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Online Extremism
This afternoon’s pannel ‘Online Extremism - And the Muslims Who Fight It’ introduced the attendees to a new type of terrorist, the Islamic fundamentalist hacker. The panel, made up of private security officers, former and current governement officials and a the founder of Muslim community Web site, also introduced us to the people fighting this new enemy.
“It’s an online battle for their hearts and minds,” said Mohamad Hluchan of iDefense, a cyber-intelligence firm.
Hluchan spoke about the sophistication of the encryption and coding software like Asrar Al-Mujahidin and the “two way street” between organized crime and terrorists. The Kalashnikov-toting fundamentalist is the face of these orgnaizations, but the tech saavy brain is a much more insidious foe.
If Hluchan gave us a new boogey man, Mohammed Suleiman Khan, founder of Hadithuna.com, gave us the face of the people working to combat the negative perceptions spread this new enemy. Khan’s Web site is a sucessful online community that hosts over 57 million blogs from housewives and college students to more radical minded fundamenalists. Khan admitted to walking a fine line between promoting provacative dialouge and facilitating hate-speech. Ultimately, the radicals have helped promote the website’s objectives by demonstrating the power of the majority of its users to police the site themselves when it came to hateful and inflamatory speech.
Overall, the panel was an introduction into the online grassroots approach that many Muslims around the world are embracing to combat the work of extremists. Videos like ‘Yeh Hum Naheen’ (‘This is Not Us’), a sort of “We Are The World” collaboration of Pakistani pop stars, fight back against the negative perception of Muslims perpetrated by terrorist propaganda. Frank Cilluffo, associate vice president for homeland security at The George Washington University, challanged the roomful of bloggers and journalists to help in this effort to combat radical extremism.
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