The nation’s red-topped bastion of impartiality and absolutely-not-xenophobic reporter of immigration and multi-cultural issues, The Sun, accidentally found itself a bedfellow it can’t kick out. Today The Currant Bun ran a story, Grant for Muslim hate bloggers, which I reproduce in full below. I did add the link though - the editors obviously can’t be seen to be aiding and abetting this VILE FILTH!

AN Islamic website which backs suicide bombers got a £35,000 Government grant – a month before the anniversary of the 7/7 attacks.

Muslimyouth.net carries dozens of rants by fanatics on its “support group” site.

One member wrote of suicide missions: “If you can blow dozens of people up at the same time, great, absolutely great.”

And in another vile message a member PRAISED a beheading video of British hostage Ken Bigley.

It said: “I like the beheading videos of the prisoners of war – especially the Daniel Pearl and Ken Bigley one.”

But the Department for Communities and Local Government agreed to fund the group’s film on problems faced by UK Muslims.

A spokesman said: “We can’t prevent violent extremism if we aren’t prepared to talk about the issues.”

VIPs will see the film in London tomorrow, including Cabinet minister Hazel Blears.

Rizwan Hussain, of Muslimyouth. net, said: “We’re conscious of a few people venting anger on our site. If there was a direct threat made we would alert authorities.”

Four suicide bombers killed 52 people in the 2005 7/7 London attacks.

Wonderfully, if you put ‘grant muslim hate bloggers’ into Google it returns The Sun article first. The second hit is none other than Stormfront which, for those who don’t know is the world’s premier white supremacist website. They also ran The Sun article in full, which elicited the usual trite responses [thread here].

I realise I could have chosen a different search string but The Sun and Stormfront really aren’t that far apart ideologically. For example, The Sun’s recent decision to launch a Polish version of the newspaper, and that other right-wing rag The Telegraph’s support for Poland in Euro 2008 (in England’s absence), are such crass examples of anti-immigration xenophobia as to be barely worth comment. A clearer message of exclusion could hardly have been sent to the government and to a public daft enough to lap up this sly, exploitative nonsense. As for Stormfront, I’m sure a quick search would reveal that Poles are actually ‘dirty Slavs’ or some such lazy racist slur.

So what’s the truth of The Sun’s story? Well, MuslimYouth looks pretty benign and with production values like that it’s fairly safe to say it’s not actually as radical and underground as made out. There are indeed forum posts about jihad, etc, but it’s not one-way traffic. See this thread, for example. I wish we could have youth-led debate on such sensitive issues in the national press, but that’s never going to happen. Mind you, one of their sponsors, the Ansar Youth Project is advertising a summer camp on the Isle of Wight. I suppose the island’s inhabitants might have their backs turned during Cowes Week allowing the little jihadists to hone their combat skills, like “sleeping outdoors in tents, cooking meals and taking part in a range of messy and not-so-messy activities”.

Did they receive a grant, and what for? I’m not sure, as I haven’t managed to track down a sensible source yet. Far be it for me to defend New Labour’s policies on anything but it doesn’t sound unreasonable to fund such a project. If anything else crops up on this story I’ll update as appropriate.

Small Wars Journal alerted us to a Charlie Rose interview with our Insurgency Research Group colleague Colonel H.R. McMaster (soon to be General). SWJ has a short YouTube video but I’ve tracked down the full, hour-long version, which also includes an interview with Philip Bobbitt, plugging his new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Bobbitt will be launching the UK edition of Terror and Consent at the London International Institute for Strategic Studies tonight, which I’m unfortunately going to miss.

I’ve had a few problems getting this video to stream consistently, but it may just be my connection today. If anyone finds an alternative source please let me know.

European Science Foundation conference, ‘Imaging War: Intergenerational Perspectives’, Vadstena, Sweden, 3-7 September 2008:

We have entered a time of highly technological warfare, where over half of the world’s research and development is now military and an ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA) is changing the rules and weapons that will be used to define our common futures in a global society. Yet most of the public are getting their information on the implications of these developments, not from learned scientific or technological treatise but from the media, film, literature, computer games and simulations. The way that war is imaged varies considerably between artists, scientists, urban geographers, media theorists and indeed between generations.

Given the controversies which form our daily news about the “War on Terror” and the projected need to give up our traditional human rights and civil liberties, it is essential that we understand the role of the war imagers and their critics. There are many lenses to tell the story, including political, PR and weapons procurement; media journalism (which leaves out as much as it includes), games, stories, and literature. This conference will explore what these various cultures are saying to each other and how organised knowledge systems, scenarios and stories are used to legitimate or deconstruct new paradigms on war and its consequences.

