New Europe: Media and the Internet as a catalyst and accelerant for radicalisation in Europe
On October 31, 2017, a 29-year-old Uzbek man drove a rented pickup truck into people on a bicycle path in New York City, killing eight people and injuring 12. The perpetrator, Sayfullo Saipov, was an avid fan of ISIS propaganda. According to the Counter Extremism Project, Saipov’s attack was a textbook case of a vehicular attack, straight from the pages of ISIS’s magazine Rumiyah and the terror group’s online videos. According to the criminal complaint, he “(W)as inspired to carry out the Truck (sic) attack by ISIS videos he had watched on his cellular phone.” Furthermore, “Saipov was motivated to commit the attack after viewing a video in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi…questioned what Muslims in the United States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.” Law enforcement officers found more than 90 ISIS videos on the attacker’s phone, along with thousands of photos related to the terrorist group.
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