[Australian] Terrorist Mohamed Elomar’s father fans the embers of peace by funding a community barbeque in Lakemba
This paper is right-wing bent, and tends to distortion and sensationalism too often. Though this isn't exactly in the investigative line they do sometimes have some decent investigative reporting and some fair other stuff.
Sarah Crawford The Daily Telegraph September 15, 2014 12:00AM
Mamdouh Elomar, Scott Morrison and Jamal Rifi enjoy the barbecue in Lakemba yesterday / Picture: Chris McKeen
HIS terrorist son may have chosen a path of violence, but Sydney businessman Mamdouh Elomar wants peace and was happy to reach into his own pocket to promote it.
The father of IS terrorist Mohamed Elomar donated $10,000 towards a free barbecue that attracted more than 5000 people to Sydney’s Muslim heartland of Lakemba yesterday. He was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with organiser, Muslim leader Jamal Rifi, wearing matching T-shirts that read: “Proudly Australian”.
It's hard not to scream and head butt a wall when media outlets ask this question about a 33-year-old, schizophrenic, disabled pensioner whose greatest criminal effort prior to fleeing to Syria was getting caught stealing six alarm clocks and 140 batteries from a Big W store.
Even Sharrouf, whom the judge who jailed him describes as "a highly unintelligent man who has no perception of himself .. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s4067434.htm";, could probably tell you who burnished his image and promoted it to the world: the Australian media.
Some might point the finger at social media, where Sharrouf and his mate Mohamed Elomar, have been regularly posting pictures of themselves holding guns and heads and whatever else they can find lying about in the rear-guard of the Islamic State's murderous rampage through Syria and Iraq.
Social media certainly gave these men the platform to publish pictures of their deeds but, if you follow any of the experts writing about the Syrian conflict, like the blogger Brown Moses .. https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses, you'd have seen pictures and videos just as harrowing as Sharrouf's efforts.
One unconfirmed clip I made the mistake of clicking on showed a Syrian woman being strangled to death by her captors, while the ABC's Richard Aedy said on air last week he'd seen images of young children who had been hanged and a primary school-aged girl who "appears to have been raped".
"You have to get the balance right between reporting the facts and bringing information and perspective into the arena, and finding yourself used as a tool for propaganda purposes; that's where it can be very difficult and we've struggled with this," he said.
Whatever the intentions of organisations such as the ABC - and I'd wager they put a little more thought into publishing graphic images than many other outlets do - it would appear the picture of Sharrouf's son, posing with a decapitated head, has become one of the Islamic State's big propaganda success stories, prompting comments from our Prime Minister and the US Secretary of State, John Kerry .. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/world/asia/australia-boy-severed-head-syria/.
We tend to forget the people Sharrouf and his ilk are reaching out to don't share our values. Where we look at that picture and say "sick", they look at it and say "siiiiiiiiiiiick, bro". When there is this inversion of values, it's all too easy to manipulate the outraged mainstream.
I doubt very much whether the people most impressed with Sharrouf and Elomar even read the bulk of the news stories about them, they just see them on the front pages of newspapers, leading TV news bulletins, being talked about by the PM and think "Wow, that could be me."
"They’re offering an opportunity for people to feel powerful. They’re making disillusioned, disaffected radicals feel like they’re doing something truly meaningful with their lives," Horgan said.
This has always been a huge motivation for young men to go off to war but, due to the efforts of Sharrouf, disaffected young Australian Muslim men now have a narrative to follow, of a nobody just like them, who's now a world famous jihadist.
The great American historian Will Durant, describing Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on war, said the "general who uses up soldiers on the battlefield, where they have the pleasure of dying under the anaesthesia of glory, is far nobler than the employer who uses up men in his profit-machine; observe with what relief men leave their factories for the field of slaughter".
"Napoleon was not a butcher but a benefactor; he gave men death with military honours instead of death by economic attrition; people flocked to his lethal standard because they preferred the risks of battle to the unbearable monotony of making another million collar-buttons."
Durant, writing in 1926, describes what's going on in the minds of thousands of foreigners flocking to the Islamic State in 2014: "Work as a labourer for $18 an hour or go be a freedom fighter and blow shit up?"
The reality of war, however, is never what the majority of recruits expect it to be and I wonder if the media's sanitising of the images coming out of this conflict actually does the Islamic State a favour.
See enough pictures of brutalised or dead children, and men and women screaming as a killer saws through their necks with a knife, and even a disillusioned young man looking for adventure is going to question how "meaningful" this sort of life is.
You can follow Sam on Twitter here. His email address is here.
'Radicalized' father of Australian boy holding severed head has mental illness
By Hilary Whiteman, CNN August 13, 2014 -- Updated 0159 GMT (0959 HKT)
(CNN) -- A proud father's boast accompanies an image the U.S. secretary of state on Tuesday called "one of the most disturbing, stomach-turning, grotesque photographs ever displayed."
"That's my boy," Khaled Sharrouf wrote on Twitter alongside a photo of his 7-year-old son using both hands to hold up a man's severed head.
News Corp Australia are reporting a warning that Muslim extremists could attack members of the military in Australia has gone out to army officers, highlighting the case of one officer who was verbally abused in Sydney's CBD.
