“The Internet is acting more and more like a virtual terrorist training camp,” wrote Dutch National Anti-Terrorism Coordinator Tjibbe Joustra in a report entitled ‘Jihadists and the Internet’ according to Radio Netherlands.  According to Joustra, there are 100 to 200 Dutch radical Islamic web sites whose main goals are to “form virtual networks, to facilitate training and for propaganda purposes.”

None of this is exactly new to anyone here, though the sheer number of sites in Dutch alone raises an eyebrow.  The problem, Joustra contends, is not necessarily that the radical Islamic message is out there in full force, but rather there are very few alternative voices to compete over the same audience.

“We’ve tried, in the report, to show the size of the problem and to make it clear that there is a huge amount of fundamentalist, Salafist or jihadist interpretations of Islam on the Internet. And we hope that this information will encourage other groups to put their far more moderate vision of Islam on the Internet.”

And hence the issue of radical Islam on the Internet almost mirrors the reality of the world.