Islamic jihadists are besting the U.S. in the propaganda war, according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"Clearly, ISIS, al Shabab, and the al-Qaida related thugs that are out there, they are running circles around all of us," Cooper said Thursday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum." "They've managed to leverage the social networking platforms to really use it for propaganda, sometimes to command and control, certainly for recruitment, and here we are of course talking about them."
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Immediately following Wednesday's deadly shooting in a Tunis, Tunisia museum, Cooper said Twitter lit up with "celebrations of the event, saying that the frogs, meaning the French, had gotten what they had deserved."
Two days earlier, terrorists
used social media to warn of an attack.
"This is a situation that really is intolerable," Cooper said. "It's in effect handing over what would be the last generation's equivalent of all the TV, all the media, to the terrorists and allowing them to dictate the terms of engagement, to allow them to go unfearful, unadulterated directly not only to their constituents, but also to mock the United States, to spread fear and terror among civilian populations around the world and this simply has to stop."
To defeat the terrorists, it's crucial to degrade their online marketing campaigns, he continued.
"In order to do that, we have to get the full engagement of the companies. That means Twitter, it means YouTube, it means Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies that only our kids and grandchildren have heard about before.
"We need their voluntary involvement to make it more difficult for the terrorists, for the food chain of terrorism, to use those platforms in order to wreak havoc, in order to boast about events, current, future possibly and certainly past.
"If we don't get Twitter to come up with a list of rules and to begin to co-opt and to bar those groups that openly and proudly parade their allegiance to terrorism, we could lose this war."
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