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Web Brings War Home: Page 4 of 5

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has spoken out against videos showing Iraqi bodies and a recent well-publicized video of a soldier in a mess hall singing a song that describes the soldier laughing as a young Iraqi girl is shot.

"We love the First Amendment, and we use it everyday," Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's director of communications, said in an interview Friday. "The Internet is filled with anti-Muslim content, the vast majority of which we say nothing about. If it's something that deals with an official source, a credible source, we feel it is appropriate to challenge Islamaphobic content that promotes hatred or violence. If somebody is sending a "hi mom" from Baghdad, we have no problem with that. If it's video of war crimes or abuse, we have a problem with that."

Though images of death and destruction turned the tide of public sentiment during the Vietnam War, Hooper said he would not support showing Iraqi war dead for that aim because he does not believe those images have the same effect now.

"I don't think we've reached that stage yet," he said. "We're seeing images of civilians each day in Lebanon, yet there is no cease-fire agreement."

Hayden Hewitt, who co-owns Ogrish.com, takes the opposite view. His site posts insurgent video of beheadings as well as footage submitted by soldiers. He said he believes people should see the reality of war.

"It's not like other sites where you'll get 'lol. Another beheading," he said Friday during an interview from Manchester, United Kingdom. "You can look if you want and don't if you don't. We have descriptive captions so you can make a decision: 'Do I want to see this, or do I not want to see this?"