Adam the propaganda mastermind
Not only does American Al-Qaeda Adam Gadahn star in jihad videos (in one of which he was kind enough to extend to me a personal invitation to join Al-Qaeda), but he’s also crossed into producing.
“London bomber’s suicide video is ‘linked to traitor’: Californian masterminded al-Qaeda propaganda, claim terrorism experts,” by Jamie Doward in The Guardian:
The first American to be charged with treason since the Second World War is said to be the mastermind behind al-Qaeda’s propaganda operations in Britain.
Californian Adam Yahiye Gadahn, 28, who last week was charged by the US with treason and aiding terrorists, has produced and appeared in a series of videos that have been disseminated over the internet, including films urging Muslims in Britain to commit terrorist atrocities against Western targets.
British intelligence believes Gadahn produced a 31-minute video featuring 7 July bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, extracts of which were released by Arab satellite station al-Jazeera earlier this year on the anniversary of the London bombings.
Gadahn has been credited with helping produce anti-US media on behalf of al-Qaeda, and now his more recent attempts to disseminate the organisation’s message to British Muslims are troubling terrorism experts here.
Gadahn is believed to have been responsible for cutting the footage of Tanweer to make his ‘martyr’s will’, although a study of the full video suggests he struggled with the task….
‘The likes of Tanweer may not be the sharpest tacks in the box,’ said Josh Devon, senior analyst with think-tank Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), which monitors Islamic fundamentalist media. ‘This is a guy reading a script; you don’t get to say some of the things Tanweer said without coming into contact with senior Koranic scholars.’
What’s that, Mr. Devon? You mean senior Koranic scholars abet this “hijacking” of Islam?
The broadcast of a small part of the Tanweer footage by al-Jazeera earlier this year drew widespread revulsion. The video from which it is extracted is equally disturbing. Gadahn’s slickly produced video shows a computerised simulation of the King’s Cross tube exploding. In the video Gadahn takes great efforts to reach out to a British Muslim audience. He is seen claiming that neither Forest Gate-style raids, Belmarsh, Guantanamo or the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board, which was set up last year to tackle radical Islamic clerics in Britain, will ‘prevent Muslims from exacting revenge on behalf of their persecuted brothers and sisters’….
An unidentified narrator emphasises a key al-Qaeda message: that Tanweer, like all suicide bombers, wanted to become a martyr because of his love of Allah, not because of ‘poverty, unemployment and emptiness as some of the mercenary media try to portray it to us‘.
It tells how Tanweer and Mohammed Siddique Khan, his fellow 7 July bomber, attended al-Qaeda terror training camps with the sole aim of becoming martyrs.
Intelligence experts believe the tape shows how al-Qaeda has been attempting to develop its ideology by creating a ‘single narrative’, one that emphasises a history of Western aggression towards Muslims around the world.
The tape makes repeated references to the Crusades and explains that King’s Cross was chosen as a target because of its Christian connotations. Tanweer and Khan are referred to as ‘knights’ while al-Zawahiri talks of the Crusader/Zionist alliance. There are also references to the West’s wars against the Turkish Ottoman empire and repeated mentions of the conflicts in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.