Bintjbeil.org, a Hezbollah-affiliated website, has announced the formation of its own facebook group. The website is named after a town in south Lebanon (nicknamed City of the Resistance and Lady of the Galilee), which has been the site of key engagements between Hezbollah and the IDF over the past 20 years.
While in a physical sense the town itself served as a bulwark of the ‘resistance’, its virtual integration into cyberspace is representative of a greater trend in which entities that espouse political violence/terrorism have developed a sort of pop culture appeal with the advent of user-based media via the Internet. This trend perhaps even more acute now with the grafting of sites like Bintjbeil into social networking sites a la Facebook.
One might question whether or not this trend will help solidify the value of militancy within political cultures that have developed over the course of armed conflict and violence. At the same time, it is perhaps important not to be quick to perceive such manifestations in the virtual world as physical threats.
