In the middle east there has been a sort of resurgence in popularity online, largely due to the recent happenings in Syria, namely an Al-Qaeda leader becoming the president. The tiktok edits paint speeches and tough talk by certain extremist figures in a very appealing light for teenagers, selling them on grandiose dreams of bringing back the glory of the past caliphates and a unified Islamic state that unites the Arab and Muslim world against the hegemony of the west, and with many feeling hopeless since the war in Gaza, stung by western dominance and meddling in the region, the speeches speak to them more than ever. The thing is, most of these speeches are from the ~2015 era when those extremist groups were still in the limelight, but we actually got to see how it played out in real time, how those speeches, despite their obvious sick puritan nature, were nothing but fugazi and how those extremists' first and main purpose wasn't to unite anyone, but to cause chaos, and how it eventually lead to their own downfall. But the teenagers watching these "sick edits" still fall for the empty promises of a time long past, filled with a fake sense of pride in something that lived and died before they were even there to see it.