A century-old trick
During World War II, media machines of all the parties involved in that universal war that claimed the lives of millions produced special movies and documentaries that are still available on YouTube today, and through which everyone can see the efforts used to demonize certain people, despise them and make fun of their culture and religion. The US movie industry played a major role in creating stereotype images of the German and Japanese that still dominate Americans’ minds today.
The same media mobilization was used during the East-West cold war, giving the upper hand to US and British media, as the most popular movie series have been used to slander the Soviet people. Such movies and animations produced by Disney were used to slander the people and countries that were then deemed as enemy to the United States.
Today, screening of such movies and documentaries is banned on any national TV channel in the US because they involve racist calls and phrases against certain people, races and religions. These include movies produced by Warner Brothers and Colombia that only call for mockery of their content and of their producers. Nonetheless, this does not mean that they did not achieve the goal of promoting public hatred towards the enemy.
However, when the war was over and such productions became a bad media archive that everybody is trying to forget, the Arab World still unfortunately uses such media campaigns that were used over hundred years ago before the revolution of the press, telegrams, radio and telephones. The same is being done with the revelation of social media networks and satellite TV channels that are being used as means of silly, superficial yet hostile propaganda.
The real problem is that we have developed stereotype images of each other that are used on social media networks in cheap disgusting media wars. What is even worse is that we have a hidden reserve of racial and regional hatred that is being used in this war leaving us no option but to rely on Arab recipients’ awareness to be the final judge in attempts to put an end to the bad use of social media as cheap and old means of propaganda.
This does not mean that they did not achieve the goal of promoting public hatred towards the enemy.