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Stephen Schwartz, Tech Central Station

What do we do about terrorist incitement on the internet? I have noted on several occasions that the main enemies of democracy and pluralistic Islam — al-Qaida, the ultra-Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia, and jihadists in Pakistan — seem to have far surpassed the antiterror forces in use of this versatile and effective form of media. Those of us who have studied terrorist sites and video products are struck by how much more sophisticated and impressive they are, in their presentation, when compared with U.S. government and other outreach efforts.

British prime minister Tony Blair, as an element of his new, “changing-the-rules” approach to abating terror, has declared that his government will draw up “a list… of specific extremist websites,” with which “active engagement… will be a trigger for the Home Secretary to consider the deportation of any foreign national.” To certain Americans the notion is abhorrent, to others debatable, and to still others, necessary and overdue.

Some hold to an interpretation of freedom of expression based on maximum indulgence of the inciters of and recruiters for terrorist atrocities as a libertarian principle. Others who object to suppression of terrorist websites in the U.S. include those who question whether action against extremist sites will actually curtail radical Islamist conspiracies, since sites can be mirrored from anywhere in the world, and some who value the sites as evidentiary assets in tracking terror.

I have tended to subscribe to the latter theory; my book The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism was based in great part on internet research. But that was a product of the first phase of the Wahhabi war against the world, when research seemed more important than preventive and preemptive action against the threat of bloodshed.

Today I agree with the approach of Prime Minister Blair. We who work to combat Islamist terror have developed networks of informants to keep us aware of the enemy’s rhetoric, such as hardly existed four years ago, and it now appears more urgent to shut down the use and abuse of the internet to carry out the destruction of human life, than to let them flourish for monitoring purposes.

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