Sienna Jackson / Roundup
Has anyone noticed the distinct lack of al Qaeda in the news?
One of the most positive aspects of this overall highly positive revolutionary movement that is taking the Middle East by storm is the fact that, although they’ve tried, al Qaeda and other fundamentalists like them haven’t been able to get in on the action.
The protests (now being known collectively as ‘Arab Spring’) have been, for the most part, nonviolent but extraordinary acts of civil disobedience.
Instead of guns and suicide bombings we see signs, marches, ingenious tech-savvy and the implementation of the Internet to affect change, to greater and more meaningful effect than any bloody riot could accomplish.
Instead of getting angry, violent, and subsequently vulnerable to manipulation, people in the region have shown to use words as weapons against oppressive regimes – and a wireless connection in place of the old sword/pen saying.
That’s not al Qaeda’s cup of tea, and it’s not the playing field they do ball in for a few simple reasons:
The success of a decentralized network like al Qaeda lies in the fact that it’s members are too angry, hurt, desperate and disenfranchised to see any alternative to solve their problems.
In any propaganda you can find on al Qaeda (less is being produced these days than before), there is always talk of corrupt governments, the anger of the people, and how al Qaeda offers the only solution to these problems.
Networks like these exploit the tunnel vision that people develop in extreme emotional states, and in a region where every government causes grief and dissatisfaction, it’s not hard to drum up support from people who are just plain sick of the world and how it works.
But the people driving the Arab Spring are not so easily manipulated. We’re talking about people who are young, motivated, educated and more connected with the world at large than the generations that came before them.
While members of al Qaeda are still taping propaganda and distributing their VHS tapes from caves, the youth of the Arab Spring are circumventing Internet blocks by hijacking fax lines.
It’s a question of new versus old. Destruction versus growth.
The world is growing up and moving forward, and al Qaeda’s being left in the dust.
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