How Team Kagirison Would Have Engaged in Narrative Management for Israel

In any ideologically-driven hot war, information warfare serves as a combat force multiplier.

Antony Kagirison

The Better Narrative Wins

In the realm of ideologies, a good ideology is underpinned by a good narrative

Antony Kagirison

Narrative management is heavily dependent on psychological operations and narrative framing. Psychological operations have value in kinetic wars. During the 1989 Panama War, psychological operations were used as combat force multipliers at both the tactical and operational levels.

Narrative framing is vital in waging ideological wars because in this theater of conflict – the better narrative wins. In the realm of ideologies, a good ideology is underpinned by a good narrative.

The Cold War was essentially an ideological war i.e. a war of competing/rival ideas. In the war of ideas, strategic victory is achieved by communicating your ideas in a relatable and easy-to-understand way while simultaneously discrediting the validity, reliability, and applicability of rival ideas. This is why narrative framing is important because it designs how the narrative will be communicated, as well as how rival narratives will be combated.

The American Department of Defense (DoD) tried to create an ultimate framework for psychological operations (psyops) in 1985 during the Cold War. However, this framework was never fully developed by 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and was finally abandoned because its principal target – the Soviet Union – was no longer a strategic nor ideological peer rival of the United States Government (USG). As expected, psyops was abandoned during the 1990s – even during the First Gulf War – when priority was given to public diplomacy. At this time, America was the sole Global Hyperpower. It retained this status for two decades until 2010 when strategic rivals had gained significant economic, technological, and geopolitical resources to embark on their journey to become peer competitors, though no nation has thus far rivaled the United States of America (USA) as a full (domain) spectrum peer rival.

Notwithstanding state rivalry, psyops started becoming a subject of interest following the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda. USG blamed these attacks on a unique form of Sunni Revivalism that was powered by radical revolutionary politics. To counter al-Qaeda, USG developed a counter-messaging plan to subvert and undermine the religious ideology that was the raison d’être for al-Qaeda’s existence. This led to the formation of the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which ultimately failed to achieve its objective. Another failed venture was the establishment of the Office of Global Communications (OGC) which was closed without it achieving its objectives.

It was recognized that information warfare needed to be tailored to the populace rather than a segment of the populace, i.e. the young male Sunni Muslims who were tagged as at-risk demographic group because they were vulnerable to ideological indoctrination by Sunni extremists.

On the legal front, the Freedom Promotion Act (FPA) was enacted in 2002 and this allowed for propaganda to be broadcast using media funded by the American taxpayer. Among the media established for propaganda purposes include Radio Free Afghanistan, Al-Hurra TV, Radio Sawa, and Radio Farda. Among the print media established was Hi Magazine which was suspended for lack of effective outreach. The lessons learned from the information warfare waged against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been integrated into the approach used by Team Kagirison for narrative management.

PsyOps as a Strategic Tool in Public Diplomacy

In the 1990s, psyops was developmentally upgraded so that it could be deployed as a strategic tool in public diplomacy. It is for this reason that two types of psyops developed – white psyops and black psyops.

White psyops is deployed alongside public diplomacy as the parallel communication channel for overt propaganda. Black psyops is used to broadcast covert propaganda. We will recommend the use both white psyops and black psyops in our hypothetical perception management for Israel during the current Israel-Hamas War.

Narrative Management Framework

Our narrative management framework consists of narrative generation, narrative amplification, and narrative deconstruction as explained below.

1. Narrative Generation

The most potent grand narrative in the current Israel-Hamas War is antisemitism or judeophobia or simply hatred of Jews.

Antony Kagirison

We possess the ability to create a coherent pro-Israeli narrative that reflects a holistic understanding of geopolitical realities and vogue media sensationalism. We understand the dynamics of narrative generation, narrative profiling, and narrative appraisal.

So, why is a narrative important in the first place? The answer is simple: human beings interpret reality through a set of consensus narratives. This set of consensus narratives is collectively designated as the Grand Narrative – a term that can be traced back to Arnold Toynbee in his 4-volume work, A Study of History (1934); and was later popularized by the French postmodernist philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard in his scientifically-flawed work – The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge that was first published in 1979.

