Yesterday, while going through my Twitter haystack, I came upon this video below titled “The Army Of Imam Al Mahdi”. It plays a documentary-like clip about a jihadist boot-camp in Afghanistan. It consists of a series of clips showing the training sessions done by the soldiers of Imam Al Mahdi—jidadists.

I’ve watched quite a lot of videos similar to this one before; it wasn’t  new to me. They are mainly filmed for promoting these Jihadist “schools”. In other words, they want to attract young and naive Muslims to join them, and they do so by showing how professional and advanced their training techniques are: they use “cool” combat manoeuvres, and fire powerful machine-guns.

This type of advertising is one of the many highly effective brainwashing techniques used by Muslim extremists. I have a little story that proves how effective they are.

The clip played a couple Jihadist songs—anthems—in the background of the video. These songs are in Arabic, and they encourage Muslims to fight, kill, sacrifice themselves, and join the jihadist armies, by claiming it is the duty of each Muslim, according to the Koran. The songs include a lot of repeating and emphasis.

Now what happened to me was the following. While watching this clip. last night, I thought to myself the tunes of the songs played in the background are really catchy. However, I didn’t realize how catchy they really are until this very morning: I woke up today, and ironically I was humming the tune—and some of the words—of one of these songs! I mean I only heard it once, and there I was singing it in my head, the very next day. I was really surprised, and so I said to myself “I am going to write about it tonight!”

I’ve always wondered why so many non-Lebanese people hold an extremely pessimistic view of Lebanon. I guess I’ve known the reason all along: religious extremists. But since Lebanon is my home country, sometimes I tend to ignore this sad reality, and convince myself that Lebanon is the most developed country in the middle east as well as the one with the most open-minded people—which is true to some extent. However, every time I put on the news, the same hopeless and sad feeling takes over me. It’s impossible for one to escape from his or her own reality.

Lebanon is a really strange country. On one hand, a large part of society consists of hard-working, civilized folks who enjoy their own lives, and respect that of others. On the other hand… (I’ll leave it to the video below to fill in the rest)

Source: CNN