AS MILITANTS RAGE, I.S. HAS DIFFERENT MESSAGE
Group accuses peers of hijacking Palestinian cause for self-gain
OSAMA bin Laden was just 14 when his mother noticed that he had stopped watching his favourite Westerns. She found him fixated instead on news reports about Palestinians, tears streaming down his face as he watched TV in their home in Saudi Arabia.
“In his teenage years, he was the same nice kid. But he was concerned, sad and frustrated by the situation in Palestine,” she said, according to Lawrence Wright’s account of Osama’s trajectory and al-Qaeda’s rise in his book, The Looming Tower.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had long been one of the themes invoked by jihadis to push a narrative of Muslim victimhood and to fan an us-versus-them framework.
So, it’s of little surprise that extremist affiliates across the world reacted with venom after President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
But the outlier was the Islamic State (IS), which waited until Friday to publish an editorial in its weekly newsletter — one that appeared to be mainly concerned with critiquing what it saw as hypocritical and self-serving statements by other jihadi groups and Arab leaders.
“How did IS respond to US announcement on #JerusalemEmbassy move? Outrage? Nope. Call to jihad? Not really,” researcher Raphael Gluck wrote on Twitter.
He added: “IS takes a stab at rival terror groups, accusing them of politicising Palestinian cause to suit their own agendas.”
The article published by IS began: “Sixty years and Jerusalem has been in the hands of the Jews, and it is only now that people cry when the Crusaders announced today as their capital,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group based here.
“Are these cries over an issue to which they are accustomed to crying every time it is mentioned?” it added.
“Or is it a new opportunity for the traders of faith and the fraudulent ones to raise their voices again?”
IS argued that the focus should be on working to defeat the Arab countries ringing Israel, which they said “surround it the same way a bracelet surrounds the wrist, protecting the Jews from the strikes of the mujahideen”.
Even as its official line played down the White House move, followers in chat rooms on messaging app Telegram had busied themselves making revenge posters.
“Wait for violent attacks on American and Jewish embassies by the wolves of IS,” the text alongside the images said.
That message was more in line with that of other terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda.
The world’s perceived indifference to the plight of the Palestinians was proof, jihadis said, of the second-class status of Muslims, and only through violence, would Muslims regain dignity.
And from Mali to Yemen to Afghanistan, jihadi groups ridiculed Trump.
On his Telegram channel, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, an alQaeda ideologue, posted a YouTube clip from a rally last year, when Trump appeared startled after hearing a commotion.
He called Trump a “coward” and an easy mark, urging future terrorists to do their best to “surprise” him. NYT