Pixelated Semantics

Websites now terrorist organisations

Further to the "We don't torture/ We're a civilised nation..." item(s) below, "The United States has added Web sites to its list of "foreign terrorist organizations" for the first time, under the category of aliases for conventional groups...A list published in the Federal Register includes newkach.org, kahane.org, kahane.net, kahanetzadak.com as aliases for the Jewish group Kahane Chai or Kach, which is suspected of organizing attacks on Palestinians."

The 'meaning' of "terrorist" is becoming a shifting catch-all for targetting government-defined 'anti-social activity'. During the Gulf War 2, the interpretation was widened to include criminals as well as anti-war protestors, for instance. While there is no justification for using the Web to publish hateful harmful material, there does need to be informed debate about how a "web site" can become a "terrorist organisation". The potential now exists, by way of this precedent, to classify publishers of information that is disagreable to governments as "terrorists", with the consequences that entails.

Websites now "terrorist organisations".

Item posted by AutoEditor at 12:51 pm ::