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Ramadan Massacre in Orlando

June 13, 2016

Ramadan Massacre in Orlando, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, June 13, 2016

(The Orlando massacre happened because of homophobic Christians and their horrid firearms. CAIR and Obama have told us so and it’s true. It  had nothing to do with Islam and to claim that it did is Islamophobic. Muslims are the victims. Thus spake the left. When will they blame anthropomorphic climate change? — DM)

Ramadan shooter

It was the worst mass shooting ever on American soil: Omar Mateen, 29, opened fire at the Pulse, an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub, on Saturday night. Mateen murdered at least fifty people and wounded another 53. The death count is almost certain to go higher, as many are quite gravely wounded. Mateen was a Muslim who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and mentioned the Boston Marathon jihad killers in a 911 call just before he started shooting. Thus in the wake of the jihad massacre, it was time for the Leftist political and media elites to do what they always do first and foremost after every jihad massacre: make sure that no one thought ill of Islam.

The FBI, to its credit, immediately declared the massacre a terror attack, but Barack Obama was circumspect about what kind: he declared that it was too early to know “the precise motivations of the killer.” This despite the fact that not only had Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and made reference to the Tsarnaev brothers, but also the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI is investigating reports that Mateen recited Islamic prayers during the massacre. On top of all that, the attack took place during the Muslim month of Ramadan, during which the Islamic State has called for jihad attacks against Americans.

Nonetheless, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with many other Leftists, tried to turn the jihad attack into a commercial for rolling back Americans’ Second Amendment rights, tweeting: “We mourn with the people of Orlando and the LGBT community as a whole on the news that -once again- we have lost precious lives to the gun.” Who knew that guns could be so diabolical and anti-gay?

Leftist responses ranged from the ominous to the absurd. Ominously, Facebook and Reddit turned to censorship to try to prevent people from thinking ill of Islam. Facebook removed the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) page, which had been up for six years and had over 55,000 members, and Reddit began banning people who dared to mention that the killer was a Muslim.

On the absurd side, ACLU staff attorney Chase Strangio tweeted that the massacre was the fault of conservative Christians: “You know what is gross — your thoughts and prayers and Islamophobia after you created this anti-queer climate.” Does the illustrious Strangio actually believe that Omar Mateen was incited to commit mass murder in the gay nightclub in Orlando by an “anti-queer climate” created by Christian conservatives? He probably does, since, as a Leftist, he knows that non-Muslims are always and everywhere to blame for atrocities that Muslims commit.

Not only are non-Muslims to blame for Muslim atrocities, but Muslims are their victims, even when no Muslims are killed. AFP reported that “Florida officials also invited a local Islamic leader to address the media in a bid to preempt a possible backlash against the Muslim community.” Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida warned against“sensationalizing” the story.

In a similar vein, gay activist Steven W Thrasher wrote sanctimoniously in the Guardian: “Let us remember that we have never really blamed all Christians, Republicans or Democrats (many who have organized en masse to subject queer people to systematic violence and destruction at different points in American history) for the violence waged against us. We should remember that again today. We should remember not to blame all members of any other religion or political ideology for what one person does.” Right. The problem is that any examination of the motives and goals of people such as Omar Mateen, and any consideration of what can be done about them, is always met with the accusation that such examinations and considerations constitute blaming all Muslims for the actions of jihadis. It is so obviously fallacious that it is hard not to suspect that it is an intentional obfuscation.

In reality, the motivation for the jihad is quite clear, but Barack Obama doesn’t want to acknowledge that, because to do so would force him to confront the reality of Islamic teaching regarding gays. The Qur’an says: “If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-returning, Most Merciful.” (4:16) That seems rather mild, but there’s more. The Qur’an also depicts Allah raining down stones upon people for engaging in homosexual activity: “We also sent Lot. He said to his people: “Do you commit lewdness such as no people in creation committed before you? For you practise your lusts on men in preference to women: you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds….And we rained down on them a shower of brimstone: Then see what was the end of those who indulged in sin and crime!” (7:80)

Muhammad makes clear that Muslims should be the executors of the wrath of Allah by killing gays. A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” (Abu Dawud 38:4447) And: “Stone the upper and the lower, stone them both.” (Ibn Majah 3:20:2562)

Combine this with the fact that Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani recently called on Muslims to use this Ramadan to “get prepared, be ready … to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers…especially for the fighters and supporters of the caliphate in Europe and America,” and Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State, and there is no doubt whatsoever what Omar Mateen was trying to do.

