Amazingly, these covered-face killers have unraveled the secret of how to outsmart every world power including the U.S. Empire with regard to every form of communication. They have stomped out the U.S. military, NSA, CIA, NATO, U.N. and the intelligence of Israel, U.K. and every other nation that surrounds them.”

ISIS beheading videos, according to British forensic experts and other analysts, are fake.

In addition, there are questions about the legitimacy of the latest sensationalistic execution video of a Jordanian pilot allegedly captured by the Islamic State.

“A guest who appeared on Voice of Israel, Israel’s biggest English language broadcast network, sensationally claimed that ISIS faked the burning of Jordanian pilot Youssef al-Kasasbeh and that the highly produced video was acted out,” Paul Joseph Watson reported last week for Infowars.com.

Empowering the State to “Countermessage” ISIS and “Extremism”

The hype surrounding the supposed power of ISIS and its social media skill, including its alleged ability to hypnotize school girls, is being used to expand the power of the state and amplify its effort to “countermessage” targeted enemies.

On February 16 The New York Times reported that the “Obama administration is revamping its effort to counter the Islamic State’s propaganda machine” by “expanding a tiny State Department agency, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, to harness all the existing attempts at countermessaging by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

The agency, created by unconstitutional presidential fiat in September, 2011 “is guided by National Strategy for Counterterrorism and operates under the policy direction of the White House and interagency leadership,” according to the State Department.

Its “integrated analysis component leverages the Intelligence Community” and counters “terrorist propaganda and misinformation about the United States across a wide variety of interactive digital environments that had previously been ceded to extremists,” primarily social media and other internet media platforms.

In August of 2011 the Obama administration promised to “closely monitor… the Internet and social networking sites” in order to “counter online violent extremist propaganda.” The plan called for “aggressively” combating such ideology by “continuing to closely monitor the important role the internet and social networking sites play in advancing violent extremist narratives.”

Infowars.com reported:

In targeting the Internet and social networking websites for surveillance in the name of fighting domestic terrorism, the White House is continuing in the vein of the previous administration who in 2006 revealed that since 9/11 they had been pursuing a plan to diminish the role of “conspiracy theories” as a primary recruitment tool for terrorists.

In 2013 the Pentagon was caught manipulating social media accounts and discovered “running massive propaganda campaigns that cover a vast array of online networks.”

In 2011, Computerworld reported that the government

contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people. As disturbing as this is, it’s not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors.

“The 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base sought the development of Persona Management Software which could be used for creating and managing fake profiles on social media sites to distort the truth and make it appear as if there was a generally accepted agreement on controversial issues,” Darlene Storm noted for Computerworld.

The question then becomes, considering the past history of the intelligence community, particularly in its documented effort to create terrorist groups and, domestically, contrive terror plots for propaganda value, how much of ISIS propaganda and “recruitment” (using kittens and Nutella) is in fact produced by the U.S. military and its intelligence apparatus?

Twitter and other social media platforms are extremely useful for political activists not associated with ISIS or Islamic extremism.

Domestic political activism aimed at changing the policies of the government pose more of a threat to the state than IS which has not engaged in terror within the United States.


Articles by: Kurt Nimmo

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