An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers

[brokenfingers]

From the New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/us/15net.html?ex=1193025600&en=f360c210c8786a49&ei=5043&partner=EXCITE):

"When Osama bin Laden issued his videotaped message to the American people last month, a young jihad enthusiast went online to help spread the word.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.”

Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq...

Tedious Arabic screeds are reworked into flashy English productions. Recruitment tracts are issued in multiple languages, like a 39-page, electronic, English version of a booklet urging women to join the fight against the West.

There are even online novellas like “Rakan bin Williams,” about a band of Christian European converts who embraced Al Qaeda and “promised God that they will carry the flag of their distant brothers and seek vengeance on the evil doers.”

Militant Islamists are turning grainy car-bombing tapes into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites like YouTube, the online video smorgasbord.

“It is as if you would watch a Hollywood movie,” said Abu Saleh, a 21-year-old German devotee of Al Qaeda videos who visits Internet cafes in Berlin twice a week to get the latest releases. “The Internet has totally changed my view on things.”

[brokenfingers]

I forgot all about this. I knew i shouldn't have made the joke about the writing.

Ok, I'm curious as to what people think about this.

If we are at "war" and Bin Laden and these Islamic Fundamentalists are seeking to destroy our country and way of life, is it okay then to aid and abet the "enemy"?

For some reason, I just can't imagine someone getting away with handing out Nazi literature and spreading Hitler's speeches to help recruit people to his cause during WW2.

Do you think this is a similar thing? Or is it different in your eyes? And if so, why?

[Bird of Prey]

Yes, I do have a problem with it. But I think's a free speech issue.

Now, that said, given the potential horrific ramifications of US recruitment, I would want to make it illegal to show"recruitment" films, meaning those films that are intended to glamourize blowing up Americans. I consider it as revolting and dangerous as say, kiddie porn. But I expect I'm in the minority.

[whistlelock]

Free Speech. Just because you don't agree with what he has to say, doesn't mean you can stop him from saying it.

Of course, if he breaks any laws in the course of his free speech- well, that's a different thing, now isn't it?

[Bird of Prey]

I guess what worries me and where I could find the "illegality" in it is the targeting and recruitment of minors.


The free speech issue is hard for me because we are not completely free speech. Cigarette companies can't advertise on television for the health safety of minors or viewers, and yet cigarettes are legal.

It's murky because I recognize it's a slippery slope, but I think it's already kind of slipping, and in view of how dangerous I perceive the Jihad cult to be, especially toward vulnerable teens, I guess I'd be in favor of reining it in.

[maestrowork]

When does free speech end and treason begin? Am just curious.

[RumpleTumbler]

I support Samir Khan's right to free speech.

If by chance a couple of armed MK-84's were to fall off the rails of a overhead F-16 into his parents home while he was editing his blog I would support that as well.

[brokenfingers]

Another question:

Why is the spreading of information and videos that support killing Americans ok - yet it isn't ok to do the same for, let's say, blacks, women, children etc?

How is this different?

[Bird of Prey]

I think treason is a little more than talking; it's perhaps taking a physical role in the sabotaging your country? Spying, trading in classified information, planting a bomb, telling the enemy where to strike. . .that kind of thing. It's more than advocating; it's taking an active role in your country's defeat? I think?

[benbradley]

I think treason is a little more than talking; it's perhaps taking a physical role in the sabatoging your country? Spying, trading in classified information, planting a bomb, telling the enemy where to strike. . .that kind of thing. It's more than advocating; it's taking an active role in your country's defeat? I think?
I'm not sure myself. I've heard people say Jane Fonda committed treason when she visited Viet Nam during that war (the enemy side, she posed for pictures with enemy troops, visited POW's - the enemy used it for the opportunity to show that POW's were being "treated well"). It's certainly a sleazy thing to do, at best.

But make no mistake about it, there are certainly limits to free speech in the USA. To use the canonical example, the safety of people in a crowded theater trumps the freedom to falsely claim and yell "FIRE!" in such a theater.

[maestrowork]

I know that if you talk of killing the President, it's treason, even if you haven't "done anything." So I am curious about when freedom of speech ends and treason begins, when someone is advocate jihad against America and killing Americans.

