] A militant group has threatened to kill three Italian
] hostages unless their countrymen demonstrate against the
] presence of Italian troops in Iraq, according to a video
] aired on an Arabic news channel.

This is about the dumbest thing that I've ever heard. It would be good for the blooper reel if it wasn't for the fact that people's lives are at stake. What is the point of a protest rally when it is held under duress? It means nothing and will have no political impact.

These guys are either dumb, or something got lost here in the translation (maybe intentionally).

The government certainly won't organize a protest. It will be interesting to see if protests occur. Its possible that some people won't get the memo that you don't comply with requests like this. Will the ensuing demonstation actually satisfy the kidnappers? Who knows?

A much more interesting strategy would have been to kidnap people during election time and then demand that people vote a particular way or you'll kill the hostages. Maybe this is a trial run for such an attack.

Usually they'd prevent such a message from getting to the media, but under these circumstances Al'J might run it and the domestic media wouldn't be able to keep it bottled up. You could also end run that by posting your demand broadly on the internet... Spam it...

The only way to manage a situation like that is to launch a strong multi-partisan domestic cultural response that the terrorist demands ought to be ignored by the voters and then hope people come through. Things could get really really ugly if one of the domestic parties tried to take advantage of the situation...

(U:) Probably the point of this is not to influence the west, but to demonstrate to gullible people in the middle east that they terrorists have influenced the west.

] A militant group has threatened to kill three Italian
] hostages unless their countrymen demonstrate against the
] presence of Italian troops in Iraq, according to a video
] aired on an Arabic news channel.

[ This is new to me, though perhaps others can refute... i've never before seen hostage takers issue demands to the public at large like this. Certainly it's common enough to take prisoners and then demand that the nation withdraw their support, etc. etc., but that's directed at governments, at the leaders. It seems like a unique capability of the current media centric world that these people can demand action of the entire nation of Italy, directly.

Will the government of Italy consider a demonstration (if the people acquiese) valid? Will it carry more weight than the terrorists' previous demands directly to the government? Can people, large numbers of them, be motivated in this way? -k]