Publish or perish? Well, per Qur’an 9:111, “publish and perish” may be more what they’re encouraging. “FBI: Suspect claimed he wrote jihadist fitness article,” from CNN, November 27:
A Somali-American teenager arrested Friday on suspicion of plotting to bomb a holiday ceremony in Portland, Oregon, told an undercover FBI employee that he wrote articles published in an English-language jihadist magazine, including a story on fitness, an FBI affidavit says.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, told the undercover operative last summer that he had written articles for the online magazine Jihad Recollections under a pen name, according to an FBI affidavit filed with Mohamud’s arrest warrant.
One of the articles Mohamud claimed to have written was “Getting in shape without weights,” which was published in the inaugural issue of Jihad Recollections in April 2009, according to the affidavit.
In the article, the author – identified as Ibn al-Mubarak – writes that jihadists must prepare their bodies for war and “train as hard as possible in order to damage the enemies of Allah as much as possible.”
The article implores readers to train without weights, in part because using them is “unrealistic for the Mujahid in the front lines anywhere in the world today,” and because gyms are not Islamic environments, with their “music, semi-naked women [and] free mixing.”
The piece describes stretches and warm-ups before instructing on ways to sculpt one’s legs (suggestions include walking at least 90 minutes a day, doing interval runs, crawling long distances and sitting against a wall for long periods) and strengthen one’s arms (100 to 150 push-ups per day, pull-ups, walking on hands).
“We find that [weights are] … a major setback for the Americans and the NATO Crusading army as they cannot go to any battlefront without carrying along with them their bench, squat sets and sometimes even their machines,” the article says. […]
That fitness regimen has helped produce a fighting force that the jihadists cannot defeat fighting openly like men. So the pious thugs hide behind women and children to conduct asymmetrical warfare (just as Mohamud didn’t care that his own attack would kill women and children) and create needless casualties for propaganda points. The valiant mujahedin! Alhamdulillah!
Mohamud said he wrote two other articles for Jihad Recollections, and that he also sent an article to another jihadist publication, Inspire, according to the affidavit. The court document does not identify those articles.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have said Jihad Recollections was produced by former North Carolina resident Samir Khan, who those officials now say they believe is living in Yemen. Intelligence officials also suspect Khan is the driving force behind Inspire.
He may get a publication after all, as a consolation prize for his abject failure, having taken the kuffar law enforcement’s bait — hook, line and sinker. Perhaps he’ll get an “E” for Effort. It will be cold comfort inside the Portland jail.