Israel Matzav

YouTube is becoming a tool of the Iraqi 'insurgency'

The Jerusalem Post is reporting this evening that YouTube is being used to broadcast propaganda videos for the Iraqi insurgency.

Many of the videos have been seen by tens of thousands of viewers, and some by hundreds of thousands, on YouTube, Google Video and LiveLeak.com. Some show footage from terror attacks, including close-ups of badly burned children. Others give a slide show of photographs depicting exploded military vehicles and dead American soldiers, while Arabic victory songs play in the background.

What does this have to do with Israel? Tom Gross of London's Sunday Telegraph explains:

This is a potentially dangerous development for the fight against terrorism in the West.... It makes it far easier for freelance, go-it-alone jihadists and suicide bombers in western Europe and elsewhere to access information, techniques and propaganda without having to know in advance where to find such material, which was previously only available on obscure Web sites.

And it's not just the Iraqi insurgency that has gotten into the game:

Surprisingly, some of the videos of battle scenes in Iraq are taken by US soldiers, who upload the products of their helmet-mounted cameras to the Internet. One such video, showing US soldiers in a humvee speeding through the streets of Baghdad and forcing other cars and pedestrians out of their way in order to avoid becoming the target of a missile or bomb attack, was viewed on YouTube over half a million times in just three weeks. Such videos have found their way into footage distributed by the insurgents themselves.

Many of those uploading the videos are not in Iraq. Most insurgency videos are listed alongside personal videos of Internet users in the West, many of them Arab or Muslim, and were posted by these Western Internet users. These videos usually target Western audiences with political messages.

And those aren't the only offensive videos on the Internet:

One popular video on Yahoo! Video discusses purported Jewish control of American foreign policy leading up to the Iraq War, saying it served the interests of Israel, "a hostile, apartheid state."

Isn't that lovely?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:44 PM