No matter... I am sure he'll be watched by all sorts of people from now on...

[Bird of Prey]

I'm not sure myself. I've heard people say Jane Fonda committed treason when she visited Viet Nam during that war (the enemy side, she posed for pictures with enemy troops, visited POW's - the enemy used it for the opportunity to show that POW's were being "treated well"). It's certainly a sleazy thing to do, at best.

But make no mistake about it, there are certainly limits to free speech in the USA. To use the canonical example, the safety of people in a crowded theater trumps the freedom to falsely claim and yell "FIRE!" in such a theater.


The question is, did Fonda actually, actively collaborate with the enemy to defeat her country? I would have to say no. Sympathizing is different than collaborating. But I'm having a different problem with the Jihad videos. If these videos are tools for recruitment and actually achieve the goal of recruiting enemy combatants, does that make their distributor/broadcaster/producer treasonous?

It depends on where I would place the responsibility really: on the recruiter or the recruitee?

[Jean Marie]

Advocating jihad against America, Ray, is treason.

[Cassiopeia]

If I remember my American history lectures well, it was first established in George Washington's day that if you said anything negative, demeaning, slanderous or libelous about the President of the US, it was considered treasonous and you were put to death for it.

[Bird of Prey]

Sounds like a monarchy!! Well God knows that's not the case today. Lol. And honestly, I don't know if that was true.

But regarding today, I don't think anybody can threaten him or advocate harm to him without being "looked into."

I think that's about it.

[Cassiopeia]

Sounds like a monarchy!! Well God knows that's not the case today. Lol. And honestly, I don't know if that was true.

But regarding today, I don't think anybody can threaten him or advocate harm to him without being "looked into."

I think that's about it.It was from a class lecture. The story told was one of a person who mentioned in a letter to a family member that he didn't like the President or his actions and he was hauled into jail for it.

What I want to know is who ratted him out? I don't remember what the instructor said but you know..the mind grows old and you forget the details. :)

[Bird of Prey]

It was from a class lecture. The story told was one of a person who mentioned in a letter to a family member that he didn't like the President or his actions and he was hauled into jail for it.

What I want to know is who ratted him out? I don't remember what the instructor said but you know..the mind grows old and you forget the details. :)


Maybe it was during the Whiskey Rebellion, you know, an intercepted letter. . . .

[Cassiopeia]

Maybe it was during the Whiskey Rebellion, you know, an intercepted letter. . . .All I know is I remember thinking, if we aren't careful things are going to get like that under the current administration.

OH MY GOSH! JOEY! get me out of here, I am talking in politics! :D

*he sends me reps telling me not to be in here* ;)

[Haggis]

If I remember my American history lectures well, it was first established in George Washington's day that if you said anything negative, demeaning, slanderous or libelous about the President of the US, it was considered treasonous and you were put to death for it.

I'm thinking that might have been John Adams, and what you're referring to might have been the Alien and Sedition Act, repealed when (I believe) he was still in office.

[Bird of Prey]

All I know is I remember thinking, if we aren't careful things are going to get like that under the current administration.

OH MY GOSH! JOEY! get me out of here, I am talking in politics! :D




LOL!! Yep, I know what you mean. . . .That's a pretty scary administration.

And tell Joey it's O.K!!

[plnelson]

Free Speech. Just because you don't agree with what he has to say, doesn't mean you can stop him from saying it.


Well . . .
It's battling Constitutional clauses. First Amendment -versus Article 3, Section 3.

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;. . .
-versus -
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort

This is where the Conservatives have trouble, because Conservative legal scholars deny the applicability of precedent but, when you have two competing clauses in the same Constitution, precedent is the only way to settle it.

I'm willing to accept the idea that it's treason based on "giving them Aid and Comfort" as long as we also bring Bush up on treason charges based on the way his idiotic policies have acted as a giant recruiting poster for terrorists, the way the chaos he's created in Iraq has created a great breeding and training ground for terrorists, and the way the his policies have stretched the US military so thin and weakened it that we no longer have the resources to respond to a genuine threat requiring major ground resources, should one emerge.

Bush has done far more damage to the US than some crackpot video jihadist