It came to my attention not long ago that Marshall McLuhan
thought of my writing style as being the most expressive of the theory he was
espousing, mainly that the “Medium is the Message.” He would have liked to communicate
with me and invite me to do some work with him, except that the Jews decreed
this could not be done because my success will mean bad news for the Jewish
causes. I must be kept out of the limelight, they said, and so I was till the
advent of the internet which changed all that.
I believe this gives me the right to take the McLuhan theory
a step further and say that the medium can become the message then become the
medium again. To do this, I must first explain how I understand: “The Medium is
the Message.” To help me remember the essence of the theory, I boiled it down
to the following: There are many ways to convey a message, each way being a
medium. There is the spoken way, the written way, the radio medium, the
television medium, the film, the theater, the music, the dance … and so on.
Delivering a message using anyone of those mediums, shapes the message so
differently from its original intent – and doing it in each of the medium's
ways – it can be said that the medium has become the message.
Now, given the rash of copycat mass killings in schools and
other public places in America ,
and given the ongoing propaganda war between the Islamic State and the Jewish
State … which, after all, has near total monopoly on the English mediums
worldwide – I began to wonder if McLuhan's theory did not need to be updated. I
saw the individual committing the crime as being a medium onto himself,
delivering a message to be copycatted, not using words to express his thoughts,
but by committing the heinous act itself. To say the same thing in the language
of the proverbial: such acts speak for themselves.
Another layer was added to that view when acts were
committed by what were said to be new converts to Islam. I wondered if these
people became monsters because they converted to Islam, or they were monsters
to begin with, and looked for a way to express their monstrosity in a
spectacular way. They may have thought that going on a shooting spree would
give them the notoriety they crave, but they will be forgotten in a day or two.
If, however, they were to commit an act considered to be terror, they will gain
a worldwide notoriety. They may even be considered martyrs by people half way
around the globe, and their story will have a longer shelf-life than that of a
lone gunman who begs the police to shoot him. They chose to be martyred.
After that came one more layer to be added to the theory
that was growing in my head. It appeared as if it had come out of nowhere when
every broadcaster I watched stressed the point that the perpetrator was a
convert to Islam. Whether or not they knew what they were doing, these
broadcasters had created something new. They were telling everyone who may be
unhappy with his lot in life that he need not die an inglorious death and be
forgotten. He can be a part of something big by converting to Islam and
carrying out any act he can pull off, knowing that it will take on a worldwide
dimension for being considered an act of terror by virtue of it being linked to
Islam.