The conference seeks to explore dissonance and common ground between the image builders and the image consumers; the weapons manufacturers and the story tellers; the politicians and the children. Given its timeliness and originality, we anticipate a wide audience for such an event and are seeking to include as many of the relevant dimensions of the topic as possible. We also wish to encourage different generations to participate.

Abstracts for papers, posters, screenings and performances on the following topics are particularly welcome, however abstracts related to the themes of the conference are also welcome:

- Selling Modern Warfare Technologies and Strategies

- Screening War

- War games

- Deconstructing the Technology of War

- War and the Media

- Intergenerational Perspectives

Applications close 20 June 2008.

I’m not exactly partisan, particularly with respect to military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this article by Eric Walberg at Australia.TO News is an example of chronically poor journalism. I’d already decided to flag up this piece about Afghanistan before noticing that Fabius Maximus has also had a go in the comments. It’s so bad that the editors even challenged Walberg on substantive grounds, let alone his baseless bias. Awful piece of writing, at every level.

Prepare to be amazed at how bad journalism can be.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

Human Rights Watch provides more evidence that the Egyptian government is continuing to harass private media providers. A sure sign that the regime is in deep trouble.

Egyptian authorities have enforced media licensing laws to punish a company associated with broadcasting information critical of the government, Human Rights Watch said today.

The state-run Radio and Television Union brought a complaint against the Cairo News Company (CNC) on April 8, 2008, the day after Al Jazeera broadcast coverage of large anti-government street protests in the Nile Delta. CNC provides satellite transmission services and equipment to television networks operating in Egypt, including Al Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. On April 17, 35 plainclothes police officers raided CNC’s Cairo offices, confiscating its five sets of satellite transmission equipment and thereby shutting it down. Nader Gohar, CNC’s owner, has been charged with importing and owning television equipment and transmitting television broadcasts without permission. He is due to stand trial on May 26 and if convicted would face fines and at least one year in prison.

“Egypt’s closure of CNC and its prosecution of Nader Gohar are just the latest episodes in the government’s campaign to stifle freedom of the press,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “The government has already attacked several satellite news channels, apparently because it doesn’t like the news they transmit.”

Read the rest here.

Footage from Al Jazeera News 7 April 2008:

I gave up reading Robert Scoble’s blog Scobleizer some time ago. Far be it from me to criticise the 31st most popular blog in the world, I just don’t go for Scoble’s frenetic techno-evangelism or the febrile adulation he elicits in some quarters. His name might not mean much to many regular readers of this blog but what he says matters to an awful lot of people. He has a knack of spotting technological trends, mainly due to his absolute immersion in new media and technology and, let’s face it, he’s ultra-bright and totally dedicated to his cause.

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ’swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

Noise, in Scoble’s sense, is noise with information value, very different from the engineering sense in which noise is data without meaning, without semantic content. Scoble’s noise, like noise in the information theoretical sense has redundancy. This redundancy is what provides Scoble with the ability to detect patterns in the streams of Twitters and FriendFeeds coming his way. As a good journalist, he knows that just because fifty people propagate a meme (a troublesome term, but I’ll let it slide for now) doesn’t make it true, but he can see the drift of global conversation and concerns.

I’ve been toying with ideas of data, information and redundancy recently. About whether the physical nature of the internet, and the ways in which it transmits and reproduces digital data as a matter of course, could in some way constitute force-multipliers in the global insurgency (another troublesome term, as David Betz wrote yesterday). Does the fact that, once created, data continues to flow through the internet, somehow act to the benefit of the insurgent or terrorist sophisticated in the use of new media? I don’t mean the relative ease with which anyone can set up a website, or post a video of an IED explosion in Iraq. I mean the unpredictable course data takes once ‘released’ into the digital wild and its subsequent recontextualisation as actionable and significant information.

I suspect that it could do, although I’m not convinced it is yet happening, except perhaps in the sense of the deliberate viral spread of propaganda of the deed acts through visual media. One critical point is how (and whether) data is being recovered from parts of the internet and used somehow as a weapon or tool in whichever campaign or operation the individual or group is involved. Reconstituted ‘information bombs’.

See also:
Mining the digital
Global Information Flows

Update:

Oops, shoulda checked Zen’s feed first: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take the plunge? Is the fact that both he and I have written about this today a function of memetic correspondence, or sheer coincidence? I dunno, but read why Zen likes it here.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On Monday 13 May, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation led an evening seminar at King’s College London, ‘British Muslims: Identity, Integration and Policy’. Hussain is the well-respected head of the Policy Research Unit and Senior Research Fellow at the foundation, and also serves on the board of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK. Hussain is the co-author of British Muslims Between Assimilation and Segregation: Historical, Legal and Social Realities (2004) and has also written several op-eds, not least a rebuke to charges of extremism laid at the door of the Islamic Foundation by the BBC Panorama programme in 2005.

