SHAMI-WITNESS: A JULIUS STREICHER FOR THE INTERNET AGE?

If there was ever a tale for our time it is surely the case of @ShamiWitness. This pro-IS Twitter account was responsible for propagandising for IS on an industrial scale, pouring out tweets defending beheadings, slavery and the war unleashed against the Shia, Yazidi and Kurdish communities.

‘The account's influence cannot be underestimated. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR) pointed to ShamiWitness as the single greatest "influencer" on militant jihadist Twitter, around whom foreign fighters and their fans would cluster.

"We found that of all the Twitter accounts that Western foreign fighters followed, he was by far the most important, popular, and influential one, with more than 60 percent of the foreign fighters in our sample following, re-tweeting, and/or mentioning him," ICSR director Peter Neumann told VICE News.’[1]

Now the keyboard warrior has been ‘outed’ by a British television channel and revealed as Mehdi Masroor Biswas a 24yr old businessman working for a food company in Bengaluru India. He tweeted from a one bedroom apartment, seems to have few friends and kept himself to himself. That said he seems to have enjoyed some social life, famously including some ‘Hawaiian themed evenings.’

Mehdi Masroor Biswas aka ShamiWitness

On being outed the man who encouraged the jihadis in Kobane to 'give up their lives for Allah', made a number of statements that can only be characterised as pathetic.

"If I had a chance to leave everything and join them I might have... my family needs me here."

"I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't harmed anybody, I haven't broken any laws of the country. I haven't raised any war or any violence against the public of India," he said.’

Clearly frightened he expressed concern that the police wanted to kill him, and stated that he would not resist arrest,- nor indeed did he when the Indian police collared and cuffed him. This is the man who said of the young men whom he’d encouraged to travel to Syria and later died in the attempt to take Kobane "you bros [brothers] talked the talk, walked the walk". Whilst speaking of captured female fighters of the YPJ “I should thank PKK for recruiting female fighters, specially [sic] the ones caught alive by rebels. lol".[2]

So what to do with such a man,*now that he has been outed and arrested and is in Indian police custody, by all accounts singing like the proverbial canary?

Those who sit in comfortable surroundings, safe in the knowledge that they do not risk retribution and who spew out hatred, incite rape, murder and the dehumanising of fellow human beings, are the most contemptible people imaginable. They are not however a new phenomenon but are a creature of 19^th Century nationalism, which sought to render ‘the other,’ when necessary, beyond human empathy, pity or compassion.

This phenomenon of hate propaganda really came into its own during the First World War, with the likes of the Liberal MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley painting blood curdling portraits of the activities of ‘the Hun,’ as a means urging young men to go off and fight, at no risk, of course, to his own personal safety. Indeed some of the hate propaganda of the First World War prefigured the vilest propaganda of the Nazis. Thus of another armchair propagandist:-

“In the First World War he was with Intelligence…….how we laughed at his cleverness when he told us how his department had launched the account of German corpse factories and how the Hun was using myriads of trench war casualties for making soap and margarine.” [3]

The rise of fascism and later Stalinism saw the production of hate propaganda reach new heights, or more accurately lows. However it took the Nazi’s and the likes of Goebbels and Julies Streicher to produce hate material that sought to systematically dehumanise a whole race. This was the preparatory work required for genocide.

Which brings us back to Mehdi Masroor Biswas aka ShamiWitness. Perhaps the most grotesque aspect of the affair was the sudden discovery, by some of the very worst pro IS hate peddlers, of free speech, a concept they had hitherto derided. They even set up a hash tag #FreeShamiWitness.

Now putting aside the Everest size chutzpah here, is there a free speech dimension to this tale? Like all the most vehement peddlers of hate propaganda Mehdi is a coward, unwilling to risk his own skin, whilst egging on others and encouraging a climate in which it becomes permissible to commit the most bloody atrocities. Indeed the pornography of atrocity is part of the thrill of being a Jihadi keyboard warrior.

However as he says, “I just said stuff.” He pulled no trigger, did not hack off anyone’s head or engage in the rape of pubescent Yazidi and Christian children. He merely sat in the relative comfort of his downtown flat pouring out encouragement to those who were committing such acts. So was Mehdi just exercising his right to free speech? And we cannot duck the free speech issue just because the man happens to be a loathsome moral cretin.

The first reference point is simple, incitement to murder. In most open and democratic societies your free speech ends when you make threats to kill, or incite others to violence and murder. Though even this is more complex than it first appears. Thus when the appalling Mr. Jeremy Clarkson can state on daytime TV that striking workers should be shot, in front of their families, is he really inciting murder? All who listen to his rant know that though in poor taste and unfunny it is not serious. His words are frivolous, they carry no power. We understand this when we hear him speak and make sense of the context. Nobody is going to act on his words. This cannot be said of the outpourings of Mr Biswas.

When @ShamiWitness incited violence many of those on the receiving end of his tweets were in a position to carry out his lurid fantasies of subjugating or murdering ‘Kuffars,’ imposing inhuman punishments, or raping and enslaving women. They seem to have done so with relish. Whilst he may not have been aware of the full scale of the carnage, he knew enough, but continued to pour out his incitement.

I am however merely outlining the case for the prosecution, for Mr Biswas will get something that the victims of IS never get, a free and fair trial. There is precedent for such a trial and that is the case of Julies Streicher, the editor of the Nazi anti-sematic propaganda sheet ‘Der Sturmer,’ who was tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Streicher’s defence was the same as Biswas, that he had never himself pulled the trigger. The court however did not accept his defence and he was convicted of incitement to murder.

The ‘safety’ afforded by the anonymity of Twitter and the internet has unfortunately spawned a whole breed of little Streicher’s. The ShamiWitness case provides an opportunity to demonstrate that they may not always remain so unaccountable for their words of incitement and hatred. For this reason his trial is to be warmly welcomed.