Why wasn't there MySpace when I was 20?

Here's a news story I saw today that seems to hit kind of an odd conflation of moral panic and contemporary political anxieties. Its a typical "16-year-old girl runs away from home to be with the 20-something "predator" she met online, except that in this case the guy is Palestinian and from the West Bank.

My reactions to all this:

1) Predictable moral panic on the part of the news media about a 16-year-old girl hooking up with a guy in his 20's, especially since she met him online. Some papers are already referring to him as a "predator" and a "pedophile". Having been on both sides of teenager/20-something relationships, I call bullshit on that.

2) That said, secretly leaving your family to fly to another country to be with somebody you met online shows utter lack of common sense.

3) After all of the above negative publicity, dude still has his MySpace page, complete with tracks of his sub-Nine Inch Nails compositions and lots of moony-eyed teenagers commenting on how romantic the whole story is. --sigh--

4) From the Chronicle story, I get the impression he's one of those muslim kids that's embraced both pop modernity AND Islamic traditionalism, without really thinking out the contradictions between the two. (Pretty of the "muslim street" these days, actually.) Which makes me wonder if the two of them had managed to get together whether they'd have a typical teen romance, or whether he'd decide he wanted a traditional muslim wife, and start enforcing seclusion and hijab. Somehow I get the impression they never had that conversation.

5) I also can't help but think of the case about 10 years back of Ofir Rahum, a 16-year-old Israeli boy seduced online by a good-looking 20-something Palestinian woman, Amina Mouna, whom he met for a secret rendezvous, and instead was handed over to Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade gunmen for prompt execution. Places like the West Bank, Iraq, etc aren't exactly the best places to blindly follow your heart.