Blaming YouTube for terrorism paints the killers as victims
Worse than video nasties, scourge of the 1980s, sex and trolls are YouTube videos possessed of a power to radicalise the viewer, transforming a normal bloke surfing the web for Wiggles songs and old episodes of Play For Today into a mass murderer. No circumspection, reflection or deliberation. To see is to do.
Jonathan Sacerdoti notes:
I’ve watched plenty of extremist videos and heard some dodgy speeches over the years. I even watched a couple of videos online this last week of extremist Rabbis preaching against rational and modern thought as well as homosexuality. But I didn’t become a backwards thinking fanatic.
Why do some people want to say “was radicalised” (a passive thing), rather than “chose to become an extremist and murderer”?
Passivity reduces the killer’s free will to dust. He’s one step closer to becoming a ‘vulnerable’ victim. And – boy – do Islamists love being victims. The actual victims – the people murdered – are reduced, their innocence linked to the killer’s vulnerability, the good boy or good girl from a good family who was ‘groomed’ online by powers too strong to resist. We are corralled into looking not only at the victim and saying “There but for the grace of god…”, but empathising with the killer, too. And you can’t blame a victim, so the narrative goes. You can’t get angry at a victim.
Radicalisation doesn’t come out of the blue or from a YouTube snuff movie or tweet. It’s rooted in the Islamists’ antagonism towards the prevailing culture and a search for a form of aggrandised, pristine identity they can embrace and be defined by. You might call them fascists.
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: News, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
