Online Library

On Tuesday, December 6, 2011 the Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence will hold a hearing entitled “Jihadist Use of Social Media – How to Prevent Terrorism and Preserve Innovation.”

Global Terrorism and New Media carefully examines the content of terrorist websites and extremist television programming to provide a comprehensive look at how terrorist groups use new media today.

Based partly on a content analysis of discussion boards and forums, the authors share their findings on how terrorism 1.0 is migrating to 2.0 where the interactive nature of new media is used to build virtual organization and community. Although the creative use of social networking tools such as Facebook may advance the reach of terrorist groups, the impact of their use of new media remains uncertain. The book pays particular attention to terrorist media efforts directed at women and children, which are evidence of the long-term strategy that some terrorist organizations have adopted, and the relationship between terrorists’ media presence and actual terrorist activity. This volume also looks at the future of terrorism online and analyzes lessons learned from counterterrorism strategies.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, media and communication studies, security studies and political science.

This paper explores the uses of YouTube by Uyghur nationalist movement activists and studies various ideological codes used by different communities to promote their messages. It argues that several ideological codes are produced in order to challenge the dominant ideologies promoted by the Chinese government, which create a ground for Uyghur ‘imagined solidarity’ across physical borders. Analysis of the production of audio-visual messages by the dispersed ethnic group provides an important window into how ethnic identity is forged by means of Web 2.0.

This article deals with the online activism of Abu Jandal al-Azdi, one of the main ideologues of the now-defunct Saudi version of Al-Qa‘ida on the Arabian Peninsula (QAP), whose writings have been all but neglected in publications on this organisation. While rightly seen as only a mediocre religious scholar, I contend that al-Azdi is nevertheless an important ideologue for two reasons: firstly, his religious university education combined with his internet skills propelled him to a position that can perhaps best be described as ‘al-Qa‘ida’s editor’: he presented very few (if any) new ideas of his own but collected, selected, and presented others’ general and more difficult writings into readily-applicable and easily-digestible chunks of information – now forever present in cyberspace – that was aimed carefully and specifically at his target audience of radical Saudi Islamists; secondly, through the case-study of al-Azdi, I show that anti-Saudi ideas in QAP’s discourse – as opposed to pan-Islamism – were more prominent, more openly available and expressed at an earlier time than has hitherto been suggested, and that al-Azdi has been one of the most important ideologues promoting this.

Recent years has seen a trend towards the increasing specificity of recruitment targets for global jihad. This paper is a case study of the discourses used to recruit a Western female who originally subscribed to an antigovernment, anti-New World Order ideology. Categorising using grounded theory analysis found that female recruiters tapped into the interest of their target subject and then shifted her towards sympathy and commitment to radical Islam. This was achieved through media saturation of Western aggression against Muslims coupled with an ideology that promotes the need to fight and resist. Subject material to which the recruit was directed was carefully controlled and initially deemphasized the Qur’an in favour of mujahedeen narratives and the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki. Overall, the research supported a sophisticated narrowcasting strategy that was carefully developed primarily by female recruiters.