The most potent grand narrative in the current Israel-Hamas War is antisemitism or judeophobia or simply hatred of Jews. This is the grand narrative that unites Sunni, Shia, Christian White Nationalists, Leftists, and Black Extremists among other disparate opponents of the State of Israel. We will later speak about Neturei Karta and the post-Maimonidean strand of anti-Zionism that exists in Orthodox Judaism (e.g Satmar Hasidim) following the post-Haskalah conflict between the Maskilim and the orthodox rabbinic authorities, which degenerated into a conflict between secular Zionism and anti-nationalist Judaism.

So far, there has been no grand narrative that has been developed to counter antisemitism and Jews have resorted to safety in diversity in the Western World where a lack of any hegemonic narrative in a sea of competing and complementary narratives has allowed for the attenuation of public antisemitism.

However, in the Muslim World (and especially in the Arab World), antisemitism is a potent grand narrative that can even make or unmake political leaders. For example, Anwar Sadat was killed – by Khalid al-Islambuli and Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj on October 6, 1981 – because his assassins were driven by intense Jew-hatred that could not allow them to fathom a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. Remarkably, Sadat was upholding Pan-Arab Secularism introduced by Gamal Abdel Nasser (who made antisemitism one of the vital elements of his foreign policy thus driving him to participate in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and thereafter openly declare his intentions to destroy Israel – though these intentions were put to rest by the resounding Egyptian defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War).

What is important to note here is that secular Arabs still uphold antisemitism in their Weltanschauung (or how they perceive, interpret, and relate to events in the world). By inference, we can state that antisemitism that is cloaked as anti-Zionism is a tool for political legitimacy in the Arab World, and the Muslim world in general.

We would like to propose that we promote calls for diverse worldviews (Weltanschauung) in the Arab World so that competing worldviews can shift the attention of people away from Jews as well as allow new popular socio-political imagery to develop. This will also help the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to shift the pillars of political legitimacy away from the triad of Arab Nationalism, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-Zionism to more “modern” pillars of political legitimacy that have been described in the post titled, Information Warfare Against Israel Following Propaganda of the Deed Attacks.

At the moment, we would like to argue that the current Sunni-Shia conflict be sustained as these competing religious ideologies allow for sectarian socio-political differences to become intractable and primed to turn into armed conflicts if they are ignited by spectacular acts of violence. For instance, the bombing of Al-Askari Mosque by al-Qaeda on February 22, 2006, ignited the already volatile Shia-Sunni conflict in Iraq into a communal conflict that killed about 1000 people and thereafter degenerated into a full-scale civil war that persists (in Iraq) to date.

“There has been no grand narrative that has been developed to counter antisemitism and Jews have resorted to safety in diversity in the Western World where a lack of any hegemonic narrative in a sea of competing and complementary narratives has allowed for the attenuation of public antisemitism.”

Compared to Jews, Muslims (and Arabs in particular) possess relatively low cognitive sovereignty – which according to us is the long-term effect of the psychological trauma that Arabs suffered after their Arab-dominated caliphate was replaced by the Turkish (Ottoman) Caliphate which ended up colonizing most of the Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa. This was considered a loss of face by the Arabs as they lost their high administrative status in Islam to non-Arabs. This loss of face can be traced back to the collapse of the last Arab caliphate. The destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate by the Persianized Mongol Ilkhanate created a collective trauma that still exists in the Arab mind to this day. For example, the defeat of Egypt in 1967 by Israel was compared by Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ideologues to the defeat of al-Mustasim by Hulagu Khan, and as expected, the MB claimed that these defeats were caused by the impiety of the rulers.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been in constant conflict with the Egyptian Government and most Gulf Arab monarchies (except for the State of Qatar that hosts them). This conflict between MB and secular Arabs has served to drain support from Hamas, and it makes sense (at least to us) that this conflict is encouraged so that Hamas loses popular support in the Arab street. In fact, any attack by MB-affiliated groups in Arab capitals can lead to corollary condemnation of Hamas as Arabs denounce the attackers and their affiliates (who include Hamas). For this reason, we would work to amplify attacks attributed to MB-affiliated groups/organizations so that we can garner public opposition against MB-affiliate, Hamas.

Narratives by Team Kagirison

Team Kagirison can design and build narratives to counter Sunni Jihadism and Arab Terrorism, and each narrative can be tailored to a specific audience. For example, our narrative targeting Christians in Lebanon is that Hezbollah has harmed the public image of Lebanon, endangered its civilian population, and pauperized its Christian population by tanking the Lebanese economy and mainstreaming organized crime as a semi-legitimate economic activity. Another narrative is that Hezbollah’s public support for Hamas dents the international image of Lebanon and the Lebanese people by casting them as sympathizers and/or active supporters of international terrorism.

