INTRODUCTIONanother instance of a seemingly inevitable clash of religions (or, rather, of religion, notably
Islam, on the one hand, and the ‘‘religion of secularism, orlaı ̈cite ́,’’ on the other). This
perception, however, is largely a media-induced effect.^42
If deterritorialization and deculturalization are keys to understanding urban unrest,
well-intended appeals to multiculturalism are not of much use in addressing contempo-
rary religious violence. In Roy’s words: ‘‘In the end, we are dealing here with problems
found in any culture in which inequities and cultural differences come in conflict with
high ideals.. .—the struggle to integrate an angry underclass is one shared across the
Western world.’’^43 This is not to say that jihadists are not recruited under such conditions.
But other forms of violent destructiveness—aptly documented, long before the events of
2005, in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 filmLa Haine—may be more prominent (not least of
them sexual violence against women within the suburban communities themselves).
As in the case of the Bondy blog, the role of new media, notably the Internet, in this
constitution of contemporary identities is not exclusively that of social and psychological
isolation, compensated by a merely virtual, phantasmatic, and disembodied community
of likeminded souls. Another and more surprising tendency can be observed.
Shortly after the beginning, on July 12, 2006, of new hostilities between Hezbollah
and Israel, which soon involved missile launches into Israeli cities and relentless bombard-
ments by Tsahal on southern Lebanon and Beirut, it was widely reported that Israeli
and Lebanese bloggers established or kept open lines of communication with personal
observations and video images concerning events and developments on the ground that
largely escaped the official media of television and the printed press, to say nothing of
official channels of diplomatic exchange and military propaganda. Not for the first time,
though in a significant international conflict—and for worldwide Internet users to witness
directly—citizens refused to play by the rules laid down by states and semipolitical fac-
tions, armies, and ideological movements. They are helped by an informational network
(the Internet) that is decentralized and allows no (simple or direct) control. Israelis con-
sulted Lebanese blogs and vice versa, and both sides expressed themselves—for example,
on the blog of a certain Ramzi (‘‘Ramzi blah blah’’)—thus maintaining a dialogue, finding
mutual sympathy otherwise frustrated, and preventing the war and its victims (most of
them civilians) from being anonymous. But would attempts to personalize or singularize
the effects of war—rendering them visible, audible, palpable through media that are no
longer simple instruments of propaganda in the hands of governments and organizations
(as happened during the Balkan wars, as well)—make it easier one day to interrupt or
mitigate its violence?^44 It is clear that in affluent societies and emerging economies (China,
India, and several countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America) new technological
media—the Internet and the relatively recent phenomenon of personal participatory
media such as blogging, text and instant mobile phone messaging—are already dramati-
cally transforming the mass media industry, as well as the socio-cultural and political
landscape as a whole, albeit not everywhere with the same intensity, pace, and conse-
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