The Left has chosen to protect Islam at all costs, even at the expense of its other victim groups. When the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) several years ago ran ads highlighting the mistreatment of gays in Islamic law, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which is its city council, issued a resolution condemning not that mistreatment, but our ads. Gay advocates such as Theresa Sparks and Chris Stedman attacked us for daring to call attention to the institutionalized mistreatment of gays under Islamic law. Their gay advocacy doesn’t extend to standing up to Sharia oppression of gays, even though that oppression is far more virulent and violent than anything from “right-wing extremists” in the U.S.

And you can’t blame them: given the Leftist/jihadist alliance, it’s clear that if they spoke out against Sharia mistreatment of gays, they would no longer be invited to the best parties, and might even be branded as “right-wing.” Their moral cowardice and duplicity, however, are obvious, and monstrous in the light of what has just happened in Orlando. The Left’s continuing and now reflexive obfuscation and denial in the wake of every jihad massacre only ensures that there will be many, many more such massacres.

Categories: CAIR, Christians, Facebook, Freedom of speech, Gun control, Homosexuals, Islam and homosexuals, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamisation, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Obama's America, Orlando massacre, Political correctness, Political Islam, Propaganda, Ramadan, Sharia law
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Hatred with and without algorithms

May 29, 2016

Hatred with and without algorithms, Israel Hayom, Judith Bergman, May 29, 2016

If you have ever found it profoundly disturbing that so much political debate centers on an online ‎platform, Facebook, which was originally about social interaction, but has by now metamorphosed into a ‎grotesque, many-headed monster that actively encourages (more about that later) and whips into a ‎frenzy existing hatred against Israel and Jews, your intuition was correct. The latest journalistic ‎experiment, in what can only be described as the dark underbelly of Facebook, confirms it. ‎

While the fact that Facebook is rife with anti-Semitic hatred is not news to anyone with even a fleeting ‎familiarity with the platform, the following is bound to disturb even the most hardened cynic.‎

A journalist from the British online newspaper Jewish News went undercover on Facebook, creating ‎fake anti-Israel internet profiles in order to infiltrate the anti-Semitic hate groups that proliferate on the ‎social platform. What he discovered were groups resembling “a lynch mob from the Middle Ages, its ‎members winding each other up until the entire group is burning with an anger that is desperate for an ‎outlet.” He mentions how one highly active group, “Israel is a War Criminal,” has more than 250,000 likes. ‎Browsing its timeline regularly, he says, “is a horrifying and deeply disturbing influence. … It is a ‎cesspit of vile and extreme political activism.”‎

What is of most concern, however, is not even the virtual cesspit of violent language and hatred, or the ‎sewer-like fabricated memes created, Goebbels-style, merely to elicit the most primitive ‎response against Israel and Jews. The most disturbing part in all this is that Facebook actively participates ‎in the hate fest, egging the participants on until hate is everywhere: “As the website builds a profile of ‎what you like and what you do not, it begins to form a unique bubble around your online existence … which means when I search for ‘Israel,’ I receive groups that are inherently pro-Israeli, but when ‘Mr. X’ ‎does, he sees a completely different list. … The truly disturbing element of the search results is that they ‎produce a list that is almost hermetically sealed in one direction. They give the appearance that the other ‎side doesn’t exist.”‎

In other words, Facebook’s algorithms ensure that users only see more of what they have already liked ‎and seen. Therefore, if you are an anti-Semitic or anti-Israel Facebook user, Facebook ‎aims to please by showing you anti-Semitic or anti-Israel Facebook posts, even if you just put in ‎‎”Israel” in the search field. In this way, those Facebook users “learn” that their warped reality is “true,” repeatedly ‎confirming their prejudices until the hatred has become all-pervasive. ‎

