Internet jihad update from the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
Technology has created a virtual sanctuary that makes terrorist training camps obsolete, analysts tell Paul McGeough.ABU Baraq and Abu Abdullah are insurgency foot soldiers on the front line in Iraq. But they are also becoming cyber warriors in a dot.com jihad. We meet in a private home in the suburbs of Baghdad. The fighters sit on an ornate sofa, explaining their cell leader's reluctant embrace of the insurgency's most sophisticated weapon - a powerful web-driven media campaign.
"Did you see us on Al-Jazeera two nights ago?" asks Abu Baraq. "We attacked an American Humvee."
Abu Abdullah outlines their late inclusion in the jihadis' burgeoning global propaganda drive: "Our leader used to object to taking the digicam on operations because he saw it as a security risk. But now we record everything because the media are captives of foreign governments. The camera lets us tell the world what we are doing."
But the recordings are not just for TV. In the 4½ years since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, there has been a global explosion in terrorism-associated websites, message boards and chat rooms, enabling terrorists and their sympathisers to bypass the filters of the mass media and to deliver their message direct to target audiences - unqualified and unadulterated.
When Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at Haifa University in Israel, decided to monitor the web in the late 1990s, he found a dozen terrorist-related sites. Now he monitors more than 4500.
Rita Katz, the director of the SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities) Institute in Washington, says new websites pop up so fast that it is no longer possible to count them.
Loaded as much from caves as cafes around the world, these websites have become what Israeli analyst Reuven Paz describes as "an open university for jihad". They are used to inform, instruct and indoctrinate, which is why Paz is troubled by a new shift as the terrorists' cyber campaign goes multilingual. "Just two or three weeks ago about 150 announcements by al-Qaeda in Iraq were translated into French and now they are popping up more frequently in English and Italian too," he says.
"an open university for jihad".
But Hey! Let's (Google and Yahoo) shut down sites with Cartoons on them.
The internet is a can be compared to a two edged sword, both for good and evil. the good part l think is best and it informs us of the evil nature of islam with such sites as this one. you have a wealth of information to arm youself against the islamofacists and liberal wiennie dhummi, and occaisional stupid conservative.
All technological advances have come from the non-Muslim world, but are put to use, against that very world, by Muslims who do not "hate the modern world" but rather, as they have been instructed by their texts, and those who know those texts best, to hate the Infidels. The full message has not changed. The ability to get that full message out, to the most remote pious villagers, whose Islam may have consisted largely of the rituals of the Five Pillars, is now greatly enhanced. And the ability to send the message to fellow Believers, now settled behind enemy lines, that is in the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels, has also greatly improved. Just as more advanced technology makes it easier for Muslims deep in Western Europe or the United States, as they claim the benefits in Europe of a disastrously generous and careless welfare state that is supporting huge numbers of Muslims at the expense of Infidel taxpayers, that is having those who wish those Infidels ill, and worse, supported by those very people who wish that ill (and worse), so it is now possible for people to live lives totally alien to, antipathetic to, the world in which they live and seem to inhabit.
Imagine someone who can now stay in touch, daily, with relatives in Yemen or Morocco. Someone whose source of news and of a world-view is Al-Jazeera (which apparently has 180,000 subscribers in the U.S. alone), with its constant hysterical anti-Infidel refrains and whipping u of anti-American, antisemitic, generally anti-Infidel attitudes. Not quite as bad as al-Manar, nor the Saudi media, but sufficiently bad, and mad, and dangerous to know.
Unless the governments of the Westeern world recognize this appropriation of Western technology as a threat to their own peoples and their own existence, and harness the talents of those who -- like hackers -- can help weaken the exploitation, by those conducting Jihad, of the weapons or instruments that the West itself has invented and stupidly allowed to be acquired by Muslims (and among those subjects that not ought to be taught to students from Muslim countries, along with nuclear physics, biology, chemistry, any advanced training in computers ought to be considered a subject that the Western or larger Infidel world has a perfect right to restrict. It is not an answer, for there are many ways for those bent on exploiting computers and the Internet for the purpooses of Jihad to still do so, but it makes things more difficult.
And where is the army of Infidel hackers, not merely approved of, but given official sanction and jobs by Infidel governments, to do what they enjoy doing, but in the service of their countries and their civilization? Choose them carefully, discuss with them the problem, then support them. They are at least as important as those "boots on the ground" in Ramadi or Fallujah.
Google, Yahoo and MSN do a good job of indexing and listing all sorts of websites that are harmful to our society - especially sites that advocate hate and violence. All of this inspite of Google's supposed theme of "do no evil".
I'm surprised that no one has called Google on their appalling case of hypocrisy here.
Google's stock is plummeting since their capitulation to the Chinese censorship agreement which they signed to merely try to make more money, bloody or not. Looks like shameless greed backfired on them
I haven't used their search engine since that squalid, anti-freedom deal was struck.
(There are other Search engines just as useful... one even with that name.)
Does the Jihad Online University's diploma look suspiciously like a stick of dynamite?
Ramsey Clark and Al Gore must be vying to be the first Commencement(al) speaker.
Why can't all these hackers target all the sheethead sites and infect every virus and worm possible? Let's start our own Jihad against Jihad? Got a mosque?? Well start burning em down guys as it's time for some genuine Charles Bronson revenge. You don't like Western freedoms but live here, time to pack em up and go back to your precave countries. Time to Lock and Load.
If this was anything like Phoenix Universities online education opportunities we are all in for a lot of unwanted solicitations.
The fall of the Roman Empire was no doubt facilitated by the advanced roads that led to its capital. The barbarian invaders were able to utilize them to their great benefit. We must be careful that the modern day huns, those that worship the barbarian pedophile, do not utilize the information highway in a similar way.
Hugh-
I've been emailing this same "Employ the hacker-oriented game-playing obsessive compulsive American 'yoot' against our enemies!" to the whitehouse, and senators, reps, etc., over and over.
In the late 50's, when threatened by Sputnik, our government immediately boosted research and funded a renewed science curriculum. Likewise, we now need an anti-cyber-Jihad founded on the quickest keyers and most devious ISP topplers on our side. To hunt down, cripple, erase, infiltrate and counteract the online dissemination of the digital Islamic Imperialism.
Call it: "The Caliphate Reloaded" Program.
I get pale replies from representatives about this need, and mild mouthings of agreement from their underlings. But I keep at it. And advise all to join in this press for the utilization of our native, wasted talent pool... now idly killing virtual enemies in endless "Doom's", "Carjack 2000's", "Myst's" and "Laura Croft's" ad absurdum.
There are real games to be played.
The Great Game.
But our leaders are virtually dithering while our real Rome is being wormed away.
We have the hungry hackers. The food is waiting. But someone has to fund them, aim them and give a few medals when the jihadis on the web crash and burn.
Pythagoras' solution:
Explode Electromagnetic Pulse weapons over the airspace of ALL Islamic countries. That should more or less permanently black out these nations (at a critical time when they are massing to attack the non-Islamic countries) and reduce them to a technological level of about 2000 years back--and isn't what these guys want anyway???
Without elecrical power these internet sites would IMMEDIATELY become unavailable to Islamic jihadist masses.
I say we do it. For real. ASAP.