I've heard of good cop/bad cop before, but al Qaeda's ricidulous video "invitation" (downloadable here) really takes the cake for chutzpah.

[Note: If you have trouble with the above download, I've uploaded a copy of the silly video and put it here.]

Anyway, I downloaded and watched the video last night. It's incredibly tedious, and shows the power of self-brainwashing inherent in poetic repetition of ostensibly religious texts, and it sickens me to see that a nerdy Los Angeleno (Adam Gadahn nee Pearlman) has made it big by becoming one of the worst traitors in U.S. history, but there's nothing new about treason. He may be sincere, but so was John Wilkes Booth.

I do think the video is well worth watching, and I agree with Walid Phares who terms it "a treasure of knowledge and indicators for the current state of thinking of al Qaeda and its ideologues...." and "a sample of what is on the mind of Salafi Jihadists for the United States and the West."

What's on their mind is to attempt to force Americans to convert to Islam, and I don't think it's a coincidence that this video was released at just about the same time as the video (streamable at youtube) showing the "conversion" of American journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig.

What irritated me the most about the latter film was not the "conversion" but that shortly after both "converts" were made to criticize Bush for using the phrase "Islamic fascists," the president himself backed away from using the phrase!

I mean, it's one thing to wimp out when someone has a knife to your throat or a gun to your head, but Bush is supposed to be the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, and if a propaganda film can make him back down like this, what's next? There's something about submitting to an extortion ring that cranks out propaganda disguised as religion which I find deeply disturbing.

These people are Islamic fascists, and I am disappointed in the president.

As to the "conversion," I'm not quite sure how much violence was involved, but it does appear to have been insincere:

"It was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns and we didn't know what the hell was going on," he said.

According to the captors, though, the two were given the following "choice":

A statement from the captors before the men were freed had said the two journalists had to choose either Islam, a tax imposed on non-Muslims to be paid to a Muslim ruler, or war.

"They chose Islam and that is a gift God gives those whom he chooses," the statement said.

I like Kathleen Parker's analysis:

...there is nevertheless something about that video — of seeing those two decent, open-hearted Western men surrendering to these lowlife fanatics — that makes me want to take a shower. How dare those thugs lecture Westerners about the loveliness of Islam while forcing religious conversion at gunpoint?

Their objective was clear from the beginning, according to Centanni and Wiig. They wanted a video. The two Fox journalists were far more valuable shown as cowardly Westerners converting to Islam than as severed heads on the tip of a dull knife.

Let me be clear: I don't think they were cowards. But those who are willing to strap explosives to their bodies — or enlist their children to become suicide bombers — surely see them, and us, that way. It is easy to imagine that rancorous Muslims are as attuned to the video as we are, watching replay after replay in the smug satisfaction that they have scored another victory against the infidel and the Great Satan.

Those few minutes of choreographed horror affirm for the Islamic world that Westerners are weak, while they reiterate the jihadist's message to the West:

Convert to Islam — or die.

The significance of this forced conversion has been downplayed in the media. The New York Times and the Washington Post even pronounced the two "unharmed" on release. This judgment is perverse. If Muslim prisoners in American custody were forced to convert to Christianity on pain of death or as a condition of release, the press would denounce it as virtual torture, and rightly so: No sane person would say the prisoners had suffered no harm.

This blindness also trivializes religion. Many people would sooner die than deny the commitments that shape their lives. Such beliefs lie near the heart of Christian doctrines of martyrdom, especially in the Middle East. In the Donatist controversy, the church was fractured over the question of whether and how to readmit those who under threat had denied their faith. In recent years, Christians in Sudan, Iran, Nigeria, and Indonesia have accepted death at the hands of Islamist extremists rather than convert to Islam.

And Centanni and Wiig remain at risk--like the writer Salman Rushdie, marked for death by Islamists who deem his writing blasphemous, or Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert forced to flee Afghanistan earlier this year. The two journalists, having announced their conversion, now must live as Muslims lest some imam declare them apostate and his followers take it upon themselves to carry out a sentence of death.

