North Carolina Web Site Said to be 'Gateway Drug' to Terror

Sami Kahn, one of the most dangerous Muslims residing in the West.

Targeting people in the West, the site(Revolution.Muslimpad.com) believed to the brainchild of 22-year-old American Samir Khan of Charlotte, N.C.

When the blog, also called "The Ignored Puzzle Pieces of Knowledge," listed its top "scholars of Islam" and people to "take knowledge from," it wasn't hard to notice that the list of 63 names contained mostly known terrorists — including Usama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The site provides links to their works, all translated into English.

Revolution.Muslimpad's sleek, modern style includes collections of the latest videos of U.S. military Humvees exploding from roadside bombs in Iraq, as well as pro-jihad messages aimed at radicalizing readers.

But terror experts say it is unique because it is written in English for a Western audience and makes accessible radical Islamic content and context found mainly on Arabic-language sites.

"This Web site is one of the premiere English-language sites promoting terrorism," said cyberterrorism expert Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Jewish human rights group the Wiesenthal Center.

On Thursday Cooper presented a report on Capitol Hill on the dangers Internet sites like Revolution.Muslimpad pose to young, impressionable Muslims. His report, "Digital Terrorism and Hate 2.0," references the Web site four times as an example of how Islamic extremists recruit for Al Qaeda.

Part of the Revolution.Muslimpad's power comes from the context and interpretation of the radical messages, which experts say offer dangerous inspiration.

"This guy [Khan] is plugged into the hardcore ideology that Al Qaeda espouses," said Jarret Brachman, director of research at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

Brachman — who oversees the center’s research on Al Qaeda and who has been monitoring the site for two years — compared it to a "gateway drug."

"The goal is to hook people, to get more people in this country to become radicalized and see the world through the lens of Al Qaeda," Brachman said.

A New York Times piece by Michael Moss, "An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers," October 15, 2007 reports that his aim to incite young American Muslims to join in the Jihad also to change the mindset of non-Muslims.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.”

Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

His neatly organized site also includes a file called “United States of Losers,” which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Mr. Khan: “You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!”

Mr. Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, is an unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls the “Islamic jihadi media.” He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn. “I will do my best to speak the truth, and even if it annoys the disbelievers, the truth must be preached,” Mr. Khan said in an interview.

While there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups, a message that is increasingly devised, translated and aimed for a Western audience.

And he is not alone. According to experts at West Point ["What to Do About Pixels of Hate," Michael Moss, New York Times, October 21, 2007],

...there are as many as 100 English language sites offering militant Islamic views, with Mr. Khan's - which claims 500 regular readers - among the more active. While their reach is difficult to assess, it is clear from a review of extremist material and interviews that militants are seeking to appeal to young American and European Muslims by playing on their anger over the war in Iraq and the image of Islam under attack.

Tedious Arabic screeds are reworked into flashy English productions. Recruitment tracts are issued in multiple languages, like a 39-page, electronic, English version of a booklet urging women to join the fight against the West.

There are even online novellas like “Rakan bin Williams,” about a band of Christian European converts who embraced Al Qaeda and “promised God that they will carry the flag of their distant brothers and seek vengeance on the evil doers.”

Militant Islamists are turning grainy car-bombing tapes into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites like YouTube, the online video smorgasbord.

“It is as if you would watch a Hollywood movie,” said Abu Saleh, a 21-year-old German devotee of Al Qaeda videos who visits Internet cafes in Berlin twice a week to get the latest releases. “The Internet has totally changed my view on things.”

Another influential site is Tajdeed,

which is based in London and run by Dr. Muhammad Massari, a Saudi physicist and dissident. Over lunch at a McDonald’s near his home, Dr. Massari said Mr. Zarqawi’s insurgent videos from Iraq inspired local productions like “Dirty Kuffar,” the Arabic word for nonbeliever. The 2004 rap music video mixed images of Western leaders with others purporting to show American troops cheer as they shot injured Iraqi civilians.