A unique narrative that we recommend for promotion is that Lebanese businessmen and/or people in Africa are exploiting African resources, disrespecting and denigrating local Black African populations, and using the wealth they acquire in Africa to foster international terrorism that has killed Black Africans e.g. the killing of the young Tanzanian exchange student, Joshua Mollel. The reason we have used this example is that Tanzania hosts a market-dominant Shia population that has shown open support for Iranian theocracy and the Lebanese Shia. We will count it a success if we can get some prominent Shia in Tanzania to criticize Hezbollah for supporting Hamas because this will publicly reveal that Hezbollah endorses the killing of that Tanzanian Christian youth by Palestinian Arab terrorists.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic Terrorism is synonymous with Sunni Jihadism because all active Islamic terrorist groups from Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Mozambique to Fulani-dominated Ansaroul Islam in Burkina Faso and Front de Liberation du Macina in Mali are armed Sunni organizations. By relating this Sunni Jihadism to terrorism against Israel by Hamas and other Sunni Jihadist groups, the popular opinion across Sub-Saharan Africa from West Africa to Southern Africa will shift towards supporting Israel. In fact, Bashar al-Assad’s cadre and its Iranian patrons used a similar strategy to win the support of Africans against the Sunni terrorists who were fighting against the Alawite-led regime of Syria. The Alawites and Iranians used a similar strategy to win the support of Indians during their war against Al-Qaeda-laced rebels. Basically, most Africans and Indians are opposed to Sunni Jihadism and need little prodding for them to support Israel and serve as an ideological bulwark against Islamist-themed antisemitism.

Relatedly, our narrative is designed to ensure that activists who promote pro-Hamas narratives are cast as anti-African or enemies of the collective security of Africa. Thereby, without invoking the name of Israel or Jews, Hamas will lose the clout it has developed among the urban intelligentsia in African capitals. We recommend that this be done using both English and Kiswahili messages on social media so as to broadcast this narrative to an African audience.

(NB: Kiswahili is the language while Swahili refers to the people. The Swahili people speak Kiswahili just like the Gikuyu people speak Kikuyu language. Swahili language is a misnomer).

2. Narrative Amplification

At this phase, we recommend the use of online resources, principally social media (and to an extent, commentary websites) to maximize the reach of the narrative we have created or modified from existing narratives. As explained in narrative engineering, the process of deconstructing an existing narrative and rebuilding it in a modified form using new concepts and ontology is called narrative re-engineering, a term derived from concept re-engineering.

Our approach is to use social media (SM) accounts to amplify pro-Israeli narratives in a coordinated and synchronized manner.

As already explained, our plan is to create tailored narratives, with each tailored narrative having a designated audience. For this reason, we will segment our target audience, and this audience segmentation will be reflected in our social media campaigns where specific social media accounts will be used to broadcast tailored narratives to specific audiences.

3. Narrative Deconstruction

This is where our custom-designed DnF framework of postmodernism comes into play. Our framework will be used to systematically discredit existing anti-Israeli narratives, including intellectual antisemitism that can be traced back to the antisemitic French intelligentsia who influenced Arab thought leaders at the dawn of the 20th Century.

The DnF Framework is simply Deconstruction complemented by non-Foundationalism. Our custom-designed DnF framework aims to decompose an existing narrative into its constituent parts so as to understand how these parts are related, and how their relationships can be exploited to destroy the narrative (what we describe as narrative decommissioning), or reforming the narrative (which we describe as narrative reformation), or creating a modified narrative (which is basically narrative re-engineering).

Non-Foudationalism aims to destroy the foundational relationships upon which a narrative rests. For instance, rearranging the constituents of a narrative destroys the initial relationships among these constituents and this creates a modified narrative with a different symbolic meaning.

If the relationship cannot be exploited, then the most vulnerable constituent parts of the narrative can be discredited before discrediting the entire narrative. This is part of narrative decommissioning.

Deconstruction involves discrediting, reforming, or re-engineering the narrative based on its constituent parts, rather than relationships between these parts. Because it focuses on individuated components of the narrative, deconstruction relies heavily on conceptual engineering as each component is pillared on concepts, rather than relationship between concepts that exist in different components (of the narrative). Deconstruction is a potent tool that can be targeted at consensus cultural narratives that are founded on irrational phobias and unsound traditions.

Narrative deconstruction must be done by intelligent and brilliant persons because it is a cognitively-demanding intellectual feat.