The blogosphere has been debating this back and forth, with David Warren (via David Schraub) opining the pair should have laid down their lives. And Captain Ed has been excoriated by Renew America's Adam Graham -- whom Graham characterized as saying that "we might as well accept Al Qaeda's invitation to convert to Islam."

Huh? Captain Ed thinks we might as well convert to Islam? Intrigued by this (but not seeing a specific link, as is usual in so many attacks on bloggers), I went to Captain Ed's blog, and found the post. Far from saying what he's mischaracterized as saying, he makes a very articulate argument against religious martyrdom as strategy:

Christianity did not survive because of martyrdom; it survived despite it, and the martyrs prepared themselves for the task. The church survived the oppression of the Romans in its first centuries, not by mindlessly dying for Christianity but for living for it. Romans did not seize people randomly off the street and tell them to deny their faith, but instead arrested and tortured the leaders of the Church. Had Warren spent any time researching the age of martyrdom, he would know that the early church cautioned the unprepared not to attempt it because of the risk of apostasy. It's hardly analogous to the terror of fanatical Muslims today, and Centanni and Wiig never volunteered to be the banner-carriers of Christianity or the West.

Still, there are some lingering questions about the conversion. Cliff May asks some good ones:

BTW: Will Centanni and Wiig return to Gaza? Since I assume they did not sincerely convert, they will not now be practicing Muslims – they will be apostates and therefore targets for capital punishment. No story in that?

I think what makes a difference to a lot of people is that religion (or a claim of religion -- depending on what these brainwashed zombies are to be called) is involved. It strikes me as a lot more serious to ask someone to make statements ostensibly betraying his relationship with God than his relationship with his military commanders or his country. But I think that depends on how religion is viewed, and that varies from person to person. It's easy for a devout person to condemn a religious "heretic" as a "traitor." But what if the "traitor" sees extorted religious statements as having no more meaning than extorted political statements?

If a Republican were abducted by a leftist gang and forced at gunpoint to recite statements written by Michael Moore or Ward Churchill, would there be a national outcry that he had betrayed his principles? I doubt it. What makes this so utterly different is that believers don't see religion as subject to mere agreement or disagreement.

But we can debate these issues (hether these men should have converted or should have forced their captors to martyr them to something, what that means, etc.) till Doomsday.

What I think is being forgotten is that this is a propaganda war.

They wanted a film depicting Americans as spineless wimps with no moral backbone, and they got it. Never mind that it proves no more than the North Vietnamese videos proved. The enemy is so insecure that they actually think that Americans can be defeated by videos showing a couple of them looking like cowards who were "willingly" converted by that same blood-dripping medieval sword that has "willingly" converted so many others over the centuries.

I am not about to lambaste Centanni and Wiig or tell them what to do. I know that given time, anyone can be broken, even the strongest, toughest soldiers. I suppose if they worked over a hardened combat veteran long enough, they could get him to read the "shehada" for a camera.

There's always the possibility that the enemy might select some American with no particular objection to martyrdom, who'd have said, "Go ahead and kill me! I prefer death to Islam!" Except I doubt very much that this would have been released on video. There are so many degrees of moral culpability involved in this that there's no way to come up with a hard and fast rule. Someone raised as an old-fashioned Catholic who believed in martyrdom might take a very different view of this conversion routine than a secular agnostic, or, say, an American Buddhist. Or even a hard core, Ayn Rand-believing atheist.

As there are so many types of believers and non-believers, I might as well take a look at my heretic self.

What would I do were I captured, and the knife wielders made me an offer I couldn't refuse?

"Either you saying the shehada or you having your head sliced off is going to be the subject of our next video!"

I think it might depend on how much I thought I had to lose. I have no kids, and if I did, that might very well influence my decision. My dad was a non-believer who never baptized me, although I was sent to a religious school because he wanted me to have religious exposure, but I have no major religious allegiance and take a broad view of God (which includes every manifestation of God inluding the possibility of multiple religions and gods). So, while I would not see the recital of the shehada as especially betraying anything on a major theological level, it is not something I believe. For me to say "there is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is the prophet of Allah" would be a lie. Hold a gun to my head or a knife to my throat, and depending on my mood, I might refuse to say it. Or I might say it. Were I feeling especially brave (or especially depressed, and there's considerable overlap there, which is another essay) I might hope I'd spit in the guy's face and tell him his god was a despicable beast and that I hoped he'd roast in hell with Allah forever.