The Jewish News journalist’s observation regarding Facebook’s algorithms aptly confirms what Shurat‎ Hadin concluded in October, when the Israeli organization filed a lawsuit against Facebook: “Facebook ‎actively assists the inciters to find people who are interested in acting on their hateful messages by ‎offering friend, group and event suggestions and targeting advertising based on people’s online ‘likes’ and internet browsing history.”‎

In other words, Facebook actively works to create hate-filled, anti-Semitic echo chambers — a sobering ‎and truly horrific thought that everyone ought to consider, whenever they enter the virtual meeting ‎place.‎

The trouble with the online echo chambers is, of course, that they do not remain online. The ‎incitement makes its way into the real world, where it may manifest itself in stabbings and murders in ‎Israel and anti-Semitic hate crimes and terrorism elsewhere.‎

Let’s take a step back from the virtual world for a moment and contemplate whether we see the disturbing Facebook trend in real life as well. Echo chambers are not unique to the ‎virtual world of social media. It is a growing phenomenon in real life, as well — a particular version of “reality” ‎regarding Israel is promulgated, circulated and reinforced endlessly, until it becomes the only “truth.” ‎

The United Nations is one such echo chamber, where the very language applied about Israel is coded in ‎phrases that denote a reality that does not exist outside this disaster of an international organization. ‎Nevertheless, most of the diplomats involved in the U.N., whether they agree with this language or not in ‎private, uniformly employ it as if it were true, leading to the establishment of a false reality that has dire ‎consequences on the decisions and votes made against Israel. One recent and striking example was the yearly vote on Israel in the World Health Organization, where the Jewish state was again ‎denounced as the world’s only health violator. The absurdity of this decision is extreme, yet grown men ‎and women, highly educated diplomats from supposedly civilized nations such as the U.K., France and ‎Germany, supported the resolution. By doing this, they not only betrayed all logic and ‎the justice they purport to support, but they clearly demonstrated that there exists in the U.N. ‎an alternate reality similar to the alternate reality that Jew-haters inhabit online ‎in the seedy underbelly of Facebook.‎

Western academia and university campuses represent another echo chamber where the established ‎‎”truths” abut Israel may not be challenged according to the reigning rules of political correctness, and ‎where professors and social justice warriors reinforce each other’s deep-seated anti-Semitic prejudices ‎in a way that creates an alternate reality similar to those mentioned above. ‎

This is not, however, limited to university education. In Britain, a schoolgirl from Wanstead High ‎School was met with frenzied jubilation and won the regional final in a speaker’s competition, the Jack ‎Petchey Speak Out” Challenge, after giving a virulent anti-Israel speech.The speech was a primitive ‎variation of the most commonly spewed diatribes against Israel, yet she was applauded by the school’s ‎teachers and pupils, as well as the local authorities, and rewarded accordingly. ‎

Tis is the result of yet another echo chamber, which now exists in British primary education. The British ‎National Union of Teachers, aptly named NUT, actively condones similar propaganda to that which is ‎found on Facebook’s hate sites, in the U.N. and in academia, thus supporting from an early age the ‎imbibing of British children with hatred toward Israel and furthering the dissemination of Palestinian ‎propaganda. As an example of this, NUT recently supported a conference,“Nakba: Then and Now” in ‎London, organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. At this conference, ex-NUT President Philippa ‎Harvey, speaking on behalf of the union, described a new project called “Beyond the Wall,” which intends ‎to engage U.K. schools in learning about schooling in conflict zones. The project intends to show films to the ‎young Britons that illustrate “the daily struggles experienced by Palestinian children as they try to gain ‎an education.” One hardly dares to imagine the kind of untruths and propaganda running rampant in ‎those films.‎

Whereas it is important to fight the virtual cesspool of hatred, which serves as its own brainwasher and ‎echo chamber, as it were, on Facebook, we must not lose sight of the fact that the exact same ‎mechanisms at work on Facebook are very much at play in the way that anti-Semites and Israel haters ‎operate in the real world. There they create their own nonvirtual echo chambers, which are equally or ‎even more dangerous, because they have a much further reach than just the haters and trolls prowling ‎the internet. ‎

By surrounding themselves with like-minded haters and creating alternate realities and ways of ‎speaking about those realities, in schools, on campus, in academic circles and among diplomats in the U.N., ‎they ultimately become blind to any kind of objective facts, and they even lose the language needed for rational discourse about Israel. And they don’t even need computer algorithms to ‎do it.

