What the Terrorists Want

Daniel Pipes gets to the heart of the matter by listening to what the terrorists say.

So why do so many of those who whine here about "separation of church and state" place themselves on the side of the caliphat?

Faces from the Front

The low price of video gear has enabled a guerilla news team to do an end run around the MSM.

A good interview with the man behind it on Tech Central Station makes an excellent point:

Technology has made all sorts of things possible. Twenty years ago, or even ten, it took a huge infrastructure to allow one guy in a safari jacket to report from places like Baghdad and pretend he knew what was going on there. Now it can be a do-it-yourself project. This is probably bad news for terrorism, which is an information warfare operation disguised as a military one, and one that is based on taking advantage of the kind of reporting (hysterical and shallow, for the most part) that traditional mass media tend to do. I suspect that the growth of guerrilla media -- ranging from operations like Faces From the Front, to reporting by freelancers like Michael Yon, to reports from Iraqi bloggers and even emails from soldiers -- has made the terrorists' task tougher, as the reporting is by people who are much closer to what's really going on, and much more closely connected to their audiences.
(Emphasis mine)