INCITING? ENABLING? TRIGGERING? How should we view media responsibility in these recent days of mounting, and I’d suggest far from random, acts of extreme violence.
It would have been a mistake to ever think, if anybody really did, that the writer Salman Rushdie (left) might no longer be in danger, a full 33 years after the fatwa death sentence was declared against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, himself now long dead and gone.
No, the man charged with Rushdie’s attempted murder last Friday, 24-year-old Hadi Matar (below right) wasn’t even born when the fatwa was issued. A California native, the son of Lebanese parents, and later a New Jersey resident, Matar appears to have eagerly followed Shi’ite extremists online, as well as the activities and announcements of Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guards.
He presented himself in his New York Post jailhouse interview as an archetypal digital native of his generation, saying he spent most of time “using the internet, playing video games, watching Netflix, stuff like that,” while also affirming his admiration for the late Ayatollah: “I think he’s a great person.” The medium of influence may have changed – we are a long age away from the wholly analogue, secretly distributed cassette-tapes with which Khomeini initially spread his violent fundamentalism – but such extremism retains its hold on the impressionable across our worldwide web. ‘Anti-social media’ could be a better label.
The Ayatollah’s edict initially forced Rushdie to disappear from the north London district where we had been everyday neighbors. He went into hiding with round-the-clock Scotland Yard protection. But he eventually decided to risk life in the open, relatively speaking, and moved to the US in 2000. He was quoted by an Indian interviewer as saying he now regarded the often-renewed fatwa as “a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat,” but I doubt that represented the full range of his thinking. Rushdie could appear supremely self-confident, but he was never as complacent as the quote might have suggested.
Even with the greatest of care, no one can be safe every minute of every day. And the vicious knife attack at Chautauqua’s literary and philosophical retreat came as horrific confirmation of that dismal truth.
WARNING SIGNS, and indeed direct warnings of violence are everywhere to be found, coming from all corners of today’s feverish digital landscape.
Was anyone at all surprised when Donald Trump complained online (on his own site, Truth Social) that the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Largo residence was a witch-hunt, and his advisor Stephen Bannon then likened the FBI to the Gestapo?
Or that a 42-year-old US Navy and Florida Army National Guard veteran, Ricky Shiffer (left), would soon use Truth Social to repeat the ‘Gestapo’ label and issue a call to arms, “Kill FBI on sight”? Then within days, dressed in body armor and carrying an A-R15 rifle, he would launch an attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati field office, only to die after a chase and shoot-out with Ohio law enforcement. Shiffer, the Wall Street Journal could report, had ties to the so-called ‘Proud Boys,’ and had been at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021.
Three days later, Capitol Hill was the chosen site for a lone 29-year-old, Richard A. York III (below, right) from Delaware, who had a low-level criminal history, to crash his vehicle into a barricade, discharge shots, and in the end kill himself as police approached. “Motive unknown,” say the authorities. “More questions than answers,” says the Washington Post. Questions indeed; all of us must wonder what York had been scrolling through, viewing, listening to … before he took his catastrophic, almost certainly deranged decision.
‘The ultimate democratization of our means of communication.’ That was how the internet was being hailed back in those heady days of the century’s turn – not least, I remember, by the leading Democratic Party strategist, Joe Trippi.
By contrast, it has turned into a Wild West free-for-all, full of untrammeled, hate-filled incitement – all too familiar to analysts like Alex Friedfeld of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. He says prominent figures employ a kind of “rhetorical two-step” on the web, whereby they simultaneously claim to oppose violence and yet decry opponents in apocalyptic terms and issue calls for “War,” insisting all the while that such calls are metaphoric.
There’s nothing metaphoric about what we’ve seen this past week. And for clusters of cases like Matar, Shiffer and York the internet has become something else, very much reduced. It’s now a mere forensic tool for discerning — way too late, and too often — just what disturbed thinking, if that’s what it is, might lie behind extreme, even fatal acts.
