The Internet has served as a vehicle for spreading the radical message of a clash of civilizations that pits a monolithic West struggling against Islam since the time of the Crusades, the report says. This theme particularly resonates with disaffected Muslim youths.
This is from a story that I have seen repeated verbatim this morning in Australian and United States news sites. Nothing new really but a report is being presented to the US Congress today that states that the "keyboard is as important as a Kalashnikov rifle" to 'terrorists'.
This reminds me of the banning of typewriters by the Turkish government in 1901, based on the idea the keyboard promoted anonymity. Keyboards and copiers needed to be licensed in the USSR for a time. As a development out of the keyboard terror meme the mention of the game "Quest for Bush" as a terror training and requiting tool (??) led to me to this interesting blog post on re skinning:
You've probably heard of Quest for Bush (a.k.a. Night of Bush Capturing) from various news sources or my own brief blog entry about it, most of which describe it as a game developed by Al Quaeda to attract new recruits. After playing it and comparing it to the game it's obviously based on, Quest for Saddam, I think that initial reports are somewhat inaccurate in how they portray the game's content. First, there is very little "development" evident in the game. It's a straightforward re-skinning of Quest for Saddam that simply exchanges references to Saddam with references to George W. Bush. Even calling it a mod is, I think, pretty generous considering how little work (relatively speaking, of course) went into creating Quest for Bush from the Quest for Saddam source material.
So "Quest for Bush" was actually an answer or response to "Quest for Saddam". Sometimes the similarities between terror and 'non-terror' are scary.
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