ISIS Killer 'Jihadi John' Identified

Discussion in 'World Events' started by Yazata, Feb 26, 2015.

  1. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The black hooded jihadist who likes to preach hatred in a London accent and wave his knife at the camera before he cuts off the heads of high-profile Western and Japanese hostages has been identified.

    The BBC and the Washington Post are reporting that he's Mohammed Emwazi, a 26 year old Kuwaiti born immigrant (he arrived with his family at the age of 6) who formerly lived in a middle class neighborhood in west London and graduated from Westminster University.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31637090

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/26/us-mideast-crisis-britain-jihadijohn-idUSKBN0LU13Y20150226

    Reportedly he's been on the British Security Service's (MI-5) radar for years. In 2009 he traveled with several associates to Tanzania, hoping to get to Somalia in order to join Al-Shabab. The British had the Tanzanians detain and question him, after which he was put on a plane back to Europe. He insisted at the time that he was going on safari.

    Some jihadist advocacy group in London is insisting that the British authorities also prevented him from traveling to Kuwait where he was supposed to get married. (Evidently an arranged marriage.) The activists are insisting that his treatment at the hands of the authorities is what radicalized him. (I'd say that given subsequent events, the authorities didn't do enough.)

    He seems that he slipped away to Syria in 2012, where he became a key ISIS asset.

    Interestingly, he comes from a fairly well-to-do family, attended a British taxpayer-funded university and always seems to have had enough money to jump on jets and travel internationally. He's not a stereotypical product of deprivation. (He's certain depraved, that's for sure.) So much for the naive "root causes" rhetoric.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2015
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  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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  5. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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  7. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Is it psychopathic behaviour?
     
  8. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    He expresses no compunction or regret about what he is doing.
    He sees his actions as a means to an end, and doesn't care about who is hurt as a result of them.
    As an armchair psychologist, I would say he is a psychopath.

    Nearly always such murderers were neglected and abused as children.
    And often they have suffered some kind of brain damage through a head injury.
     
  9. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Meh... I don't know a good solution to this ISIS problem... turning the area into a glass parking lot wouldn't end well methinks...
     
  10. Bells Staff Member

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    I do and don't see it..

    By all accounts, if Cage is to be believed, he was stopped and harassed several times and even asked to work for MI5 as a spy. But my question is what led them to make such a proposition to him in the first place?

    According to Cage and as stated in the BBC, he was asked to work for them the first time he was stopped and questioned. Here is a guy supposedly going on a safari with 2 other blokes, and they are stopped, detained, sent back home and then questioned by MI5 and they try to recruit him? It seems a tad like something out of a spy film.

    What happened between the time he went to university and obtained his degree and his getting on that plane to Tanzania that led the MI5 to assume he had terrorist links and was truly heading to Somalia, so much so that they try to recruit him?

    There is a large chunk missing from that story.

    That being said, could his treatment at the hands of the authorities in the UK have radicalised him, as Cage claim? Perhaps. But it's a long way from that to having the gumption to torture and decapitate people with a small knife in front of a video camera.
     
  11. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    CAGE appears to me to be a terrorist-advocacy organization (they defended the murderers of that soldier in London) who try to deflect blame and condemnation away from individual perpetrators and away from the UK Muslim community, and back at the British themselves. I'm not sure whether they are lying exactly, but they are doubtless spinning all of this as hard as they can and are trying to put their own interpretation on events. It's a little appalling that the news media are letting them do that. The government are partly to blame, because they won't put out an authoritative account and leave the media reporting whatever they are given by radical Islamist apologists.

