The Huffington Post has a fascinating report on YouTube’s “battle against ISIS.” It turns out that the online video giant is actively recruiting Muslim voices to combat ISIS’s social media recruitment efforts:
On a Thursday night late last fall, after leaving the Manhattan office where he works as a digital products specialist, Aman Ali — a well-known comedian in American Muslim circles — received an unusual email from YouTube.
“We need you,” read the note, which invited Ali to the company’s sprawling, 41,000-square-foot production facility in Los Angeles and promised a free flight and two nights in a hotel. “Muslim community leaders [are] struggling to have their voices heard against the overwhelming extremist and bigoted content currently surfacing the web.”
Ali wasn’t alone. Dozens of other prominent Muslims received similar invites:
Nearly two months later, on a Saturday in January, about 70 Muslims arrived at a closed-door meeting at YouTube’s studios. They comprised a who’s-who of imams, scholars, activists, Muslim vloggers and entertainers from across the U.S. Many had witnessed extremism first-hand, such as imam Suhaib Webb, who was the face of the Boston Muslim community in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. For nine hours, experts, many of them Muslims, briefed participants and brainstormed how to combat online extremism.
Imams were paired with entertainers; scholars were seated with a few of YouTube’s non-Muslim power users, who peppered the crowd and gave tips on how they had built up millions of subscribers with pop culture commentary. Mimicking a tech startup camp, attendees broke into small groups to debate what technologies and strategies worked best.
I have two thoughts in response to the story. First, good for YouTube to actively try to use its platform to combat jihadists. Given the obvious use and power of viral video for jihadist recruitment (even before jihadists widely used online platforms, they’d pass around DVDs), it’s imperative to explore whether there’s an online Muslim answer to online jihadist recruitment. After all, U.S. government or U.S. Christian assessments of the true meaning of Islam mean exactly nothing to potential jihadists.
But that brings me to my next, pessimistic, point. The theological gap between a potential ISIS recruit and, say, a popular American Muslim comedian is so vast that I’m skeptical of the chances of even the hippest, most slickly-produced videos to move the needle. The potential jihadist sees brutality as a feature, not a bug, and longs for the glories of the ancient caliphates. And so a video like the effort below – which merely tells Muslims that ISIS is indeed horrible – won’t do anything to deter a young man who wants to behead infidels, who wants to kill apostate Muslims, Christians and Yazidis. To these people, a Muslim who says “ISIS is bad” is a Muslim who needs to lose his head.
Yet YouTube and its Muslim recruits need to keep trying. The theological answer to jihad has to come from Muslims. The military answer will come from the United States and its allies. And it’s imperative to remember that a successful military response will actually help cultivate the ground for a successful theological response. Jihad thrives on victory and withers in the face of defeat. Defeat the jihadists, and jihad becomes less attractive, and maybe — maybe — minds become just a bit more open, the right kinds of messages will find larger audiences, and jihad (which will never entirely go away) will enter a season of military and cultural retreat.
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