Categories: Antisemitism, Echo chambers, Facebook, Hate groups, Israel, Israel and human rights, Media, United Nations
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Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech

February 5, 2016

Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech, Gatestone Institute, Douglas Murray, February 5, 2016

♦ Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

♦ The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.

♦ In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.

♦ The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.

At the time, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this exchange was that the German Chancellor — at the very moment that her country was going through one of the most significant events in its post-war history — should have been spending any time worrying about how to stop public dislike of her policies being vented on social media. But now it appears that the discussion yielded consequential results.

Last month, Facebook launched what it called an “Initiative for civil courage online,” the aim of which, it claims, is to remove “hate speech” from Facebook — specifically by removing comments that “promote xenophobia.” Facebook is working with a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann, which aims to identify and then erase “racist” posts from the site. The work is intended particularly to focus on Facebook users in Germany. At the launch of the new initiative, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained that, “Hate speech has no place in our society — not even on the internet.” She went to say that, “Facebook is not a place for the dissemination of hate speech or incitement to violence.” Of course, Facebook can do what it likes on its own website. What is troubling is what this organization of effort and muddled thinking reveals about what is going on in Europe.

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The mass movement of millions of people — from across Africa, the Middle East and further afield — into Europe has happened in record time and is a huge event in its history. As events in Paris, Cologne and Sweden have shown, it is also by no means a series of events only with positive connotations.

As well as being fearful of the security implications of allowing in millions of people whose identities, beliefs and intentions are unknown and — in such large numbers — unknowable, many Europeans are deeply concerned that this movement heralds an irreversible alteration in the fabric of their society. Many Europeans do not want to become a melting pot for the Middle East and Africa, but want to retain something of their own identities and traditions. Apparently, it is not just a minority who feel concern about this. Poll after poll shows a significant majority of the public in each and every European country opposed to immigration at anything like the current rate.

The sinister thing about what Facebook is doing is that it is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might consider racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

And it just so happens to turn out that, lo and behold, this idea of “racist” speech appears to include anything critical of the EU’s current catastrophic immigration policy.

By deciding that “xenophobic” comment in reaction to the crisis is also “racist,” Facebook has made the view of the majority of the European people (who, it must be stressed, are opposed to Chancellor Merkel’s policies) into “racist” views, and so is condemning the majority of Europeans as “racist.” This is a policy that will do its part in pushing Europe into a disastrous future.

Because even if some of the speech Facebook is so scared of is in some way “xenophobic,” there are deep questions as to why such speech should be banned. In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations, and only violence is left. Weimar Germany — to give just one example — was replete with hate-speech laws intended to limit speech the state did not like. These laws did nothing whatsoever to limit the rise of extremism; it only made martyrs out of those it pursued, and persuaded an even larger number of people that the time for talking was over.

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week, reports from the Netherlands told of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on Twitter and other social media.

In this toxic mix, Facebook has now — knowingly or unknowingly — played its part. The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

Categories: Antisemitism, Asylum seekers, Europe, Facebook, Freedom of speech, Germany, Hate speech, Internet, Islamic invasion, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Merkel, Multiculturalism, Racism, Xenophobia
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Gruesome Facebook posts set agenda for new Palestinian terrorism

October 13, 2015

Gruesome Facebook posts set agenda for new Palestinian terrorism Scornful of their leadership, mistrustful of mainstream media, young assailants impacted by pages filled with grisly images and caricatures encouraging attacks

By Elhanan Miller October 13, 2015, 7:26 pm

Source: Gruesome Facebook posts set agenda for new Palestinian terrorism | The Times of Israel

A caricature by Hasan Abadi encourages Palestinians to stab Israeli soldiers [Facebook image]

 

Less than 48 hours before he boarded a Jerusalem bus Tuesday morning and opened fire on its passengers, killing two, Bahaa Allyan was busy castigating mainstream media on his Facebook page.

