The Flip Side of the Arab Spring

MIT ^ | October 20, 2105 | Jason Pontin

[lbryce]

Here are some English-language tweets from jihadis fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS: “I just noticed our martyred brother r.a. had a tumblr (I know, how could I have missed it). Make sure to check it out.” And: “This Syrian guy next 2 me (AbuUbayadah) is so stoked for our op he almost shot his foot off. Come on bro—safety 1st. :p” And: “Put the chicken wings down n come to jihad bro.”

In “Fighting ISIS Online,” MIT Technology Review’s senior writer, David Talbot, describes what a Google policy director has called the “viral moment on social media” that ISIS is enjoying. Talbot reviews the early and small-scale counter-efforts designed to “make one-on-one contact online with the people absorbing content from ISIS and other extremist groups and becoming radicalized.” He writes of a “decentralized” social-media campaign by ISIS, supported by sympathizers in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, who repost ISIS’s gruesome videos or produce videos in their own languages that inflame local tribal and national grievances in an effort to join their regions to the self-declared caliphate. The reason we care about ISIS’s social-media campaign is that it has been an animating force in recruiting about 25,000 people to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least 4,500 of them from Europe and North America. Social media helped create an army that established a new state. ISIS’s viral moment recalls another recent historical moment in the Middle East when a movement was called into being by social media. In 2011, MIT Technology Review sent John ­Pollock to Egypt and Tunisia to report on the Arab Spring. At the time, journalists, new-media critics, and academics were engaged in an acrimonious debate about whether social media had been instrumental in the

[lbryce]

That we know ISIS uses social media so well because it's recruits have used it all their lives and know how to make the most of it doesn't offer any comfort in the manner in which they are such a threat to us. I doubt the leaders of yesteryear, Churchill, would sit idly by and not try to prevent them from using it. BTW: Why are we not preventing them from its access? Because it's so difficult to do, doing so would violate the principles of democracy we cherish so fundamentally? Another thing, somebody really should come up with some alternative to Arab Spring. Maybe in the beginning the Arab attitude offered the hope that it would become less radical, Obama isn't Arab) but that lasted a day and a half. Arab Spring is so cynical,so patronizing, even Friedman from the Times might agree.

[Paladin2]

So, MIT is down with ISIS?

Toast they are wrt contributions.

[butlerweave]

Obama got a Bonus from Arab Spring , an invasion of Europe

[Lucy Hamilton]

Simple question.

Why hasn’t Twitter and Facebook etc already shut their accounts down?

If anyone posts anything deemed racist, they soon get their accounts shut down.

[CharlesOConnell]

Robert R Reilly, former VOA Director during Operation Iraqi Freedom & author of Closing of the Muslim Mind How Intellectual Suicide Created the Islamist Crisis, sets several principles.

If you’re going to engage in a war of ideas:

1) Understand your opponents’ ideas.

2) Have an idea yourself.

Focusing on #1 while ignoring #2 is essentially futile.

Our schools have hypnotized our people with multiculturalism, throwing out some of the acme of human thought with the Dead White Males.

If they had been Dead African Females, the ideas would have been thrown out on the trash heap with some other moronic slogan.

The point was to destroy civilization and culture so a pernicious anti intellectual elite could shake down society.

Hence what you see all around you now.

When the Muslim hordes sweep over civilization, what can they pick out of the ruins we’ve left them?