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Iraq street rises up against al Qaeda

Austin Bay:

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...Iraqis are sick and tired of Zarqawi’s and Al Qaeda’s murder and destruction and they want other Arab Muslim countries to take strong action. This hatred for Zarqawi isn’t a new phenomenon – I heard similar comments last summer in Baghdad. Now –after the Iraqi elections– the Iraqi people feel confident enough to demonstrate in the streets. That means they attract cameras– even Al Jazeerah’s.

The demonstrations are another huge political defeat for Al Qaeda. The demonstrations make the point that Al Qaeda kills Arabs, Al Qaeda kills Muslims. Washington fretted -and quite correctly– that the coalition was losing the “information war.” Since January 30th, the Iraqis have been winning that war.

Reuters reports:

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Iraqis have joined several anti-Jordanian protests over the past week, angered by reports that a Jordanian man carried out a suicide bombing that killed 125 people south of Baghdad last month and that his family had hailed him as a martyr.

Jordan and the man's family have denied he was behind the single bloodiest attack in postwar Iraq.

Iraqi protesters have burned Jordanian flags and broken into the heavily-guarded embassy at least twice since the suicide bombing in Hilla on Feb. 28. They held banners reading "no to terrorism" and called on Arabs to speak out against praise of suicide bombers.

This is a major change from when Saddam was paying the families of suicide bombers $25,000. Iraqis are finally saying the same thing George Bush said during the Palestinian human bomb campaign. These people are murders not martyrs. Al Qaeda has lost the battle for hearts and minds and their recent PR campaign on the internet is not going to change that fact. The internet has changed the way the enemy tells his story. He does not need reporters anymore. Kimberly Dozier of CBS puts it this way:

I used to be immune to the whole anti-foreigner thing, because I’m a journalist. As reporters, our Western-ness was beside the point, almost overlooked. We could walk into the enemy camp unhindered - and frequently did - because the ‘enemy’ or whomever the ‘other side’ was, wanted and needed us to tell their story.

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The militants are journalist-editor-producer-broadcaster all in one. They video their own bombings and killings, and put it on their own websites, reaching both the young followers they’re trying to recruit, and a wider audience when we international newsgatherers pick up their material, and re-broadcast to millions.

In a sense, by rebroadcasting their material, we’ve helped them make us irrelevant.

It is ironic that reporters now find the only safe place is with the US troops. Maybe the reporters will eventual come around and decide they are on the side of the US.