THE Australian Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism, Bill Paterson, has claimed that terror outfits that have embraced the rise of technology, the Internet in particular, to spread their messages and attract followers, are using Facebook to recruit loners from western nations like Australia to their cause.

He said social media has also encouraged the rise of home-grown terrorism, particularly among ‘disaffected loners sometimes on the margins of society,’ adding that Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik is a prime example. He also said that in democratic countries where Internet censorship is seen as an ‘infringement of freedom of information’ or a breach on civil liberties, stopping terrorists from communicating on social media is difficult.

The report does not specify as to what terrorist outfits — Islamist or non-Islamist — are involved. But it does indicate that if depressed western loners can be recruited, they can resort to acts like that of Anders Breivik, the Oklahoma-bombing Christian-convict, the block-buster movie-inspired American schoolchildren cum ‘killer-kids’, then why can’t they recruit poor unemployed individuals from a Third-World country like Pakistan to become merchants of death!

As Paterson suggests financial and psychological rehabilitative measures to let the lone westerners live a peaceful life, why can’t the world come to Pakistan’s help for initiating massive rehabilitative and development projects?

ESCHMALL SARDAR Peshawar