Saudi Gazette runs a suite of articles focusing on how the Internet is being used by radicals to promote their ideology, teach their methodology, and recruit new members. The articles are built around a TV program that brought four extremist web masters to the fore as they explained how they developed their sites to bring war against the Saudi government.

The problem is that the Internet can be very seductive. Without any obvious or built-in fact-checking, all sorts of nonsense can be put forth as ‘the truth’ and there will be those convinced by that nonsense. This phenomenon is not restricted to Arabs, Muslims, or Saudis, of course; we see it (we can hardly avoid seeing it) daily in manifold websites promoting idiocies from conspiracy theories, to Islamophobia, to the latest schemes to a) get rich, b) make body parts bigger, c) cure all our aches and pains. It’s bad enough that fools are parted from their money—the ‘Nigerian scam’, that purports someone needs held to recover huge sums of money, if only you give them your banking information and ID results in the loss of millions of dollars every year, amazingly enough. It’s far worse, though, when minds are corrupted with lies and semi-truths, resulting in distrust of one’s own society and government. On-line ‘movements’ like the ‘9/11 Truthers’ are no different from their earlier incarnations like the John Birch Society or those who are constantly looking over their shoulders for ‘black helicopters’. When the lunacy moves from merely talking about it to taking violent action, however, an important threshold has been passed.

I think TV programs like this, and the attendant media coverage, are useful. They may not stop the problem, but they can help dissuade the fence-sitters, the not-yet-committed, from making mistakes from which recovery is painful and expensive in many dimensions.

I’d suggest that the government programs used to educate the population take up a bit of ridicule in its approach. It’s one thing to empathize with a dim person who is seduced into bad choices. It’s quite another thing to make them and their ideologies laughing stocks. I’ve found that humiliation is a powerful teacher.

Dangerous online traps set by radicals

RIYADH – Extremist websites are an important media tool for radical groups around the world enabling them to recruit new members and provide training on how to manufacture explosives, blow up targets, carry out suicide operations, and make explosive belts.

Prominent extremist websites include “Al-Sahab”, the media arm of the Al-Qaeda network, and its offshoot, “the Islamic State in Iraq,” which consists of a large number of terrorist groups operating throughout Iraq. The sites have created a so-called “Ministry of Information” with which the sites “Al-Furqan” and “Al-Fajr” are affiliated.

There are also numerous independent media companies serving these groups, such as, the International Islamic Media Front, which created the “Media Jihad Brigades,” and the “World News Network” which relays messages to terrorist networks, including Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq (hosted by “Sitegenie LLC Company in Iraq” and located in the US state of Minnesota), and a number of terrorist organizations in Iraq, such as, the “Ansar Al-Sunnah” group.

A number of extremist websites dedicate special sections to the Jihadist media companies, including Al-Nasrah forum affiliated with the International Islamic Media Front hosted by Select Solutions LLC in the state of Texas, the Jihadist Iraqi Militant Group hosted by Layered Technologies Inc. in Texas, the Mujahidin Army Group hosted by Network Operations Center Inc. in Pennsylvania, the supporters of the Jihad site in Iraq hosted by Electric Lightwave Company in Washington, and, the most visited site, Al-Hesbah hosted by Realweb Host Company in Texas.
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The Italian news agency AKI also reports on the TV program: Terrorism: Al-Qaeda draws new recruits via Internet