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Posted on 09/24/2001 6:31:23 PM PDT by testforecho

The Web of terror
By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine
September 24, 2001 5:01 AM PT
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COMMENTARY--The world will not forget the events of September 11th, and the World Wide Web--stocked as it is with many sites run by people who long ago declared a Jihad (holy war) against the United States--complicates the problem.

Most of these sites, including one site hosted by NBCi via its free homepage service, offer graphic images such as the New York skyline in flames. The site on NBCi remained open until recently. Until they recently disappeared, Jihadroad.com and jihadpath.com mirrored it. If you got on the Web within a day of the attacks, it was easy to find numerous sites advocating a Jihad against America for various reasons. The American flag was always on fire at these sites.

Following the attacks, the Web has been populated with interesting information that you could spend all day reading, if you wanted to. Two reports that I highly recommend seek to explain our strange relationship with Pakistan, a country that the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Peter Tomsen, believes is behind much of the world's terrorist activities. Tomsen is now a Professor at the University of Nebraska.

Anyway, the two reports that I recommend are from India, which seems to be a country left out of the loop in all of the current commotion. The first article is entitled "Islamic Jihad and the United States". The other article goes even deeper into similar subject matter.

Then if you're looking for some excellent information about the failure of the Intelligence community, you have to read a set of various pieces in The Atlantic Monthly, especially The Counterterrorist Myth. This is must-reading, everyone. The Atlantic Monthly also produced some great information on the Jihad.

Once you get into this material—and there is plenty—you begin to understand the incredible complexities of the Middle East and its odd politics. You also begin to understand that it wasn't just the U.S. Intelligence agencies that failed us, but the U.S. news media as well. We get nothing from the media but bland pap and Hollywood reports. If you want to read excellent coverage of the New York attack and its aftermath, you must go to the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, or the Times of India. All are on the Web. Even Pravda has better coverage of some aspects of the current situation. A Pakistani paper reported Tuesday that 25 warships from Britain, France, and the U.S.A. were parked off the coast. The U.S. media has reported nothing about that. The British papers have numerous reports coming straight out of Peshawar and Islamabad. American reporters are asking bland questions at orchestrated press conferences. You know the drill.

Worse, there is seldom any analysis in the U.S. media of the underlying movement behind a lot of the current tribulation: Islamism. There are people in a fringe group of the Muslim community, dubbed Islamists, who literally want to take over the entire world and turn it into a Muslim empire, ruled by clerics. No Muslim will deny that these people exist or that they are making a lot of noise. Unfortunately, our news media thinks it might offend the average middle-class Muslim if this group is even discussed. (Discuss it, I say, and discuss it with a Muslim.) Why is it that most people don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and are afraid to say anything? The media plays along, and so it just keeps the public in the dark. One last point about the Islamists: There are many of them in America. What do we do about them? Ignore them, I guess.

The public must educate itself, and the Web, combined with Google, can get the job done. I have some interesting sites that will send a shiver down your spine. Click on the link to the following site, which outlines a plan for world domination. That's a good start. It's also worth noting that within the Muslim community, there are the Secularists, who are just the opposite of the Islamists. The Secularists have an excellent Web site (www.secularism.org) and excellent resources. At their site, you can read about the unfortunate Dr. Younis Shaikh, a Pakistani condemned to death for blasphemy. What constituted blasphemy in this instance is chilling, to say the least. Check out that page.

And finally, if you really want to dig into some interesting aspects of Middle Eastern and South Asian politics, drop a couple of keywords into a Google search, and start reading. You can start by searching for "Islamism" for background. Then, to understand things further, try "Islam and Modernity." You might want to look into interesting political religious offshoot movements, so try a search for "ahmadi muslim." This is wild stuff. You can learn about the various practices, the historical relationships between these groups and Christians, the current Jihads, and more. You could be reading for months. In most cases, the reliability of the information is self-apparent. It's all very interesting.

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