On jihadists and smartphones

Geoff Sifrin

Taking Issue 

That is, the need for a firmer Western hand against Iran and by implication the terrorism infecting the world today – much of it funded by Iran. Unfortunately, Netanyahu upsetting US-Israeli relations fudges the Iranian and terrorist question in political fog rather than clarifying it.

People in the West need a serious wakeup call. Many are so infatuated today with their smartphones, social media, games and techno-gadgets, that they just won’t face the extent to which forces of plain evil are gaining ground, particularly in the Middle East, with tentacles embracing the whole world. If this continues, no-one will get away free.

Try to make sense of the fact that in this digital era, with its amazing human advances and connectivity of people from every corner of the planet, there are jihadists chopping off journalists’ and others’ heads, burning them alive and proudly broadcasting videos of their atrocities to the whole world – and fighting to impose their fanatical worldview on everyone.

The digital age lets us imagine we control a lot. We’re “empowered”. Buy Microsoft Word for your computer and you are instantly a “writer”. Establish a blog and you are a “political commentator”. Take a video clip of something that happens in your town and you are a “journalist”.

But it’s an illusion. We are seduced by a virtual world divorced from the real one. We must heed the message of the real professionals in the field taking the risks entailed by being there, such as the brave journalists who go right into the eye of the storm – the areas controlled by the terrorist group ISIS – to bring news of the actual barbarities going on. Many journalists have been captured and executed.

This week two of them, murdered newsmen James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were posthumously honoured with an award in memory of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002 while following a story about international terrorism.

The Anti Defamation League’s Daniel Pearl Award was presented to Foley’s mother and Sotloff’s parents in Palm Beach, Florida last Friday.

Foley was killed in Syria in August 2014 by ISIS after being held hostage for nearly two years. He was captured while reporting near the Turkish border. He had worked in northern Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Sotloff was kidnapped by ISIS in August 2013 while working in Syria. In a desperate attempt to save him, his friends and family tried to remove references on the Internet to the fact that he was Jewish and had studied in Israel and held dual US-Israel citizenship.

Japanese journalist Kenji Goto was another. He was beheaded by ISIS last week. In Tokyo, the Yomiuri newspaper ran an extra on the saga, and a Facebook page set up immediately after the first ISIS video of him was released last month, drew tens of thousands of “likes”. Photo postings showed people, not only from Japan but worldwide, holding up handwritten signs saying: “I am Kenji.” It echoed the reaction in France early last month when the French people declared en masse “I am Charlie”, after cartoonists of the Charlie Hebdo satirical journal were gunned down by jihadists in Paris for depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

But mouthing these slogans is not enough. People in the West still confront each new ISIS video with dangerous denialism, as if it doesn’t really concern them personally. Many Western media still refuse to use the word “terrorist” for the jihadists, instead calling them by the neutral term “militant”.

Netanyahu may have embarrassed Israel and caused diplomatic damage with his arrogance – for which he should pay a political price at the upcoming Israeli elections. But the saga might at least serve some useful purpose if people will look up from their smartphones and realise that the West has to stand up to the jihadist madness permeating the world. Otherwise, all our technological advances will mean nothing.

Geoff Sifrin is former editor of the SAJR. He writes this column in his personal capacity.