Al Qaeda recruiting goes all Loony Toons or something

Al Qaeda recruiting goes all Loony Toons or something

posted at 8:20 pm on July 22, 2011 by Jazz Shaw
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What’s a terrorist team to do when they can’t get anyone to take a leadership role for fear of a visit from Seal Team Six? Obviously you need to go back to the grass roots and capture the hearts and minds of the next generation. And what better way than a loveable set of cartoon characters?

    Yemen-based Al Qaeda sympathizers are in the midst of producing a children’s cartoon to recruit young Muslim viewers to join their cause and take up arms against the West, according to intelligence experts monitoring militant websites.

    Yemen-based Al Qaeda sympathizers are in the midst of producing a children’s cartoon to recruit young Muslim viewers to join their cause and take up arms against the West, according to intelligence experts monitoring militant websites.

    The British thinktank Quilliam, which aims to combat extremism, found out about the propaganda film on the password-protected Arabic-language al-Shumukh online forum Sunday. According to Quilliam, Abu al-Laith al-Yemin, a contributor to the website, wrote about the project that he is working on with several associates to teach children aboutAl Qaeda’s history and encourage them to engage in terrorist activity, Reuters reported.

Well… OK then!

Perhaps there’s simply too much of a gulf between the cultures or, possibly, I was poisoned by growing up watching Roadrunner and the coyote. But the actual human children portrayed in the cartoons of my youth didn’t end the show blowing up inside a bank. They were usually the winners, laughing at the foibles of the non-human antagonists.

Then again, maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle. If you wanted to convince children to blow themselves up, what better vehicle than a coyote who falls off a 500 foot cliff with a ten ton Acme anvil landing on his head who then gets up and walks away with just a few bandages and some bluebirds circling his head?

And I suppose that’s the scary part. What if it works?