    The Daily Mail story goes into that. Apparently during his time at the University of Westminster (reportedly a hotbed incubator of radical Islam) he became a close associate of Bilal al-Berjawi, a high-ranking member of al-Shabab who the Mail suggests was an organizer of the horrorific suicide bombing in Kampala Uganda in 2010 that killed 74 people watching the FIFA world cup on TV. Al-Berjawi was subsequently killed by a US drone strike in Somalia in 2012. (Significantly, CAGE attributed al-Berjawi's Islamist radicalism to British police harassment. That seems to be their knee-jerk explanation of any British Islamist outrage.) At the time Emwazi was associated with him, al-Berjawi seems to have been moving freely in London, acting as an al-Shabab fundraiser and perhaps as a recruiter of foreign fighters. He seemingly traveled freely in and out of Britain on a British passport (later revoked), including multiple flights to east Africa, saying that he was going on safari, which was the same line Emwazi used. Al-Berjawi appears to have been Emwazi's radical Islam mentor. I expect that this is what attracted the attention of Britain's Security Service.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...pil-bloodthirsty-killer-revels-brutality.html

     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 28, 2015
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry about the last post. Either Sciforums or my browser went berserk on me, posting a hundred copies of the same url. No, I wasn't leaning on any keys. When I tried to edit the weirdness out, the whole thing froze up tight and no keys would work. After shutting off and restarting my browser, the 'edit' key had disappeared, so apparently I was timed out. Screw it, I give up. (Maybe my posting al-Berjawi's name and the words al-Shabab triggered the NSA's Snowden-esque attentions.)
     
  13. Bells Staff Member

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    Hmm that's okay. That's weird. I've been noticing people posting multiple links one after the other in other threads, wonder if it is the same as what you just went through.

    I can try to decipher it into this post, if it is wrong, let me know. Because your sentences appear to have been mixed up in it. So here are the two paragraphs and the link underneath, from what I could gather in that linking issue in your post:

    "There is a large chunk missing from that story. That being said, could his treatment at the hands of the authorities in the UK have radicalised him, as Cage claim? Perhaps.

    If we were to agree with CAGE, radical Islamists should be allowed to operate freely in Britain and any attempt to prevent that constitutes "harassment" and "oppression" - that's not going to happen, so any Islamist outrage traced back to Britain is really the fault of the British infidels themselves. I don't believe that for a second and I don't believe that anyone else should."

    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-22721536
     
  14. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    People fight for a variety of causes and armies around the world. Are they also psychopaths?
     
  15. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Hey, Bells. Thanks for cleaning up the mess.

    The first paragraph was your words.

    "There is a large chunk missing from that story. That being said, could his treatment at the hands of the authorities in the UK have radicalised him, as Cage claim? Perhaps."​


    I had already suggested that the missing chunk of the story was probably Emwazi's association in London with al-Berdawi, a known terrorist and a member of al-Shabab's leadership, who was later killed in Somalia by a drone. (Likely American). Emwazi's radical Jihadist associations were probably why MI-5 was interested in him. (If he was just a harmless computer science student, he wouldn't have set off alarm klaxons. His actions got him noticed.)

    Then I addressed CAGE's contention that it was the British security services' harassment that radicalized Mohammed Emwazi and turned a nice London student into 'Jihadi John', the world's most wanted man, spouting Islamist venom before sawing off living men's heads with his little knife. That's what I intended to criticize in the second paragraph.

    If we were to agree with CAGE, radical Islamists should be allowed to operate freely in Britain and any attempt to prevent that constitutes "harassment" and "oppression" - that's not going to happen, so any Islamist outrage traced back to Britain is really the fault of the British infidels themselves. I don't believe that for a second and I don't believe that anyone else should."

    That's the same rhetorical line that CAGE has taken with the killers of that army bandsman who was hacked to death in the street, and with al-Berdawi himself. These killers were all supposed to be "victims" of the British governments' "war on terror" and whatever outrages the Islamists subsequently committed were really the British infidels' own fault.

    (As you can tell, I don't have a very positive opinion of CAGE.)
     
  16. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Some of them.
     
  17. Bells Staff Member

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    I just linked it near what you were quoting. I didn't touch your post though, unless someone else removed it or you did?