Dr. Massari, who helped promote the video, said similar crossover productions soon followed and made their way to his Web site.

“I never touch the videos that are on my forums,” said Dr. Massari, who wears a long white Arabic robe. “Someone with Al Qaeda uploads them, probably at Internet cafes, to password-protected sites. Then they call a friend, say, in Australia or Brasília, and say, ‘Hi Johnny, your mom is traveling today.’ That is the code to download the video. It goes up and down like that a few times, with no trace, until someone posts a link on my site.”

These Islamists also use YouTube, rap music, and look for parallels between Arabs and other parts of American society, such as was done in the the four-minute version of the hourlong Qaeda video entitled "To Black Americans." As of October 1007, the YouTube version logged more than 1,800 hits.

Khan transformed as a teenager:

Born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Khan was 7 when his family moved to New York City and settled into the Queens neighborhood of Maspeth.

He mirrored his teenage peers, from their slang to their baggy pants, until August 2001 when, at age 15, he said, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, which was sponsored by a fundamentalist but nonviolent group now known as the Islamic Organization of North America (IONA).

“They were teaching things about religion and brotherhood that captivated me,” Mr. Khan said. He said he went back to school knowing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim, a practicing Muslim.”

He prayed more regularly. He dressed more modestly. He stopped listening to music except for Soldiers of Allah, a Los Angeles hip-hop group, now defunct, whose tunes like “Bring Islam Back” continue to have worldwide appeal among militant youths.

He also befriended members of the Islamic Thinkers Society, a tiny group that promotes radical, nonviolent Islam by leafleting in Times Square and Jackson Heights, Queens.

After moving with his family to North Carolina in 2004, Mr. Khan said, he attended a community college for three years and earned money selling various products, including kitchen knives.

But he began spending chunks of his days on the blog he created in late 2005, “Inshallahshaheed,” which translates as “a martyr soon if God wills.” The Internet traffic counter Alexa.com, which rarely is able to measure the popularity of blogs because they do not have enough readers, ranked his among the top one percent of one hundred million Internet sites in the world.

If Mr. Khan’s extreme rhetoric has won him a wider audience, it has caused him problems at home. Last year, his father tried to pull him back to the family’s more moderate views by asking an imam to intervene.

“I tried to bring arguments from the Koran and scholars, and said, ‘Whatever you are thinking it is not true,’” said Mustapha Elturk, a family friend and the leader of IONA, the Islamic organization that first inspired Mr. Khan. But Mr. Khan did not budge, he said.

Mr. Khan said he separated from IONA over one matter: the organization would not support violent jihad without the endorsement of a Muslim nation’s leader, which Mr. Khan argues is unnecessary.

Mr. Elturk said, “His father and family are really scared that he might do something.”

Efforts have been made by his father and others to shut him down, but without success:

Mr. Khan has now moved his blog to a site called Muslimpad, whose American operators recently moved from Texas to Amman, Jordan. Their larger forum, Islamic Network, is the host of discussions among English-speaking Muslims. One of their former employees, Daniel Maldonado, was convicted this year in federal court of associating with terrorists at their training camps in Somalia.

Mr. Khan said that he had dreams about meeting Mr. bin Laden and that he would not rule out picking up a weapon himself one day. In a recent essay, he argued that jihad was mandatory for all Muslims, and he cited three ways to fulfill this obligation: join fighters in Iraq, Afghanistan or Algeria; send them money; or promote militant videos as part of the jihad media.

For now, he said, he is fulfilling his obligations by helping other Muslims understand their religion. Recently he posted a video of a news report from Somalia showing a grenade-wielding American who had joined the Islamists.

“He is an example of a Muslim who follows the Religion of Islaam,” Mr. Khan wrote.

It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that Mr. Kahn and the others like him are more dangerous than the suicide bombers that get all the press coverage!