On Sunday morning, a fellow resident of his village of Jabel Mukabber, Israa Ja’abees, was badly wounded in an explosion when she tried to detonate gas canisters in her car en route to Jerusalem. The alertness of an Israeli policeman who stopped the car for inspection prevented a massive terror attack in the capital, Israeli media reported. The woman yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is most great) and set off the explosive detonator in her car, a police statement said

But on Allyan’s Facebook page, filled with posts utterly hostile to Israel and derisive of the Palestinian Authority, the story was dramatically different. A graphic designer by profession, he had been in touch with Ja’abees’s family who, he wrote, told her that her car had malfunctioned on the way to Hebrew University. The Israeli forces, they said, mistook an electric short for a terror attack and opened fire, “killing her in cold blood.”

“I am posting news on my [Facebook] page due to the absence of real media, and also to refute Hebrew media which some consider credible but is certainly not,” wrote Allyan, who was 22. “Without real media our truth will be lost.”

Jerusalem terrorist Bahaa Allyan Bahaa Allyan Facebook page

It was not only in official media that Allyan felt he had no voice. Palestinian leadership, be it local or national, had failed the people, he emphatically argued.

“Let the Palestinian Authority know that a ceasefire [with Israel] is in the hands of the people, not in the hands of any of its rulers,” he wrote on Saturday. The following day, he added: “The reassuring thing is that the leaders are out of the equation. The opportunists and those who love to appear on television will soon be marginalized.”

On October 4, Allyan had complained that Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian village of 32,000 residents annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, was not living up to its reputation. (The village produced the Abu Jamal cousins, who carried out the terror attack on a Har Nof synagogue that killed four Jewish worshipers and a policeman in November 2014).

‘Where are the patriotic forces in Jabel Mukaber?’ wrote Bahaa Allyan two days before the attack

“When you walk around Jabel Mukaber you find only one or two shops closed and everyone else open, as though they’re not concerned by the situation,” he wrote. “Where are the patriotic forces in Jabel Mukaber? My criticism is directed at the locals before the patriotic forces. Every shop owner should decide to strike on his own. Everyone tells me not to air our dirty laundry. No! Everyone should know that there are no patriots and only two or three shops are shut, unfortunately.”

“Don’t jump up and tell me ‘no one notified us.’ Things are clear and everyone knows that situation. No one needs to tell you to strike. Our martyrs deserve mourning. Commerce is futile in light of the events.”

Allyan, like other terrorists who have shared their thoughts and emotions on Facebook ahead of their deadly attacks, belonged to a new generation which despises political authority and deeply suspects any intuition other than its own. Inspired by the activism of Arabs across the Middle East, he had nothing but scorn for the inaction of his fellow Palestinians in the face of Israel’s perceived aggressive onslaught.

Approximately one third of Palestinian society in Jerusalem and the West Bank is active on social media, said Orit Perlov, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) who specializes in Palestinian social media.

“There are no borders in social media,” she said. “The same message resonates in Gaza, Jerusalem and Um al-Fahm.”

An image posted on the Facebook account of a Palestinian activist (Facebook image)

According to Perlov, the availability of the internet in Palestinian society makes it an equalizing and democratizing tool, granting a voice to women and youths who have no say in mainstream Palestinian politics.

In recent months, she added, Israel and the PA have been monitoring and arresting prominent Palestinian social media activists in Jerusalem and the West Bank, leaving the arena “like an octopus with tentacles but no head.”

Orit Perlov, a social media expert at INSS, October 13, 2015 Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel

ِAllyan had posted photos of Palestinian attackers, lying dead in puddles of blood in Jerusalem, after being shot dead by Israeli police. The photos were doubtless downloaded from a plethora of news sites followed by youth like him — sites that post videos and photos from attack sites within seconds of their occurrence — and which have all but supplanted newspapers and satellite channels as a main source of information.

Facebook pages such as Quds News Network (3.6 million followers on Facebook, 264,000 on twitter); Shehab News Agency (4.1 million followers on Facebook, 99,000 on twitter), and Urgent from Gaza (282,000 followers on Facebook) flood Palestinian computer screens with gruesome images of dead Palestinians and caricatures encouraging more attacks, often accompanied by a hashtag ordering “stab!” or warning “al-Aqsa is in danger!”

