A specter is haunted the internet: Web-savvy terrorists, a/k/a e-Qaeda.
This post-9-11 sort of media fear-frenzy about cyberjihad, Al-Qaeda online, the terror Web, usually means... Web sites with Islamicist content, some promoting a person's legal defense, even including (gasp) discussion boards.
This sort of discourse increasingly casts web publication in military terms. The e-Qaeda piece describes "Web terrorism" as "an arms race," which is a curious thing, given the absence of an opponent (unless we should infer that Western civilization is meant, in which case the jihadists are a bit behind, even in lame Flash design. The discourse sometimes shift agency to the internet itself, sort of:
the movement as primarily driven today by "ideology and the Internet."
It's obvious, but worth noting that this sentiment is useful in ginning up support for censorship, calls for which are evident in every alarmist piece on the subject.
And this rhetorical approach typically misses most of the key issues concerning Islamicism and cyberspace. What are the effects of globally available Islamicist content, given the context of censoring governments, the policing nature of states (especially those on a war footing), the rise of effective Web filtering, the explosive growth of mobile technologies? Writings by leading Islamicist thinker Sayyid Qutb used to difficult to find, banned and censored, available as Islamicist samizdat. The Web is generous, now, and it's easy to grab Milestones or sections from Shade of the Quran. At a different level, such cyberjihad articles usually ignore the gender implications of virtual communities available to Islamic women; the casts of characters in this discourse are uniformly male.
Did you say "castes" of characters?
Posted by: Gardner | March 29, 2006 at 07:55