by joe eskenazi
staff writer
Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, he’ll be watching you — provided you’re an anti-Semitic extremist. And like to write about it on the Internet.
The “he” in this case is Brian Marcus, the Anti-Defamation League’s Director of Internet Monitoring. It’s a job title that sounds equally foreboding and lofty, but the genial Marcus manages to explain what he does with nary a word of jargon: “I get paid to be a geek.”
And, make no mistake, there are traces of geekiness in Marcus’ road to being the online scourge of anti-Semites. The 36-year-old used his bar mitzvah money to buy a computer (a PC, he feels inclined to note) and, unlike most teenagers in 1984, he was more interested in programming than Pac-Man.
Fast-forwarding 23 years, Marcus has 485 unread emails in his Blackberry; he’s the ADL’s walking source on Internet rumors. He and his staff “slurp” thousands of Web pages a day, tracking the ongoing musings of extremists weighing in from Northern Idaho to southern Iraq. And if the term “extremist Web site” conjures up images of horrible, red-text-on-black background sites with cheesy, rotating clip art images of swastikas or eagles, Marcus has a message for you: Welcome to the new century.
These days, white supremacists — especially Muslim jihadists — are producing astoundingly well-polished and professional material for posting on the Web. Marcus whips out his ubiquitous laptop and plays a Hezbollah file from the early 1990s. The music is out of sequence, the film quality is grainy and, other than the machine guns and rockets being fired, it looks like something you’d shoot in your backyard.
With a click of a button, he cues up a recent al Qaida Web posting — and, right from the terrorist group’s computer generated logo at the beginning of the clip serving the same purpose as the MGM lion, it’s obvious that the world of terror videos has experienced a sea change in the past dozen years.
Computer animation as good as any you’d see on the History Channel depicts a convoy of American Jeeps in Pakistan fatally interrupted when a dynamite-laden car backs into the U.S. vehicle with explosive results. This attack actually happened — and the al Qaida video goes on to show the “martyr” creating the bomb, packing it into his trunk and offering his valediction. It’s a slick, well-produced video of higher quality than the infomercials one sees for juice machines or motivational speakers.
In today’s world, points out Marcus, even the uneducated pawns being recruited to back TNT-laden cars into American Jeeps make value judgments based on the quality of a terror group’s films. In short, no one wants to become a martyr if your snuff video is all grainy and poorly produced. That’s so 1994.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a Western audience or not. More and more, people are media connoisseurs and more picky about these things. They see a well-done commercial and think of the money, power and influence,” said Marcus, who works in Manhattan and traveled through the Bay Area this week for a series of speeches in schools.
Sometimes even Marcus has to hand it to these jihadists; he’s watched one British Muslim anti-Semitic, pro-Hezbollah rap video so many times he can sing along with the chorus. (“What can I say? It has a beat”.)
Most of Marcus’ work is far less musical. He records hate groups announcing they’ll meet for an event at a certain time and place, and may alert law enforcement. He charts extremist trends — opposition to immigration is a galvanizing issue here in the U.S., for example — and notes who hosts extremist sites and what connections the extremists make.
From day to day, he never knows what he’s going to find.
“Look at this,” he says while surfing the Web. “It’s a step-by-step presentation on how to make a suicide bomb belt.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California