comment by Jerry Gordon

It appears that mainstream media has finally woken up to the power of the internet by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to engage in propaganda, incitement to violence and training Jihadis via the internet. This Washington Post article focuses on the massive output of sophisticated videos, iPod downloads and materials for chat room forums produced by As Sahab, (”the cloud”), the Al Qaeda media production enterprise. Senator Lieberman reported extensively on As Sahab in a U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee report released on May 8th, entitled: “Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat”. Following the release of that report, Senator Lieberman and the Senate Committee followed up those revelations with an effort to get Google to take down many of these As Sabah videos posted on YouTube, only to be rebuffed by Google, the ACLU and mainstream media editors. Our colleague Joseph Shahda and we at ACT have supported the Lieberman initiative because those videos are used to train Jihadis here in the US, like the trio of Muslim extremists from Toledo, Ohio recently convicted in a federal court decision. We will have more to say about this in the coming days. This Washington Post article is at least an admission that what Lieberman and we have been saying for months in finally getting through, we hope.

By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, June 24, 2008

Early this year, a religious radical calling himself Abu Hamza had a question for the deputy leader of al-Qaeda regarding the Egyptian secret police. “Are they committing unbelief?” he tapped on his keyboard. “And is it permissible to kill them?”

A few weeks later, an answer came from a man with a $25 million bounty on his head, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Killing the police is justified, Zawahiri replied, because they are “infidels, each and every one of them.”

The exchange was part of the latest propaganda coup orchestrated by al-Qaeda: an online chat between Zawahiri — one of the world’s most wanted fugitives — and hundreds of curious people around the globe. After announcing in a Web forum in December that he would entertain questions on virtually any topic, Zawahiri received 1,888 written queries from journalists and the public. He patiently answered about one-fifth of them, even hostile postings that condemned al-Qaeda for harming innocents and perverting Islam.

The war against terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda’s voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has built an increasingly prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential recruits worldwide.

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda’s commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network’s in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005. (As-Sahab means “the clouds” in Arabic, a reference to the skyscraping mountain peaks of Afghanistan.) (Continue Reading this Article)