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DispatchesWar Torn title

Jihad TV title

Broadcast: Monday 06 November 2006 11:00 PM

"It's quaint now to remember how terrorist groups ran their publicity before the internet was invented." Jihad TV reporter and director Paul Eedle explains how the internet changed evrything for modern day terrorists.

The Jihadi broadband revolution


It's quaint now to remember how terrorist groups ran their publicity before the internet was invented.

At Reuters in civil-war Beirut in the early 1980s, the only clues we had to the motives behind the latest wave of bombings or assassinations were smudgy faxes in typewritten Arabic from organisations with obviously made-up names such as the "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners".

The internet changed everything. Within six months of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, al-Qaeda had been driven out of its bases in Afghanistan but had regrouped in cyberspace. When I started exploring Islamist sites on the Net in the weeks after 9/11, I discovered there was an entire jihadi subculture in chat rooms, message boards and email lists.

Al-Qaeda itself was operating a website which gave all the information which a cell anywhere in the world would need to operate independently of the now-scattered leadership - and everything a Western journalist would need to understand why al-Qaeda had attacked America and how it planned to wage war against the West. The site even gave phone numbers of families of Qaeda members captured in Pakistan so sympathisers could call their families.

Five years on, the jihadi propaganda has evolved. Most of it is now near-broadcast-quality video on broadband. As I hope you'll see this Monday night in our film for Channel 4, Jihad TV, Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya are uploading films almost daily to the internet. They range from short clips of US humvees being blown up to hour-long documentaries with twirling graphic effects and animation ideas borrowed from video games. Some clips are unwatchably horrific but others give a view you may never have seen of the jihadis' wars against the West. A few are just intriguing - look out for the news bulletin by men in balaclavas.

The question that nobody's answered convincingly, though, is what effect is all this sophisticated propaganda having? Are these images breeding a new generation of suicide bombers who will attack the London Underground or planes over the Atlantic? It's tempting for a Westerner to think so. The videos are available anywhere in the world through the internet, and opinion polls show that Muslims in many countries are extremely hostile to the West.

But Arab opinions of both the West and al-Qaeda are much more nuanced than many Westerners might imagine. Many people in Saudi Arabia, for instance, were quite enthusiastic when al-Qaeda attacked America but extremely disturbed when it bombed housing compounds in their own country and killed Muslims.

So I wanted our film to look not just at jihadi videos but at their potential audience - young people in the Arab countries and here in the UK. I wanted to try to put the jihadi videos into the context of all the other imagery which young Muslims are immersed in. What is really shaping their view of the world?

We went looking for a range of points of view - from Egyptians crammed in a migrant workers' camp in Dubai to boys playing a Hizbollah video game down an alley in the southern suburbs of Beirut and young British Muslims protesting outside the high-security police station at Paddington Green. We talked to presenters and producers at three very different television channels - Al-Arabiya in Dubai, the main rival to al Jazeera and owned by liberal Saudis; Hizbollah's station al-Manar in Lebanon, celebrating martyrs in the war against Israel with bagpipe anthems; and Syria's state-run satellite channel which put this summer's war in Lebanon on their children's programmes.

Are all the young people we met hugely hostile to Western actions in the Muslim world? Absolutely. Are they all downloading jihadi videos? Well, no. What is really driving their hostility is the suffering they see on mainstream news bulletins every day from Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Lebanon, most of it blamed on America, Israel and Britain. It's very convenient for us to believe that some uniquely powerful jihadi propaganda is poisoning young Muslim minds. In fact the most deadly influence is probably our own actions as seen on the evening television news.

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