Jim Harper

Suppressing Terrorism Videos Does No Good

It exalts terrorists and terrorism to try chasing their videos off the Internet, and it doesn’t work. Senator Lieberman’s quest to cleanse the Internet of terrorism has won a battle in a losing war by convincing Google to take down such videos. They can still be found on LiveLeak and can be hosted on any of millions of servers worldwide.

[In his eager anti-Google gafliery ("gadfliery" - the nominative case of the verb "to gadfly," which I just invented), I'm sorry to say that TLF friend Scott Cleland has gotten it wrong.]

The better approach is to treat terrorists as the losers that they are. Their videos do not scare us, but provide us opportunities to observe, comment, and deplore them, perhaps even mocking their foolishness. In this video, at minute 2:18, terrorists appear to be training for the circus. We’ll really fear them when they can fend off lions with a chair.

September 15, 2008 | Comments |

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    What's ironic about this is that if people actually saw what the terrorists do in many of these videos, the public would grow more resolved in wanting to eliminate them--which is Lieberman's ostensible goal here. The propaganda videos are unlikely to be taken seriously in the West and the majority of the industrialized world, but the execution videos are certainly useful for putting things into perspective when false equivocations are drawn (my favorite is the way that feminists often talk about "patriarchal tyranny" in the West and equivocate the treatment of women in the West to that of women in most Islamic societies).

    Nothing put things into perspective for me as to how sick and unjust Muslim culture generally is in its application of Sharia than watching a video taken from either Afghanistan or Iran showing an actual stoning of a woman accused of adultery. Seeing it actually happen in all of its gory mob detail was enough to cast aside any doubts in my mind that there is compatibility between our cultures.
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    Maybe if they had better formers of percussion, they wouldn't have to blow things up just to keep the beat.

    While I'm sure the jihadist version of "GI Joe" has its appeal in some quarters, I'm going to avoid panicking until I see a Larry Lessig-style snappy powerpoint calling the faithful to jihad.

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