LiveLeak, Fitna, and the Base

This is an open letter to LiveLeak.

In these days of the globalized Jihad everyone must choose their allies, their customers, their base with care. Choices not made still have consequences.

A few days ago, Fitna hit the Internet. LiveLeak, which hosted it, became the target of threats and rage. About 12 hours after posting the movie, LiveLeak took it down.

This is quite ironic because LiveLeak, hosted in both the UK and USA, has long been one of the most reliable places to find jihad terrorist propaganda videos. For the past couple of years, YouTube and LiveLeak have hosted hundreds, thousands of terrorist propaganda videos featuring such horrors as Juba's sniper attacks on American and British soldiers, IED and VBIED explosions, torture murders of captives, etc. YouTube initially resisted requests to take the videos down, but eventually began to comply. On the other hand, when requested by American and British citizens to remove the terrorist propaganda movies, LiveLeak always used free speech as a defense for letting the movies stay.

For several years, against the opprobrium of patriots from the English speaking countries, LiveLeak stood firm in its stand for the free speech rights of those who were profoundly opposed to free speech for those who were not as them. Its reputation grew among the terrorists and the terrorists' fans, both from idolaters of Jihad and those with a nihilist, post-modern, Gramscian hatred of ordinary British and American culture. LiveLeak's developed these haters of Britain, America, Christianity, Jews, and capitalism into its base.

So when Geert Wilders came along with his well-publicized project to face Islam with the idolatry of Jihad within it, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for LiveLeak to poke a stick in the eye of a new target. LiveLeak exists to stir things up like this. But this time it backfired. LiveLeak was threatened, not with scorn and indignation, but with bloodcurdling threats of violence against employer, employees, and their families. The threats were believable because the evidence that violent Muslims would carry them out was in color on LiveLeak's very own site. Worse yet, the base of haters that LiveLeak had built up with great care was the heart of the revolt against it. Now LiveLeak felt the hatred and threat of violence that it had gleefully helped its own base aim at others for years.

It spooked LiveLeak. The company threw in its cards. It banished Fitna with the cynical excuse that the price of free speech was too great.

Now it was apparent to everyone what LiveLeak was. Its ethical stance was revealed as a rotting corpse. LiveLeak turned out to be a cowardly organization that cheered on murderers against its employees, their neighbors, and the countries in which they lived. Were any LiveLeak employees killed in the 7/7 bombings? Were the brothers of any LiveLeak employees killed in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? Perhaps not, but they very well could have been. But when LiveLeak itself faced a few threats it quickly gave up and censored one, carefully chosen video that it hosted.

A few days later, LiveLeak restored Fitna. But it does not help LiveLeak, which now stands exposed as a cowardly, rabble-rousing, self-loathing organization without even the courage of its convictions. LiveLeak's way forward will either be to self-destruct, or to take sides. Will it recruit its base from the peoples of the countries that nurtured it, that provided the environment in which the technology that allows it to exist was developed, countries that send brave young, all-too-young, men to dangerous places to protect LiveLeak from morally retrograde murderers and slave-takers, or will it recruit its base among those who would overthrow free speech, democracy, women's and gay rights, scientific discovery, secular law, who would reinstate slavery and impose the burka, honor killings, second class citizenship, and clitorodectomies on women? That is the choice before it. The result of no choice will be a slow death of nihilism and irrelevance.

LiveLeak, it is time to choose. This is the moment that will make or break you. Take your stand or slowly wither away.

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