Times of London reports that terrorists and child pornographers overlap in the recesses of the internet, using some of the same tactics to transmit incrimination information without being caught. Quote:
The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of both types of criminals and has been hailed as a potentially vital intelligence tool to undermine future terrorist plots. "A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are", an anti-terror source said, "is to go through the child-porn sites."
The surprise with which this is met indicates that the “war of civilizations” paradigm can be limiting as it shapes how we think about terrorism. The War v. Crime debate has certainly raged in America at a higher pitch than it has in Europe, but Europeans are certainly not immune to letting cultural stereotypes dominate their thinking about terrorists who use Islam as justification for their actions:
Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's anti-terror magistrate, said: "In our experience in investigating Islamic cells linked to al-Qaeda, they use pornographic images simply to camouflage the content of their messages. They use the images ‚ of men, women and children ‚ as an instrument to hide messages of quite a different content.
"I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which ‚ as in many parts of the Arab world ‚ wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture."
Pedophilia is a facet of Arab culture. Wow. In addition to being obviously offensive, these sorts of enforced boundaries between different types of criminals will make it more difficult to make connections between groups like pedophiles and terrorists. Conceiving of criminals as being outside the boundaries of social morality more generally, rather than adhering too closely to the social prescriptions associated with a religion of over 1 billion people. Construing terrorists as a unique, Muslim kind of criminal may make it more difficult intellectually to realize the following similarities:
One area that British anti-terror investigators are now keen to look at is the startling similarity in the way that jihadis and paedophiles target vulnerable young people, first befriending them and then slowly introducing them to warped behaviour that comes to be seen as normal. "What we were starting to see was a similarity in grooming that goes on in paedophilia and grooming that goes on in extremism," said the anti-terror source.
The source explained that both types of criminal also share a need for great secrecy and indeed it is the paedophiles’ status as outcasts as well as their expertise in encryption techniques that may have first attracted the terrorists. Hardline Muslim recruits are often given passwords and keycodes to terrorism sites via internet chatrooms, although sometimes they come from sympathisers in local mosques. But recently British police have managed to crack some of the codes that prohibit outsiders from accessing the more hardcore jihadi sites. Using child porn sites might be one way round this.
The Hoffman/Sageman debate over whether terrorism/jihad – pick your term – is best combated through a paradigm of local crime or organized global crusade certainly comes to bear in this issue. In the words of Balthasar Garzon:
"The danger of this "either-or' argument could lead us to the mistakes of the past," said Baltasar Garzon, Spain's leading antiterror investigatory magistrate. "In the '90s, we saw atomized cells as everything, and then Al Qaeda came along. And now we look at Al Qaeda and say it's no longer the threat. We're making the same mistake again."
Thinking of terrorists as either typical criminals or typical Islamic fundamentalists may lead to the same sort of limiting thinking.