Early yesterday I received an E-mail from Melissa McNamara informing me that my post on YouTube’s banning of Conservative content would be referenced in her Blogophile column. Ms. McNamara graciously included me along with a post from Hot Air to provide right of center perspective to the otherwise left leaning samplings of blogs discussing this topic. In reading the article, and following the links to the other blogs referenced, I was troubled by where the discussion was leading, specifically that the jihadi snuff films had socially redeeming qualities and should thus be protected.

In my generation this is called the G.G. Allin defense.

While some activists wanted Allin to be an example for free speech, the truth was Allin was a sexual sadist and a criminal. His violent acts had nothing to do with his stage show as he proved later when he was incarcerated for raping a fan. Supporters of jihadi videos are making a similar claim, that the posting of videos of Islamist killing people is an expression of free speech and an important source of the news that “the Bush Administration has actively sought to prevent Americans from seeing” according to Ted Landau of Slanted View. Adrian Chan seems to believe that YouTube’s posting of snuff films is part of a cultural revolution where the media can no longer act as agents of population control, while Courtney Radsch at Arab Media just doesn’t understand how the videos violates YouTubes posting policy.

For Courtney, the short answer is because it’s an actual crime to distribute the video documentation of a persons death for commercial gain. But for the rest of the blogs, the answer’s more complicated, because they seem to not really care about the illegality of this. By their logic, if a rapist video taped himself in the act of brutalizing a woman, and sent it to a for-profit corporation to be hosted it on their website, the “newsworthiness” of the rape would extend First Amendment protection to people who would otherwise be charged as accessories to the crime. The theory is that exposing the “larger truth” of the violence of war (which you and I simply cannot appreciate) supercedes all other concerns, even concerns that YouTube is becoming a jihadist recruiting tool.

The idea that those watching these films are “truth seekers” is ludicrous, the videos are made to appeal to sadist, people who derive emotional and sexual gratification from brutality and violence. The videos are designed to attract sadists to the ideology of jihad, by showing them that through its application they can live out their twisted fantasies. For ideological reasons of their own, these bloggers mentioned pretend that they’re blissfully unaware of what these videos are, but if the situation was reversed and the U.S. Army was posting footage of them killing people as part of a recruitment campaign they’d write a post very similar to this one about it.

And I’d agree with them.