An insightful and informative piece on countering the Internet jihad from Joshua Sinai of The Analysis Corporation in The Washington Times (thanks to Sr. Soph):
The Internet has become the "seductive hypermedia" for radical Islamic terrorists, with official and unofficial Web sites, forums and chatrooms that appeal to supporters worldwide. Most Web sites are intended to advance a group's propaganda to increase their supporting audience, while some have operational intentions. But how do we defeat such terrorism in cyberspace?An eclectic group of international experts in terrorist use of the Internet and graphic design specialists met recently in Israel's southern resort city of Eilat to formulate a comprehensive response campaign that deserves wide attention.
As explained by Gabriel Weimann, of Israel's Haifa University, terrorists "narrow-cast" their messages to "trap" selected audiences of adherents. Taking this further, Boaz Ganor, of the Israeli Interdisciplinary Center, showed how the "captured" adherents are then indoctrinated into radicalization by emphasizing a problem, such as threats posed by a common enemy or humiliation suffered by Muslims at the hands of their adversaries. Emphasizing the religious obligation of Muslims to confront their enemies and the challenge to their faith is the common denominator that binds the audience into their new virtual community. Segments of this community are then activated into a variety of activities on behalf of the terrorist group, such as fund-raising, recruitment, training and warfare.
The different types of terrorist activities on the Internet require appropriately differentiated responses. As outlined by Mr. Weimann, one such response is based on what he terms a "MUD" approach (Monitoring, Using and Disrupting).
c First, terrorist Web sites need to be monitored to learn about their mindsets, motives, persuasive "buzzwords," audiences, operational plans and potential targets for attack. These sites will also reveal whom they consider to be their political and religious authorities, as well as moderate religious clerics they regard as particularly threatening. Monitoring also reveals their inner debates and disputes.
c Second, counterterrorism organizations need to "use" the terrorist Web sites to identify and locate their propagandists, chat room discussion moderators, Internet service provider (ISP) hosts, operatives and participating members.
c Third, terrorist Web sites need to be "disrupted" through negative and positive means. In a negative "influence" campaign, sites can be infected with viruses and worms to destroy them, or kept "alive" while flooding them with false technical information about weapons systems, circulating rumors to create doubt about the reputation and credibility of terrorist leaders, or inserting conflicting messages into discussion forums to confuse operatives and their supporters. In a more positive approach, alternative narratives can be inserted into these Web sites to demonstrate the negative results of terrorism or, to potential suicide bombers, to suggest the benefits of the "value of life" versus the self-destructiveness of the "culture of death and martyrdom."
That last one may be a bit quixotic, but I suppose it's worth a try. Anyway, read it all.
Islam’s war against it’s own people
Here is a good way to fight the internet Jihad.
Virtually all the Muslim’s resentment of the West is driven by the Palestinian issue.
Muslims need to understand that Islam has been waging a war against it’s own people and that in the last fifty years more Muslims have been killed by other Muslims than have been killed by the Israelis.
This is a fact that many leftists such as George Galloway and Robert Fisk are oblivious to.
I recently read a good article on this by Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini on this very issue.
Here are my estimates for the number of people killed in inter-Mulsim conflicts as opposed to the Arab-Israeli conflict
Ben Dror Yemini estimates that 60,000 Arabs have been killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He doesn’t really go into the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when an estimated 17,000 Palestinan-Lebanese were killed. However, the total number of Arabs killed in the conflict is probably not much higher, around a 100,000 maximum figure.
The Arab-Islamic obsession with the conflict is largely due to symbolism, that and of course their religion which teaches them to hate Jews.
Compare these figures with this.
Algeria: 150,000 people killed in civil war
The Sudan: possibly 2 million killed in civil war
Bangladesh: In 1971 the Pakastani army killed between 1 to 3 million people, many civilians in attempt to crush Bengali independence movement in what was then East Pakistan
Indonesia: In 1966 General Suharto overthrew President Sukarno, initiating a bloody purge of communist opponents. Estimates of the number killed by Suharto vary between 0.5 to 3 million. His regime also invaded East Timor killing a third of the population (200,000).
Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s regime killed approximately 180,000 kurds in internal oppression and was largely responsible for the Iran-Iraq war which killed 1.4 million people. Some historians argue that the real reason the Iran-Iraq war happened was that the Iranian revolution triggered hopes, in the Shia regions of Iraq, for greater autonomy. In order to crush this movement at it’s source, Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of Iran.
Ben Dror Yemini goes into all these issues in much more depth.
You can read his article here.
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/483/521.html
Even if the Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation you can make a good case for this, arguing, with good reason, that the number of Palestinians killed would be much higher if they lived under the occupation of an Arab-Islamic army.
When will the Muslims develop some sober self-criticism?
I really like this "MUD" concept. Where do I sign up?
Psy-ops is the way to go, and it can be phenomenally successful in defeating these cro magnons;
One would think that now that George Tenet is no longer in charge of the CIA, the West now has an opportunity to use one of its premiere institutions to help us effect victory.
One would think that one of the best ways to screw up and enervate a jihadi is to get into his mind and work it.
Islam is an ideology or hate, deception and aggression. To allow it incursion into the West is madness.To not take advantage of its weaknesses is folly,
The psy-ops crew can be assembled like the writers for Saturday night live, brainstorm for the most effective plays, and impement them as well as monitor their effectiveness.
(It would be a field day in employment for our bloggers)
Funny how the West is constantly attacked on all levels by the "peaceful ones"-anything Western must be bad by their statndards. Yet here they use that Western tool called the Internet. Does this mean they're violating the Koran in some way? If so, somebody needs to issue a deadly fatwa against these blasphemers!
Thank you for this very interesting News clip. I still don't see how these measures are going to help us fight Jihadis spreding their hate on YouTube. I, for example, have sent eMails to YouTube requesting the removal of certain users who share videos from Alqaeda in Iraq or Chechen terrorists and to give their IP adress and any relevant data to the authorities, yet nothing happens. The only effective way, till now, is to get as many friends as possible to flag the user and his videos. Any Ideas?
I'd like to know what gives with You Tube (take nothing for granted).
You tube gives Jihadi's free reign, but censors anything that the muslims take exception to.
That aside, the internet Jihad takes many forms, of note is their ability to grab hold of free speech forums, and dominate it with their lies and obfuscations.
I am thinking of Liberty Forum
Besides a plethora of lying and obfuscating muslims, the forum is largely populated by right wing, (that is homophobic, misogynistic, anti abortion, family values cultural warriors, especially Catholics who are also antisemitic err antizionist then again most converts to Islam were Catholic..must be something there..family values, patriarchy and misogyny perhaps?
Yhere have been rumours for years that there are some versions of the "Anarchist Cookbook" circulating that have been "doctored" by the CIA to make the instructions potentially lethal to anyone who tries to make explosives and bombs.
I guess this approach would work well for any bombmaking and other instructions used by the terrorists - even if the instructions aren't incorrect - just a few instances of unintended consequences would be enough to destroy the trust that the potential terrorists have in the information they recieve.
Odyessus
Great post!
Just the kind of ammunition I need to defend myself from the chattering classes,as I so often do.
Robert should post this on the frontpage.
Regards.