New approach in radical propaganda

20/12/2007 Written by minor

It is no secret, that rad­i­cals and ter­ror­ists are using dif­fer­ent approaches to get new mem­bers and sup­port­ers. One of them is also Web and rad­i­cal web­sites and forums. Such web­sites pro­vide con­tent, that is intended to spread the ideas among vis­i­tors.

Cre­ators of this con­tent are mostly anony­mous per­sons, but now the vis­i­tors have a pos­si­bil­ity to place ques­tions to real per­son, for some — their icon: Ayman al-​Zawahiri, Guardian informed. Media arm of al-​Qaida — Al-​Sahab said, that Zawahiri would answer the ques­tions as much as he is able.

Ques­tions should be brief and focused and style of this Q&A ses­sion is described as “open meet­ing”. Adam Rais­man of the SITE insti­tute in Wash­ing­ton said, even most of these forums are mon­i­tored by intel­li­gence agen­cies and spe­cial orga­ni­za­tions, they were flooded with questions.

Such approach is a sign, that war pro­pa­ganda con­tin­ues. But also so called “e-​jihad” groups are try­ing to recruit skilled hack­ers to pro­tect jihadist web­sites against attacks from another attack­ers. Dan­cho Danchev in his blog stated, that none of these are known to have any kind of direct rela­tion­ships with ter­ror­ist groups, there­fore they should be con­sid­ered as ter­ror­ist sym­pa­thiz­ers.

Any­way, pres­ence of these groups should not be for­got­ten. Rad­i­cals under­stood the poten­tial power of the Inter­net in spread­ing their ideas. Now another log­i­cal step would be devel­op­ment of rad­i­cal forces aim­ing on dig­i­tal tar­gets. Their power there­fore can’t be under­es­ti­mated.