Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Arabic Text on Newsweek

Arabic text on Newsweek, with fine print in English.
Also, notice the Islamic green as a background


Creeping Sharia has a post on how mainstream print magazines such as TIME and Newsweek, as well as newspapers such as the New York Times introduced Islam-friendly stories almost at the same time this month. He calls these simultaneous publications an orchestration, but I would say they were more of a coincidence. Still, the more Muslim-friendly publications there are, the more these coincidences will occur, perhaps turning innocent simultaneity into the planned orchestration CS talks about.

What was unique about CS's post was how these publications also used images to support their stories. One of my points in this blog is that images are subtly being changed or added to create a Muslim-friendly world. People don't have time (or often the desire) to read long articles about Jihad, Islam, the Koran or Mohamed. They are far more likely to respond quickly and viscerally to images. That is after all one of the ways propaganda (and advertisements) work.

As I've shown throughout this blog, Muslims are becoming quite adept at changing the imagery in our landscape - from TV shows to magazines, and even in clever ways to accepting Arabic script (as in the Arabic script for halal which we can - or will - slowly recognize without reading Arabic.)

Now Newsweek has on its front page the Islamic green as the background to Arabic text (with a finer print, supposedly its translation in English.) Like the halal script, we are cleverly being introduced to Arabic, and eventually, we will surely begin to visually recognize (without actually reading them) prominent words like Jihad, Allah, Islam and Mohamed.

I wonder when "green" will no longer mean Irish, but Islam instead?