Many in St. Maarten expressed solidarity with their brothers and sisters on the French side and the population of France in general over the weekend after the merciless terrorist attacks that killed 132 in Paris. Flags in both Marigot and Philipsburg were
at half mast
and the Simpson Bay causeway illumination was red, white and blue. There can be no doubt that the people of “The Friendly Island” stand united against this horrific massacre of innocent civilians.
One point of growing global concern is the increasing use of the Worldwide Web for not only spreading hate, but inciting violence and even recruiting extremists to engage in this despicable form of so-called warfare through random killings. The suicide assailants are usually led to believe they will be rewarded in the afterlife for their cowardly act, as though any conceivable God would approve of such beastly behaviour.
While freedom of speech is a basic right for which real heroes have fought and died, one can’t help but wonder whether everything under the sun – up to instructions on home-made bombs – actually should fall into that category. And why is it that groups that openly advocate the deaths of others are permitted to do so via the Internet, including social media?
Perhaps the latter is just an unavoidable sign of the times, where nobody seems to have the power and/or means to stop the propaganda madness. After all, any talk of policing the Internet immediately raises pertinent issues like by whom, based on what criteria and with what sanctions, although there has been progress regarding, for example, child porn.
Still, to the average law-abiding citizen it’s a bit hard to understand how what are essentially criminal organisations promoting mass murder have known Websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that apparently can be neither traced accurately to physical locations nor shut down. Maybe the very nature of Western civilisation and its democratic system is part of the problem, because one imagines that in, say, China persons using the Internet to destabilise that country probably won’t get away with it so easily.
Mind you, finding suitable answers to these questions without jeopardising individual liberties will be difficult at best, but properly managing technical advances is one of the most important challenges facing modern man. The international community through the United Nations (UN) together with the telecommunication giants that dominate the digital information landscape in any case need to take this complicated matter seriously and somehow turn it into a joint responsibility.
