| BRIAN KNOWLTON | ||
Washington, Sept. 27: Along with
its surprising military success, the Islamic State group has
demonstrated a skill and sophistication with social media previously
unseen in extremist groups.
And just as the US
has begun an aggressive air campaign against the militants, Richard A.
Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, believes the
US has no choice but to counter their propaganda with a forceful online
response.
“Sending a jazz
trio to Budapest is not really what we want to do in 2014,” said
Stengel, referring to the soft-edged cultural diplomacy that sent
musicians like Dave Brubeck on tours of Eastern-bloc capitals to counter
communism during the Cold War. “We have to be tougher, we have to be
harder, particularly in the information space, and we have to hit back.”
But now, digital
operators at the state department are directly engaging young people —
and sometimes extremists — on websites popular in Arab countries,
publishing a stream of anti-Islamic State messages, and one somewhat
shocking video, on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, using the hashtag
#Think Again Turn Away.
Critics have
questioned whether this effort is large, nimble or credible enough. The
US’s image in West Asia — which seemed perched on the verge of
hopefulness when President Obama delivered a closely watched speech in
Cairo in 2009 — is now at “the bottom of a sliding scale”, said Lina
Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, in Beirut.
Stengel, who joined the Obama administration in February after seven years as managing editor of Time
magazine, is focusing his efforts on an approach that reflects Obama’s
insistence that countries like Iraq must take responsibility for their
own defence. While secretary of state John Kerry was assembling a
military coalition against the Islamic State on his most recent trip to
West Asia, Stengel met Arab officials to create what he called in an
interview “a communications coalition, a messaging coalition, to
complement what’s going on the ground”.
The Centre for
Strategic Counterterrorism Communication is the state department’s
spearhead in this fight and potentially defines the kind of pushback it
would like to see friendly countries in the region engage in.
Formed in 2010 to
counter messaging from al Qaida and its affiliated groups, the
interagency unit engages in online forums in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and
Somali. It recently added English, making itself more transparent — and
more open to critical scrutiny.
Posting on
Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook, members of the unit question
claims made by IS, trumpet the militants’ setbacks and underscore the
human cost of the militants’ brutality. Terror groups in Somalia and
Nigeria are also targeted.
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| NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVIC |
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