Hussain describes the construction of modern British ‘Muslimness’ - encompassing a plurality all too often overlooked - as an ongoing negotiation of inherited identities. First, as the ‘Other’ (black), passing through the continental (Asian), national (Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc) to the current situation in which many Muslims define their primary identity as religious. He outlined the internal and external drivers of this evolution, the latter including the oil crises and Middle East wars of the 1970s, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the Satanic Verses affair a decade later. Critical events of the 1990s, like the genocide in Bosnia, 9/11 and 7/7 further served to polarise Muslims in opposition to notions of statehood and nationality, preferring instead to identify with their religion and the global ummah. More than ever, the tensions of hyphenated identity are being laid bare.

Read the rest of this article here.

Jeremy Kahn in Newsweek, War is the Answer: Sri Lanka’s leaders are testing a dangerous theory: that the best way to end a civil war is by winning it.

That’s not quite what Kahn argues at all, so boo! to the sub-editors at Newsweek for letting me down. What Kahn actually says is that although the government military and police have made significant gains over the last two years, against a relatively traditional Maoist-style insurgency, the LTTE is still a potent adversary. President Rajapaksa faces increasing political opposition within his own ranks, as well as an inflationary economy, external debt problems, and a general public tiring of the war.

Achieving [military] victory is still possible, analysts say. “If somehow [the government] can kill Prabhakaran, that would change the picture dramatically,” says one senior analyst for a Western NGO in Colombo. Barring that, if the Army can deliver a few significant victories before January, it may buy Rajapaksa enough good will among the Sinhalese to allow him to continue the fight. For that reason, security experts expect another major push before the rainy season begins in June.

But the best chance for peace, analysts agree, involves combining the military campaign with a political strategy to empower moderate Tamil politicians and deprive the LTTE of support. Most Tamils on the island oppose the Tigers’ calls for independence, though they do want more autonomy. Under a 1987 accord brokered by India, Sri Lanka passed a constitutional amendment that was supposed to transfer some powers to the provinces. But the Tigers refused to disarm as called for under the accord, and the amendment was never implemented in Tamil areas.

Seems eminently sensible, and fits the bill of a rounded COIN approach (if implemented) to the Sri Lankan situation. Kahn concludes:

Without a more serious effort to redress discrimination, however, many international commentators believe the military campaign can’t succeed. The fighting alone “cannot be the whole solution, because that alone won’t address the grievances of the minority community,” says Susan Hayward of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. Unfortunately, Rajapaksa, who is surrounded by Sinhalese hardliners, has shown little interest in truly reaching out to the Tamils. Which means that while there may well be a military solution to Sri Lanka’s civil war, it probably isn’t this one.

Doesn’t quite suit the headline, methinks. Kahn presumably grasps the requirements of successful COIN, but his editors obviously do not.

A few interesting links on aspects of Web 2.0 (not a phrase I like at all, but there you go):

We don’t need more information or aggregation, we need inspiration, Alexander van Elsas:

Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers.

From Wikinomics to Government 2.0, L. Gordon Crovitz in Wall Street Journal:

Online tools under the rubric Web 2.0 are changing how information flows, with social networks letting people communicate directly with one another. This is reversing the top-down, one-way approach to communications that began with Gutenberg, challenging everything from how bosses try to manage to how consumers make or break products with instant mass feedback.

The institution that has most resisted new ways of doing things is the biggest one of all: government. This is about to change, with public-sector bureaucracies the new target for Web innovators…

That article via Amicable Collisions, who further addresses the need for new rulesets for a new century:

So we need to stop thinking about classical liberalism within the conservative framework and start imagining and inventing a conceptual framework and ultimately a social-political-cultural movement to champion a 21st century individualist-classical liberal ruleset. If we don’t do this then the collectivists will and our children and grandchildren will find themselves living under their ruleset, again.

Marisa at Making Sense of Jihad joins the dots between knowledge management and CT/COIN, via this article by Dave Snowden:

Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking…

The big problem for the knowledge and information management functions in an organization is that their governance structures were developed in an earlier, more ordered time when we focused on transaction systems for accounting and process. The essence of such systems is to remove ambiguity; the evolutionary pressure of natural human knowledge exchange is to embrace ambiguity. Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.

Marisa also points the way to a video of an International Data Corporation panel on Generation Y and the Emerging Power of User-Generated Content (UGC - another term I loathe btw). Four Asia-Pacific bloggers talk about social networks, monetisation, micro-blogging, etc.