The Lighter Side of Jihad

Greetings from the Left Coast! Warning: This is another one of those politically incorrect posts, this time mixed liberally with irreverence and sarcasm. Still with me? Cool.

I typically don't find the global struggle against Islamofascism to be a laughing matter, but this item on eWeek.com had me shaking my head in bemusement (which is not quite the same thing as amusement, but close, in this case).

According to an Israeli on-line military intelligence magazine, counter-terror sources picked up Internet traffic indicating that Al Qaeda was planning a Distributed Denial of Service ("DDoS") attack on November 11 against 15 targeted Web sites, and would expand their "e-Jihad" activities until "hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites."

The line in the article that got me was this one: "They offer would-be martyrs, who for one reason or another are unable to fight in the field, to fulfill their jihad obligations on the Net. These virtual martyrs are assured of the same thrill and sense of elation as a jihadi on the 'battlefield.'"

I hardly know where to begin with this. First of all, I'm not all that worried. The phrase "hundreds of thousands of Islamic hackers" strikes me as an oxymoron. It seems to me that the members of any fundamentalist religion have a built-in handicap when it comes to matching cyber-wits with good old porn-surfing, Canadian-bacon-pizza-eating, Diet-Coke-drinking Western cybergeeks. And by the time the terrorists spend enough time on the Internet to be able to effectively launch this kind of attack, there's a good chance that they'll be Westernized to the point that their religious zeal will be, shall we say, blunted to some extent. Mere religious zeal doesn't come close to the intensity of a non-stop 48-hour Twinkie and Diet Coke fueled massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing binge.

Second, would someone please explain to me what a "virtual martyr" is? Unless "first-person shooter" computer games have become way more realistic than they were the last time I played Duke Nukem, it's hard for me to imagine that sitting at a computer is going to quite match the "thrill and sense of elation" of, say, setting off your suicide vest in a restaurant full of women and children, being in a firefight with a highly-motivated U.S. Special Forces team, or facing the business end of a Cobra gunship. So if you can't actually die doing it, who decides when the point of martyrdom has been reached, and what are the criteria? And exactly what reward does a virtual martyr receive? A year's membership to 72virgins.com?

There are a lot of things in the world that I do worry about. I worry about terrorists smuggling bombs across our open borders. I worry about what Iran would do with nuclear weapons if they had them. I worry about what really happened to Saddam's WMDs. I worry about what will happen with Pakistan's nuclear stockpile if Musharraf is deposed by Islamic fundamentalists. I worry about what would happen if Iraq became a terrorist-run state. I worry about the people in this country who are too stupid, or too blinded by partisanship, to realize that we should be worried about these things. I don't worry much about "Bin Laden's cyber legions." Maybe I'm wrong, but if there's one place where the West's technical superiority should triumph it's in the area of technical superiority. I'll bet on our geeks to out-hack their geeks any day. You want cyber-war? Bring it on!

Thanks for listening.