The entire world has been buzzing with a single topic: War.
No matter where you are in the world, or which ideologies you adhere you, the topic of war has certainly been at the forefront of your mind for the past few weeks as we are watching the genocide of the Palestinian people unfold at the hand of the United States of America and its proxy in the middle east, the Zionist Occupying Entity.
This war, like all wars, is of many fronts:
- The military front, which implicates the airstrikes, the missiles, and the tanks, as well as the soldiers shooting at children as their parents watch and the use of banned chemical weapons.
- The economic front usually involves sanctions, controlling imports and exports, and imposing blockades on essentials such as: water, food, electricity, gas, and diesel. It kills through thirst, hunger, bleeding out because medical essentials are stuck behind a gate under threat of bombing if they enter.
- The last front is one we are all directly involved in, it is a war in and of itself: the soft war.
The Soft War can be defined as a war of weaponized information, namely disinformation. The difference between misinformation and disinformation, being an intentional spreading of false news in order to control the narrative, a phenomenon we have been witnessing firsthand since October 7th, with the tale of the 40 beheaded children and the calendar introduced as a “list of terrorist names”. In this war, ideas and narratives become the weapons of choice, and the war is for the shaping of public opinion and even for individual hearts and minds.
This is a war we must fight on a political level, in the face of the propaganda. It is the war journalists are fighting through organic posts on social media and the Occupying Zionist entity is attempting to silence by shutting off communication and murdering journalists and their families. In fact, one of the many records the Occupation has broken in this war on Gaza is the coldblooded deliberate murder of over 60 journalists, making it the deadliest war for journalists in over 30 years. It is the war we are fighting with posts, and stories, and comments and the occupation is attempting to drown us with their bots and paid actors.
The strategies of the Western world and their media are many: distraction with trivial matters, creating the illusion of helplessness & incapacity in the face of all that is happening, fostering division within members of a group to weaken their union, dehumanizing a people, etc.
The political level melds into a personal level as these strategies affect our hearts and minds and prevent us from being alert in the face of it all.
One of the most important tools used towards achieving these strategies is terminology. Whether spoken or written, words encompass entire ideologies; they hold the weight of manifestos and the power of bullets. Just like words can dehumanize a nation enough to consider its people “human animals” and its destruction a justified means to an end, they can also empower a resistance and allow us to reclaim the narrative. By refusing to use the terms they’ve indoctrinated us into accepting and instead insisting on the use of accurate terminology, we are winning battles on the soft war front. Using the term IOF or Israeli Occupying Forces to describe the army of the Occupying Entity is not only more accurate, as an occupying state’s violence is never in defence but also a direct defence against their propaganda.
Let us be the voice of the people in more ways than one, let us be warriors in the struggle for liberation of lands but also of hearts and minds.