Tom Friedman resurrects the e-Qaeda meme with gusto, warning us about jihad.com. Or Virtual Afghanistan (TM).
It's a weird article, with strange lunges and phrases, odd even for Friedman. For example,
Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things...
That's a fun explanation of the Civil War, as a kind of kindergarten lesson. But note the exhortation to the Muslim world to, um, have a giant, bloody, sustained civil war: "Islam needs the same civil war." How appealing! "Thanks, Tom," murmur grateful Muslims around the world.
Or,
A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.
(Or we ask them to have a civil war.) Does that include the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Or the various Muslim-majority allies (Turkey, Egypt, etc) who seem to have their own ideas? Or Muslims in the US. Who is this "we", actually, doing all of this? And did objectifying Muslims and Arabs perhaps - maybe - just maybe - predate 2001? That's quite a broad brush, Tom. And what happened to the internet by that point in your article?
In fact, the internet vanishes from the editorial's second half entirely, sneaking back in only in the putative conclusion. The call for Muslims to have a civil war seems to be an offline one, although it's hard to tell.
Earlier, Friedman calls for "a parallel surge — by Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders — against those who promote violent jihadism... online in the Virtual Afghanistan. " What does this look like, besides imitating the 1860s? Is Friedman calling for increased censorship, or creating Arab state cybersecurity forces, or taking down servers hosting jihadi content, or what? It's impossible to tell, but fun to guess at.
The whole thing begins with the stern-faced exhortation "Let’s not fool ourselves." Oh, c'mon, let's!
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