Hamstrung by a culture of “political correctness” and afraid of litigation or violence, many mainstream media outlets now err on the side of extreme caution when reporting on radical Islam. One need only recall the reporting on the recent Fort Hood massacre, and the subsequent suggestion that the gunman had suffered from a previously unknown “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” or the way on which the Mohammed cartoons were reported upon in European and the US. If one wanted to see the “offending” images, one had to visit one of the smaller news and opinion sites or “counter jihad” blogs. Again, when LiveLeak temporarily removed Geert Wilders’ movie Fitna, these sites hosted it. They have also been at the forefront of exposing anti-Semitism on display at “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations, and in reporting on riots in France and other European states.

Despite severe restrictions on reporting inside Iran, that country’s pro-democracy dissidents have also been able to get the facts on the ground out via the internet, and, most famously, via the social networking site Twitter. In June, as Iranians took to the street to protest against the election results – widely regarded as rigged – the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance. Iranian protestors had been using the site to send messages to the outside world about the brutality the regime and its thugs were inflicting on them. Some of this information may well have been lifesaving, as Iranian Tweeters warned which hospitals had been turned into traps by the regime’s militia, and which embassies had been blocked.

In December, when pro-democracy protestors took to the streets again, Twitter was hacked and briefly taken over by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army. This was the same month that the German broadcasting network Deutsche Welle was targeted with jamming signals, later found to have originated at Tehran. Continue Reading →