Fight al-Qaeda with satire, ridicule — researchers FEATURE 04/21/2010

Fight al-Qaeda with satire, ridicule — researchers

FEATURE 04/21/2010 LONDON — Satire and ridicule can help win the fight against al-Qaeda by stripping it of its glamor and mystique, a team of British researchers argue in a report released in London and in comments to AFP. Beating the Islamist movement is as much about winning the battle of ideas and undermining al-Qaeda’s counter-culture cachet as it is about conventional anti-terrorism operations, said the report. “Terrorism must be defeated through the deliberate ‘toxification’ of the al-Qaeda brand; not by making it seem dangerous, but by exposing it as dumb,” Jamie Bartlett, one of the report’s authors, told AFP. “Al-Qaeda has to be ridiculed as the equivalent of a middle-aged dad at a school disco: Enthusiastic, incompetent and excruciatingly uncool.”... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100421com7.html

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