For decades, the United States has allowed terrorist organizations to frame America’s image for a vulnerable portion of the Muslim world. These terrorists have done a masterful job of making sure their audience knows all about the “evil” that is America:  The brutal, wealthy bully that uses power, might and military strength to repress Muslims around the world. Naturally, the terrorists are the good guys who fight bravely and unselfishly to protect Islam and Muslims around the world.

Terrorists have achieved great success with their America is Evil narrative using Information Warfare, or “using truth, intelligence, propaganda, psychological warfare, and media in a unified effort to control the way an enemy’s own ideology or policies are perceived by the global public.” They base their storylines on half-truths or outright lies, then fill in the blanks with America’s actual failures – like the catastrophes of U.S. waterboarding and the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion (a fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for anti-Semitism in the early 20th century) and the 9/11 Truth movement (a conspiracy theory that disputes the conventional wisdom of the 9/11 accounts, specifically the part where al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and Twin Towers) are exploited mightily.

Terrorists wage their propaganda war by using everything from CDs to television to radio. Now they have the enormous benefit of the Internet, which gives them the opportunity to reach into unlimited parts of the world. It’s imperative we fight back – in real time – and reframe this highly damaging, globally destructive narrative.