The warning of such a terrorist attack went out just 48 hours before Australia on Friday increased the public terrorism alert to High.
The memo reportedly details verbal threats made against a uniformed officer who was approached by a group of young men and told to go to the Middle East so we can 'blow your head off'.
The memo underlined the risks of an attack such as that on British army soldier, Fusilier Drummer Lee Rigby, who was run down by a car then hacked to death on a London street by Muslim extremists in May last year.
This article is different. I see in it a grand effort by one who still struggles with a new language which some say is the most difficult to learn. Some, i guess, may be critical of it's posting in the form it has been, yet it feels flattering/becoming to the author to me.
Australia’s many comparison IS member funnels scores of fighters onto frontline
Islamic State Attracts Female Jihadis From The U.S. Heartland
Kashmiri demonstrators hold up a flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during a demonstration against Israeli military operations in Gaza, in downtown Srinagar on July 18, 2014. (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images)
By Alistair Bell Posted: 09/14/2014 8:00 am EDT Updated: 09/14/2014 9:59 am EDT
MINNEAPOLIS, Sept 14 (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement is investigating a new phenomenon of women from the American heartland joining Islamic State as President Barack Obama vows to cut off the militants' recruiting at home.
At least three Somali families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have female relatives who have gone missing in the past six weeks and may have tried to join Islamic State, said community leader Abdirizak Bihi. He said that while the reasons for their disappearance were unclear, he had told the families to contact police.
In a separate case, a 19-year-old American Somali woman from St. Paul snuck away from her parents on Aug. 25 saying she was going to a bridal shower. Instead, she flew to Turkey and joined IS in Syria.
Home to the biggest Somali community in the United States, the Twin Cities area of Minnesota has been plagued by terrorist recruiting since the Somali group al-Shabaab began enlisting in America around 2007.
This year, law enforcement officials say they learned of 15-20 men with connections to the Minnesota Somali community fighting for extremist groups in Syria. They included Douglas McAuthur McCain, a convert to Islam, who was killed in battle this summer.
The St. Paul woman is the first case of an area female joining IS that has been made public although her family have asked for her name to be kept private because it fears retaliation from Islamists.
Greg Boosalis, FBI division counsel in Minneapolis, said law enforcement was investigating the possible recruitment in the area by Islamist extremists of other females, as well as males, but refused to comment on specific cases.
"We are looking into the possibility of additional men and women travelers," he said.
Somali leaders and sources close to police worry that the reports of female would-be jihadis from the region could mark a new trend.
The St. Paul woman is highly likely to have been recruited by IS through Islamist sympathizers in the United States, rather than joining the group on her own, they said. At least one other woman is suspected of helping her leave the United States.
Another U.S. teenager, nurse's aide Shannon Conley, 19, from Colorado, pleaded guilty this week to trying to travel to the Middle East to enroll in IS. She was arrested at Denver International Airport in April with a one-way ticket and had been recruited online by a male militant in Syria.
Nipping domestic extremism in the bud before Americans try to join terrorist groups is part of Obama's strategy against Islamic State announced in a televised address last week.
Along with an aerial bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, Obama pledged that the government would "intervene with at-risk individuals before they become radicalized toward violence and decide to travel abroad to Syria and Iraq to join ISIL."
He said authorities would offer "tailored domestic programs to prevent violent extremism and radicalization" but gave no more details.
The Somali woman from St. Paul who traveled to Syria attended a mosque near the eastern bank of the Mississippi River which had previously attracted suspected extremists. In June, the mosque banned an Egyptian-American man it said was spreading radical ideology.
The woman told a relative after leaving the United States that she wanted to help children in IS-controlled territory in Syria.
"The nature of the recruitment of these crazy organizations is how they use the element of surprise. Now they have surprised us again by going for the girls," said Bihi, speaking about the St. Paul woman who he said was targeted by recruiters.
Bihi's teenaged nephew was killed in Somalia in 2009 after being persuaded to join al-Shabaab while in Minnesota.
"BABY FACTORIES"
While foreign women who join Islamic State often envision aiding a holy war or at least playing an active role in establishing a purist Islamic nation, the reality can be more mundane.
Monitoring of extremists' social media accounts and other writings shows that male jihadis regard women counterparts as little more than mating partners, said Mia Bloom, from the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
"ISIS is recruiting these women in order to be baby factories. They are seeing the establishment of an Islamic state and now they need to populate the state," Bloom said.
Scores of European Muslim women, mostly from Britain and France, have joined IS in the Middle East.
Denver teenager Conley became engaged to an Islamic State militant in Syria who she met online. Jihadist groups like al Qaeda and IS usually only put women near the frontline in emergencies, Bloom said.
Some young foreign women have been deployed to Islamic State checkpoints in northern Syria where they pat down other women to search for weapons and force local females to abide by strict Islamic dress codes.
But snapshots on social media of the female jihadis' lives in Syria more often show that, "the girls go around making cookies. It's almost like a jihadi Tupperware party," Bloom said.
The main worry for law enforcement is that U.S. militants will one day return to the United States and attack targets.
"The obvious fear is of individuals coming back and committing a terrorist act here," said the FBI's Boosalis. The FBI has been working with the Somali community in Minnesota for years to help it combat radical Islamists.
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