It is interesting that the very medium in which I’m communicating with you today is the very medium that terrorists use to indoctrinate and communicate with their people. The size of the Internet and the fact that people believe they can hide on it makes it an ideal place to coordinate attacks or just to encourage people in their terrorist ways.
In his article Doing What’s Necessary, Mortimer Zuckerman brought this back to my attention. He lists those things going on in different Middle Eastern countries that could come here because of how small the world is getting. The problem he sees is that there are multiple areas where nuclear material could end up in terrorists hands, yet it’s much easier to carry off a terrorist attack than it is to capture terrorists.
We need some way of breaking up these groups– of getting into the minds of the terrorists and convincing them not to do their attacks (taking care of things at the root). One way is through the Islamic religion itself, but since the terrorists may believe that others aren’t true Muslims, that could be a problem. If terrorists are truly using chat rooms, IM and websites to encourage one another, it will be difficult to break that without some kind of infiltration. Just ask the boy or girl that’s in a new internet relationship how strong the pull can be with someone you only chat with through text! The other problem is that if the government actually started monitoring pages, or worse– tried to break passwords to enter into sites that have password protection so that they can get information on terrorists, the PC crowd would go nuts.
This really is a problem, and requires all of us to be watchful of people that we see/work with and give them encouragement and love. Above all, we need to show them Christ.