    I think the problem with CAGE is that they have the appearance of being a stepping stone, or the stepping stone from being disillusioned and unhappy to the first steps of radicalism that leads to that level of hatred and violence.

    Are young Muslim men and women excluded from society in many respects? Yes. But CAGE does not give the impression of trying to bridge that gap.

    Normally prisons are breeding grounds for radicalisation and where young Muslim males are over represented in the criminal justice system, you will find that many do become more radical once they enter the prison system. But Emwazi has never been to prison, and he was educated, from a middle class family. So what is happening at his university? Why are those young Muslim men turning towards radical Islam? Poverty stricken or poor Muslim men, yes, I can see how and why they are disillusioned. But what has pulled Emwazi into its folds?

    Personally speaking, I don't think it's the school. I think on this occasion, the start of it may have stemmed from closer to home.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2015
  18. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    My objection to CAGE is that they appear to be apologists for evil. They embrace terrorists, then try to deflect condemnation of the terrorists' horrorific acts away from the perpetrators personally, and away from the brands of radical Islam that the terrorists embrace, insisting that the acts were somehow really the fault of the British government and their anti-terrorism efforts which 'radicalized' these individuals. (Efforts that in the Emwazi case seem to have been half-hearted and totally ineffective.) CAGE's bottom line seems to be the demand that radical Islamists be allowed to operate freely in Britain with no police attention whatsoever.

    Apparently it's fairly notorious.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ego-created-heart-Britain-s-capital-city.html

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...Student-record-of-Mohammed-Emwazi-leaked.html

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/56...ts-University-of-Westminster-Claim-Extremists

    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jihad-john...hosting-hate-cleric-haitham-al-haddad-1489627

    Westminster's Student Union is controlled by Islamists. Prominent Islamist militants speak at the university regularly. A former head of the university's Islamic Society was found guilty of terrorism offenses. Muslim students report being aggressively proselytized by militants. In fact, an Islamist cleric who preaches against homosexuals, insists that husbands beating wives is a private matter, says that Jews are descended from pigs, and calls for killing everyone who leaves Islam, was scheduled to speak at Westminster the same night Emwazi was unmasked.
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2015
  19. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Even more the case with an all-out academic and civil engineer like Anwar al-Awlaki. Born in New Mexico, but became radical from nothing more than exposure to Jihadist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb. After working at the University of Minnesota, his father eventually become an Agriculture Minister in Yemen. As a result, Anwar al-Awlaki spent his years from age 7 to 18 there minus direct contact with what he professed to hate about the West. By the time he returned to attend Colorado State University, his long-distance cultivated distaste for America was already prodding him to claim that he had instead been born in Yemen.
     
  20. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    And there's Osama bin Ladin, son of the late Mohammed bin Ladin, one of the world's richest men and very close to the Saudi royal family.

    The elder bin Laden was the founder of the Saudi Bin Ladin Group, one of the world's largest construction companies, responsible for many high-profile projects across Saudi Arabia and the world. The SBL Group got the contracts to restore the mosques in Mecca and Medina. The international airport in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, is the SBL Group's work.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Binladin_Group

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden_family
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2015
  21. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    From post #2 link:
    Now I am not saying he should be excused by this. Its one piece of the puzzle. And typically, people who are in the know are not going to bring attention to themselves by contacting newspapers, for many reasons.
     
  22. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Well, little Jihad Johnnie has gone to join the fascists; and this is what they are. Does that make him a psychopath, however? Can we dismiss him as just deranged? What about the rest of the ISIS cadre? Are they all just mad?

    My suspicion is that, rather than just call him insane, we take note of the fact that not every philosophy on earth, or every interpretation of every philosophy on earth, is amicably disposed towards every other. Not all the Nazis were insane - some were simply what one would probably just call evil.
     
  23. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    If you want to employ someone to do a job that 99.9% of people would shrink from,
    a psychopath is the best choice. They enjoy being evil.
    Would you say that Heydrich was a psychopath?

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    More evil than Hitler. And that's hard.
     

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