In our post on the Washington Post article about the al Qaeda media production enterprise As-Sahab (”the Clouds”), we indicated that more would be said on the importance of cutting off the spigot of terrorists incitement to violence, hate and Jihadi training. We received this comment from colleague, Joseph Shahda, on his way back to the U.S. from an assignment in Japan. Shahda tells us why the Washington Post article and Senator Lieberman’s positions on the Goggle YouTube video shut down are important, if the Jihadis are to be cut off at the ‘virtual’ knees in cyberspace.

by Joseph Shahda

The more studies and analysis are done on Al Qaeda internet activities, the more it is obvious how dangerous is terrorist cyberspace. Terrorist cyberspace spreads terrorist propaganda, recruits new terrorists and trains these Jihadis online. These terrorist videos graphically portray how to conduct terrorist actions such as building bombs and explosives and conducting guerilla type warfare. The solution is very simple: Shut down all the terrorist forums and websites or at least shut down the major ones such as Al Ekhlaas, Al Hesbah, Al Firdaws, Al Boraq, etc… Some people who believe that shutting down terrorist forums is not effective are terribly wrong in their judgment. From a personal experience while monitoring the terrorist forums, once a major terrorist websites or forum is shut down there is a lot of pain and fear inflicted in the terrorist cyberspace community.

To those who believe that these forums can be back up again, we say that we can shut it down again. There is a point where it will be very hard for these terrorist forums and websites to be up if there are US and international laws that prohibit Internet Service Providers from hosting them. Some argue that these terrorist forums can be put up under a different names but this again will be easily detected because it is very hard to keep a terrorist website/forum address a secret when thousands of people are logging in everyday into website.