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CAIRO — Some American experts believe their government should hunt and shut down websites seen as radicalizing Muslims, while others dismiss the approach as impractical and urge counter online campaigns.
"[Al-Qaeda doesn't] put people on planes anymore because they know we're good at spotting them," John Arquilla, a military theorist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California, told Time magazine on Wednesday, December 23.
"And if we take away cyberspace we would achieve a crippling effect on the global terror network."
Some believe the US administration has done very little to fight the anti-terror battle in the cyberspace.
"Instead of thinking of cyberspace principally as a place to gather intelligence, we need to elevate it to the status of ‘battlespace'," Arquilla told the House Armed Services Committee last week during a hearing on the threat of online radicalization.
"This means that we either want to exploit terrorists' use of the Web and Net unbeknownst to them, or we want to drive them from it."
Many experts recognize that Al-Qaeda has become tech- and media-savvy in recent years.
Dozens of audio and video message produced by its media arm, as-Sahab, are immediately available on the internet.
Futile
But some experts are skeptical about the success prospects of declaring war at such websites, also citing their importance as source for intelligence gathering.
"If you shut down one of their websites today, they have a complete copy elsewhere and can put it up on a new server and have it up tomorrow," says Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, created following 9/11 to track terrorism.
He believes such websites are a treasure of information overlooked by the US and are the only window the rest of the world has into al-Qaeda and other such groups.
"[This] would be like firing cruise missiles at our own spy satellites.
"If you start shutting down the websites it's like chopping up a jellyfish — you end up with lots of little pieces that are very difficult to monitor."
Scholars like Chris Boucek, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believe shutting down websites is not the answer.
"We're talking about a movement that's based on ideas and grievances, so we need to understand those ideas and grievances," Boucek says.
"Failing to engage in debate on those issues means we're ceding all of that to them, and that makes no sense to me."
Boucek lauded a Saudi campaign, Sakina, which helps scholars to go online to militant websites and debate what is and isn't permitted by Islam.
"There's a multiplying effect when they put this on their website for other people to read.
"Also on their website are different documents and studies, recantation videos, things like that that explain extremism and radicalization."
Boucek believes Washington should launch a similar program to be handled by academics rather than by government officials.
"You can't have the American military telling people what their religion allows.
"It's shocking to me that eight years into this conflict, we don't have a formal institution doing this."
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