Just one more example of the "jihadi viral videos" that I was writing about yesterday. Today I downloaded another clip, this one allegedly of a Shia rally praising Sistani as a descendent of the Prophet, denouncing King Abdullah as "son of an American." I say allegedly because the time, place, and nature of the rally are all unclear - one major feature of all of these video clips is how decontextualized they are, allowing people to put the worst possible spin on them if they are so inclined. Like most of these "jihadi viral videos", the clip was less than a minute long. It had been viewed more than 15,000 times on this forum alone since being posted yesterday.
This particular clip actually led to some confusion in the ensuring discussion. One participant pointed out that everybody in the (virtual) room hates and denounces the Saudi royal family, not least Osama bin Laden, so why get so upset about Shia doing the same? Was the clip being circulated by Saudi intelligence agents, who might mistakenly think that insults to King Abdullah would be negatively received? But others took the bait, denouncing the Shia as "worse than pigs" and defending Abdullah as at least better than a Shia. Another (rather amusingly) suggests that perhaps the real target of the rally was Jordan's King Abdullah, not the Saudi King Abdullah, since the former's mother was non-Arab (British, not American).
Whatever the case, it's just one more example of the growing impact of these viral clips. What I find most intriguing about them is that they circulate under the radar of the mass media, and I think are of increasing importance in shaping popular attitudes. When posted on forums or spread by SMS they are coming from relatively trusted interlocutors, giving them perhaps more credibility than something aired on the mass media. If anybody took me up on this morning's challenge - to reconstruct the origins and spread of the "Shia conversion meme" - I strongly suspect that these viral clips might play an important role.
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