Satire and ridicule can help win the fight against Al-Qaeda by stripping it of its glamour and mystique, a team of researchers argue in a report released in London and in comments to AFP.

Beating the Islamist movement is as much about winning the battle of ideas and undermining Al-Qaeda's counter-culture cachet as it is about conventional anti-terrorism operations, said the report.

"Terrorism must be defeated through the deliberate 'toxification' of the al-Qaeda brand; not by making it seem dangerous, but by exposing it as dumb," Jamie Bartlett, one of the report's authors, told AFP.
"Al-Qaeda has to be ridiculed as the equivalent of a middle-aged dad at a school disco: enthusiastic, incompetent and excruciatingly uncool."

Bartlett, together with Jonathan Birdwell and Michael King, published "The edge of violence, a radical approach of extremism" on the website of the London-based think tank Demos on Friday.

Yes, they are right, though I don't know how victims of their attacks would feel. Anyway, humour is always good to fight off extremist scoundrels, mainly because they are so skin-softed when they are laughed at...