Ibn Siqilli has a great post about the jihadi fascination with Lord of the Rings in response to a spoof video that a jihobbyist recently made about me. To be clear, when I called the English-language jihobbyist community a herd of teeming “orcs,” it was really just me trying to flex my metaphorical muscle. Apparently, I stumbled on something juicy – and talk about counterintuitive.
As Ibn Siqilli explains, jihobbyists not only watch the Lord of the Rings (remember, many of these guys are American), but, surprising to me, they actually think of themselves as the Fellowship, as the good guys (Aragorn and Gandalf more than anyone else), not the bad guys (Saruman or Sauron)…
The video that one of these guys made about me, curiously enough, reappropriates my Lord of the Rings metaphor and turns it back on me. No longer are they the orcs – as I indicted them. In their construct, I’m the bad guy (cue Scarface). In fact, in this insane video (and I mean it – this is like the kind of videos I made in 4th grade), I’m painted as the actual mouth of Sauron, which I guess is kind of a backhanded compliment. But there’s a much bigger point here. I’m e-battling the jihobbyists, not over who is an orc, or the mouth of Sauron, Gandalf the White or Frodo Baggins, but rather who represents the good and who represents the evil.
See, whereas some dismiss my interactions with the jihobbyists as juvenile or even counter-productive, I beg to differ. I stir the pot because it forces movement on their side. And any time you get the adversary moving, particularly when it’s on my terms and not theirs, they make mistakes. Since 2001, the United States has ceded the discursive stage to al-Qaida and their supporters because of functionaries who hold this status-quo, risk-averse, play-it-safe mindset. I’m not content to let this ideology simply burn itself out after several generations, which it will. I’m trying to expedite that process. Most people get that there’s a method here -
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about jihadis in my career it’s this: they are our secret weapon in the fight against jihadis. Think about it: who knows al-Qaida better than…al-Qaida. And what’s more, they are more than happy to point us in the directions of their weaknesses. All we’ve needed to to do is ask. Ayman al-Zawahiri does it every time he opens his mouth.
What makes my interactions with these guys so appealing for my readers is that each exchange is a teaching moment for us. The darkness of the abyss into which we’ve been staring, at least for me, gets a tad brighter every time they take my bait. My back-and-forth gets these guys talking, showing their cards, revealing things that they otherwise might not.
It’s not that they’re are stupid. In fact, “Abu Umar” understands my approach and tried to explain it to his buddies on Ansarnet:
He is just trying to get a rise out of you brothers and sisters, I wouldn’t pay him any mind. He seems very pleased with his ‘hilarious’ commentary, which consists entirely of making fun of people who don’t speak English as a first language, and calling people ‘Orcs’ (which I guess is some kind of half-hearted attempt to dehumanize the mujahideen and their supporters).
These internet ‘counter-terrorism experts’ are the worst kind of idiots. They seemingly think themselves important because they ‘analyze’ ‘exclusive’ (meaning free and widely available) materials, in order to write inane and boring articles that only fellow internet ‘experts’ will care about.
I throw everything I’ve got against the wall and see what sticks. What you find by doing this is that the jihadis can’t not respond. And what they respond to is what they are most sensitive about. This blog isn’t just about honing my wit or selling books – it’s an instrument for engaging the adversary’s mindset and ideology so that my readers and I can reach a more nuanced understanding of it thanks, in large part, to them teaching us about them.
Consider the case of Abdullah as-Sayf (the tshirt making jihobbyist). If you recall, he was most upset about a throw-away comment I made in the course of a long indictment about him where I said that he probably lived in his mommy’s basement. He engaged me directly to explain that he was economically self-sufficient, insisting that I clarify. Who wouldve guessed that it was my reflections on his personal finances, not the soundness of his ideological positions, that got knocked him most off-balance. Silence doesn’t advance our understanding – engagement does (see Hegel’s notion of dialectics and his theory on labor).
The fact is that we have more to gain by taking the jihadi ideology and its promulgators on directly than we do sitting on our hands, letting them run the discursive show. Unfortunately, this is a strategy that, as a nation, we have been reticent to execute. It’s not that we don’t have our own pitbulls. It’s just bureacracies tend to keep them muzzled and tightly leashed for sake of not rocking the boat. Ironically, it is precisely that boat rocking that exposes their vulnerabilities and knocks them on the defensive.
[...] on the subject of users being the key to web counter-strategies, read Jarret Brachman’s post, Making Jihobbyists our New Secret Weapon in Combating Jihobbyism. This entry was written by Tim Stevens, posted on 5 December 2009 at 15:00, filed under ubiwar [...]
[...] not an insult to their ideology or religious beliefs, but the suggestion they still live in their mother’s basement. After all, it is very difficult to maintain a serious and terrifying self image when you get [...]