Technologies of today are blurring the lines between terrorism and the romanticism of a “noble resistance”
As the Israel–Hamas war, spurned by the terror attack against the former on 7 October sparked global protests, debates, divisions, and ideological fires across the spectrum, the online world witnessed a bizarre event. Parts of a letter purportedly written by Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in 2002 titled ‘Letter to America’ went viral on social media, particularly on TikTok, a platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance (India banned TikTok in 2020).
As the Israel–Hamas war, spurned by the terror attack against the former on 7 October sparked global protests, debates, divisions, and ideological fires across the spectrum, the online world witnessed a bizarre event.
Young users on TikTok got access to the letter’s text through an article published in 2003 in the British newspaper’s—The Guardian—website. The viral trend, however, came with a spin. Most young people reading bin Laden’s letter had a warped interpretation of it, not that of a most-wanted terrorist who attacked the US killing thousands in September 2001, but looking at his views as those from a repressed people partaking in what scholar Shiraz Maher highlights as being pulled towards or sold an ideation of a “noble resistance”. In the online space, where context and knowledge are increasingly secondary requirements, bin Laden more than a decade after his death found young followers, often from the West, looking upon him as some sort of freedom fighter. The context, of course, was the crisis in Gaza.
Fast forward to 2023, and Hamas has also succeeded in blurring the lines between terrorism and the romanticism of a “noble resistance”. In a good section of the prevailing discourse, the terror attack conducted by Hamas against Israel which also led to a hostage crisis that continues today, the Palestinian militant group is often seen from a favourable lens as a ‘resistance’ front and not a terror outfit. The United States (US) officially declared Hamas as a terror group in 1997, but the group seems to have at least in part reversed its public standing over the past month, not by its own design, but just by way of finding unexpected online support base including in the West.
The above trends have not occurred in isolation. Even as official state policy, the West’s decisions to negotiate with actors such as the Afghan Taliban have given non-state militant actors incredible agency amidst a section of public discourse as rational actors. The pace and design of online information flows allowing these groups to shape narratives on their own accord has been a problematic trend for a long time now. States and security agencies have repeatedly failed in their efforts to counter such narratives, and traditional state policies to counter the open-source spread of information online will always remain a few steps behind these technology-driven trends. The Islamic State, in its prime in the mid-2010s, mobilised on the fact that its ideas must survive beyond a physical terror group. Even today, three ISIS-aligned terror attacks have taken place with fatalities in Europe on the sidelines of the war in Gaza. This is even though groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS ideologically are not in support of Hamas due to the latter’s more political construct than a purely Islamic one in way of taking part in negotiations, elections, accepting alignment with a Shia Iran, and so on. Nonetheless, groups such as Al Qaeda have long propagated their ideology around countering the Israel-US alliance as a ‘Zionist-crusaders alliance’, however, as scholar Barak Mendelsohn highlights, since 9/11, Al Qaeda has had little to show for itself as the Taliban took point in fighting in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda in Iraq disintegrated, out of which the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh in Arabic) was born.
Al Qaeda has had little to show for itself as the Taliban took point in fighting in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda in Iraq disintegrated, out of which the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh in Arabic) was born.
In an era of deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, and minute-by-minute hot-takes, verification of information and time for critical thinking are endangered tools. Collectively, TikTok videos giving credence to the Bin Laden letter gained millions of views through their distribution across various social media platforms. Meaning, millions of times, Bin Laden’s letter was witnessed through snappy 2–3 minute videos, giving the deceased Al Qaeda chief and his ideology a new lease of life in a completely different and bewildering context. Al Qaeda, post the killings of bin Laden and his successor, Ayman Al Zawahiri in Kabul in 2022, is on the back foot, with no announcement of a new leader in its post-Zawahiri era. But online, the group has been suddenly picked up by a Western audience as a philanthropist and activist. Within bin Laden’s thinking, this kind of public posture was not unheard of. In 1993, five years after bin Laden founded Al Qaeda, the famous journalist Robert Fisk interviewed him in Sudan as a ‘Saudi businessman’ who recruited mujahideen. The headline read: “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace”. At that time, the blinkered approach was led by the US vs Soviet or communism vs capitalism contestation. Two main competing ideologies of the time. Today, behind bin Laden going viral, is also a playing out of naïve ideological discourses that have taken hold in America. This newfound fame for bin Laden amplified by the naivete of users, pushed by conflict and war, beaming onto their smartphones 24/7, unfiltered, distorted, and more than often, outright disinformed, is a problem with few solutions. These ‘trends’, feed into pre-existing cognitive biases of individuals, and solidify them further, to the point where in 2023, even bin Laden has a young, new audience.
In an era of deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, and minute-by-minute hot-takes, verification of information and time for critical thinking are endangered tools.
Technology today and tomorrow will significantly shape ideology, politics, and conflict. From Hamas-linked accounts reportedly having raised over US$40 million using cryptocurrency and live feeds of the Syrian civil war back in 2014-15 on Facebook run by terror organisations being reacted by ‘likes’ and ‘emojis’ from users to AI-generated images of the war in Gaza today where millions of consumers are failing to distinguish them as real or fake, the digital space is a frontline in people’s living rooms. Understanding society and politics today is coming down to a very primal ‘inquest vs algorithm’ binary.
Kabir Taneja is a Fellow with the Strategic Studies programme at the Observer Research Foundation
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Kabir Taneja is a Fellow with Strategic Studies programme. His research focuses on Indias relations with West Asia specifically looking at the domestic political dynamics ...
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