But let us suppose I decided I had something if not a lot to live for. That people needed me. That Coco needed me. That I might ultimately have kids some day. That I was worried about what might happen to Classical Values if they slit my throat. That I just remembered I don't have a current will, and never took out an insurance policy! Whoops! Better say I love that Mohammad brigand, and get the hell out of here!

So I said it. Three times in front of witnesses. La Illaha illa allah. Mohammad rasul Allah. Etc.

Now, with that done, and the video made, released, and circulated, I'd have another problem. Two problems, actually. One would be the purely personal, which is my own view of myself. I'd be on record as saying something I did not believe, simply to save my own ass. For my own self respect, I would have to denounce it the same way anyone would deny a coerced confession. If I did not denounce it, I would be unworthy of self respect, or the respect of others. True, under some interpretations of Islam, conversion by the sword is valid, which would make me an apostate and subject to death, but that crowd already wants to kill me for being a pagan, a heretic, and a blasphemer, so adding apostasy wouldn't really count.

But with all due respect to everyone including the victims of the forced conversion, I think there's a second aspect to this, and that is the political.

The conversion was intended primarily not as conversion, but as propaganda.

Seriously, does anyone really think they converted these guys simply to add two more Muslims to the 1.5 billion? They did it because they want to show the world that Americans are weak people who can be converted to Islam by the sword, and that conversion by the sword works.

These people are our enemies in war, every bit as much as were the Communists during the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Perhaps more so. When an enemy in war seizes and uses a citizen in a propaganda war, it is necessary for that citizen to state the truth and counter the propaganda ploy lest it work. Were I forced to "convert" in a video, I would do everything in my power to make it known that I had been forced to lie, that I did not believe what I had been made to say, and that the video was nothing but propaganda.

I certainly hope the captives will at least do this. I don't know anything about their religious views, so I cannot assert that they have a religious responsibility.

But I think that considering their status as public figures, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have a bit of a moral responsibility to help counter the perception of this video as a propaganda victory for squalidly barbarous technique of conversion by the sword. I can't make them do that, but if they don't, there may be lingering questions about whether the method works.

Not in my mind, though. Even if their conversion was successful, and even if they refused to renounce Islam, in terms of logic they are two people who speak for no one but themselves.

In terms of propaganda, though, others will always say they speak for "us."

That's always a problem with propaganda.

(And terrorism.)

UPDATE: Mark Steyn sees the press as having sold out to Islam, and argues that Muslims don't see the video as depicting true conversion but as confirmation of "the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade":

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions -- that these men are easier to force into the car than that 16-year-old girl in Sydney was. It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

The least the freed captives could do is to denounce their conversion as false -- in no uncertain terms.

I think some things are worth dying for, and so do the thousands of U.S. soldiers who have laid down their lives in Iraq.

I agree that a society with nothing to die for is already dead. But it also strikes me that a "society" (if it is that) with everything to die for can't wait to die. And when such a society attacks a society like ours, when there's a clear conflict between those who want to live and those who want to die, the goal of the former should be to help the latter acheive theirs.

Again, echoes of Patton:

the object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

Who knows? There might just be a few Muslims who'd rather not be martyrs.

UPDATE: Interesting biography on "death metal" Adam Gadahn here. (Via Michele Malkin.) Not that I'd blame his music, but death metal never much moved me -- to mayhem or jihad.

UPDATE" Pajamas Media has a good roundup on Adam Gadahn, and also notes that (according to this website) converts to Islam are actually reverts:

all people are supposedly born Muslim (according to that faith) and that their conversion is strictly speaking a reversion. They would be reverts, not converts.

Following that logic, it seems to me that if all people are "born Muslim," then all non-Muslims would be apostates.

The last website also denies that there was conversion by the sword. (But see Eric S. Raymond for more.)

(Somehow, I just can't quite understand how the Greeks and the Romans could have been "born Muslim." Silly me!)