June 18, 2008

AlQaeda.com: The Internet as Global Madrassa

Unfortunately Guido Olimpio's new book Al-Qa'idah.com doesn't look like it's going to be published in English any time soon. Olimpio is the terrorism correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. But here are a few highlights from an English language synopsis translation.

I especially like the concept of the internet as Global Madrassa. Why bother going off to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia for Salafi jihadi indoctrination when you are only a few mouse clicks away from learning that it is the individual duty of Muslims to wage holy war against the U.S? A couple of highlights:

This was a school in subversion on the Internet - run from an Italian city, but linked to Baghdad, Kabul, and Algiers. Nobody can yet say how many jihad outposts there arein anonymous rooms in Europe, the Orient, or the United States, or at what rate they are multiplying. This is Al-Qa'idah's virtual and elusive entrenchment....

The new Al-Qa'idah has abandoned couriers and has evolved by making full use of the Internet - a "powerful, swift, universal, and accessible" medium, a vehicle for "virtual connections that can become real." ...

From a letter by Bin Laden to Mullah Omar, intercepted by the Americans in Afghanistan: 90 per cent of the battle will take place in the propaganda field. The Internet is a medium that provides the best guarantees. It is an ideological umbrella for those who will put the teachings into practice, albeit without direct contacts. A meeting place for militants and a forum for seeking recruits. A non- centralized university for indoctrination. A vehicle of "counterinformation" vis-A -vis the Western media. A means of launching threats and keeping the West in a state of constant anxiety. A forum for celebrity martyrs (there are over 3,000 books by jihadists online,) and on the operational plane Islamist hackers gather funds by means of Web scams.

The Internet is a mirror of the new Al-Qa'idah - amorphous, fragmented, and without any fixed hierarchy. The connections between the circulation of ideology and actions are variable. But on 7 April 2005 Hasan Ahmad blew himself up in a Cairo street. He had found instructions for manufacturing bombs on the Internet, followed the teachings of minor ideologues via the Web, and consulted forums devoted to the jihad. Every connection to the Al-Qa'idah galaxy was purely virtual, but four people died.