As frustrating as it may be for Israeli decision-makers, statements by Palestinian leaders have little effect on the perpetrators of deadly attacks. If anything, it is the leaders who follow the trend set by social media at the grassroots level, adopting hashtags invented by teenagers and online activists.

Last December, Allyan posted a chilling “will for any martyr” on his Facebook page, a document that has gone viral on Palestinian media following his death.

“I instruct the factions not to claim responsibility for my martyrdom. My death was for my homeland, not for you,” read article number 1. ” Don’t turn me into a number to be counted today and forgotten tomorrow. See you in heaven.”

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Video: Hatchet-wielding attacker has “Islamic extremist leanings”

October 24, 2014

Video: Hatchet-wielding attacker has “Islamic extremist leanings” Hot Air, Ed Morrissey, October 24, 2014

(There may be a possible  connection with Islamist “extremism.” In other breaking news, there may be a possible  connection between the daily rising of the sun and mornings. However, we must not “jump to conclusions.” — DM)

Yesterday, a man wielding a hatchet attacked four New York City police officers, inflicting a head wound on one that left the officer in critical condition. The other officers opened fire on the attacker, killing him and wounding a bystander. At first, the attack could have been chalked up to simple insanity, but then SITE took a look at Zale Thompson’s Facebook page:

The man who attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet before being shot dead was reported to have Islamic “extremist leanings” police and a monitoring group said.

The man, identified in the US media as Zale Thompson, had posted an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook that “display a hyper-racial focus in both religious and historical contexts, and ultimately hint at his extremist leanings,” the SITE monitoring group said. …

SITE, which monitors radical Muslim groups, said that in a comment Thompson had posted to a pro-Islamic State video on September 13, 2014, he described “jihad as a justifiable response to the oppression of the ‘Zionists and the Crusaders.’”

Police commissioner Bill Bratton advised people not to jump to conclusions:

“There is nothing we know of at this time that would indicate that were the case,” he said.

“I think certainly the heightened concern is relative to that type of assault, based on what just happened in Canada and recent events in Israel — certainly one of the things that first comes to mind — but that’s what the investigation will attempt to determine,” Bratton said.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Jim Sciutto, their national-security correspondent, about the issue later last night. Sciutto reports that the NYPD is looking at the same data as SITE:

The New York Daily News notes that Thompson had recently been talking about terrorism with a Facebook friend, according to the police:

Police are investigating the possibility that the attacker killed on a rainswept shopping corridor, identified by police sources as Zale Thompson, 32, had links to terrorism. A Zale Thompson on Facebook is pictured wearing a keffiyeh and had a recent terrorism-related conversation with one of his Facebook friends, according to a police source.

Thompson made no statements as he approached the four officers with hatchet in hand on Jamaica Ave. near 162nd St. in Jamaica at 2 p.m., officials said.

According to a CNN report this morning, Thompson had a criminal record and had been discharged from the US Navy for disorderly conduct, and some “commonalities” that have investigators worried enough to issue a warning to all law-enforcement agencies:

And there are uncomfortable commonalities with other Islamist attacks that have law enforcement in New York and Washington on high alert.

On a Facebook page bearing Thompson’s name, a warrior masked in a head and face scarf and armed with spear, sword and rifle gazes out at the beholder. The vintage black and white photo is the profile picture of the user, who lives in Queens.

A Quran quote in classic Arabic calligraphy mentioning judgment against those who have wandered astray serves as the page’s banner.

Some of the user’s Facebook friends posted articles about Thompson’s attack and death, referring to him by name and linking back to the Facebook page.

Thompson has been in trouble with the law before. He had a criminal record in California, a law enforcement official said, and the Navy discharged him for disorderly conduct.

This report notes another “commonality” — the somewhat similar circumstances of the murder of UK soldier Lee Rigby in London last December. There are also differences; two men conducted that murder on a single target, which they ran down in a car first. Both attacks, though, involve very personal attacks on figures of authority with cutting weapons by people who have publicly associated themselves with radical Islam. Sciutto notes that it’s these commonalities, plus the proximity of other lone-wolf attacks, that has police leaning toward terrorism as an explanation, rather than workplace violence.

Categories: Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihad
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