January 31, 2005
Baghdad (APUPI) For the second time in less than three months, a popular media campaign designed to influence voting patterns has proven impotent, as millions of Iraqis refused to heed heart-felt calls to avoid exercising their franchise this past weekend.
Roughly modeled after the “Vote Or Die!” campaign of hip-hop empresario P. Diddy last fall, like that effort, Musab al “DeCapitan” Zarqawi’s campaign to suppress the vote in Iraq seems to have had little effect on voter turnout.
With the thrilling and enervating slogan “Vote And Die!,” “DeCapitan” hoped that he could arouse the incipient Iraqi voters, most of whom had never voted before, from their pro-democracy lethargy, and get them out to support his insurgency by continuing to not vote. He was relying on his popularity among former regime supporters and enthusiasts of Al Qaeda, the most recent fad among the young, to keep people of all ages from the polls.
“Our theory was that there was nothing being wrong with P. Diddy’s campaign, except that he didn’t explain the process, and wasn’t graphic enough in the descriptions of exactly how the dying was to be occurring,” explained Qarbom al Qarblewi, an al Zarqawi spokesman. “They weren’t learning until after the election how fatal this non-voting could be, when it was too late.”
He went on to describe the differences between the two campaigns: “In infidel America, you had ‘Rock the Vote.’ In Iraq we had a campaign called ‘Stone the Voter,’ in which we promised every infidel with a blue finger who was supporting an unIslamic democracy that they would be buried up to their necks and have stones hurled at their heads until they were dead.”
Other ads sponsored by the campaign described beheadings, car bombings, and shootings of anyone who attempted to go out to a voting location. There were even warnings about the deadly nature of blue ink.
But it was all for naught, as the voters turned out in droves, in apparent indifference to the imploring from the charismatic murderer.
Perhaps the most puzzling feature of the failure was that it occurred in the face of so much publicity. The campaign was heavily covered not just by the local media, such as Al Jazeera and the Arab press, but also by the mainstream media of the US, including CNN, Fox and the major networks. They broadcast the al Zarqawi threats on an almost nightly basis, with interviews of enthusiastic non-voters, who swore that they would not be going to the polls out of fear for their lives.
“Unlike P. Diddy, we could not get the support of Senator Clinton for our campaign, but we did get much support from other famous and popular American celebrities, like Michael Moore, as well as locals like Osama bin Laden,” explained al Qarblewi. “We’re very disappointed, and just can’t understand why we couldn’t get the message out.”