by Luca Watson, The Critic
In an online age, Islamic militants have been exposed as thuggish and dim
The internet age has allowed for the uncompromising demystification of all sorts of public archetypes. Sectors once held in high regard, or at least intense intrigue, have suffered from a dramatic drop in prestige as more comes to be known about the true nature of those who fill their ranks. Social media is awash with people from once-respected professions like academia, journalism, or law repeatedly making fools of themselves, exposing their intellectual vacuity for all to see, and being humiliatingly dunked on by random nobodies with anime profile pictures and usernames best not repeated. In doing so, they have been shorn of the high social status that they were once deferentially afforded on the assumption that most members of these professions were fundamentally interesting, capable, or at least replete with stories and opinions worth listening to. The more we see of who they truly are, the more banal and petty these figures appear.
But perhaps the archetype that has suffered the greatest collapse in perceived stature from unfiltered online exposure is the jihadi.
Attempts to crudely caricature the early cohort of jihadis from the 1990s and early 2000s as crazed fanatics, motivated by an irrational lust for violence and destruction in the name of the antediluvian views they recited unthinkingly, fell flat, as the jihadis that came to prominence were clearly anything but unthinking. As the investigative work of former CIA officer Marc Sageman showed, the majority of al-Qaeda jihadis were university educated, and the group was mostly made up of recruits from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, not society’s rejects.