Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [97]
Through connections made online, LaRose met like-minded people in Europe and Asia. One of them promised to marry her if she just took care of one little task—find and kill a Swedish cartoonist whose work had been deemed offensive to Islam. In August 2009, investigators alleged, LaRose flew to Sweden and began stalking the cartoonist but did not complete her mission. When she returned to the United States in October, she was arrested.93
One of LaRose’s online correspondents was Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, an American woman from Colorado. Paulin-Ramirez had converted to Islam after learning about it online. Using e-mail and chat, she communicated with Muslim men in Europe, hiding her interactions from her family.
LaRose encouraged the Colorado woman to join her for terrorist training in Europe. On September 11, 2009, with her six-year-old son in tow, Paulin-Ramirez got on a plane and flew to Europe. Two days later, she married one of the men she had met online. With her new husband and several other men allegedly linked to the Sweden plot, she moved to Ireland.
In March 2010 investigators in the United States and Europe, following leads from the LaRose investigation, arrested four men and three women in rural Ireland for complicity in the assassination scheme. Paulin-Ramirez was pregnant when she was returned to American soil and indicted.94 LaRose pleaded guilty to her role in the assassination plot in early 2011. As of this writing, Paulin-Ramirez was awiting trial.
LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez were extremely unusual examples of women involved in operational terrorism, but the manner in which they were radicalized has become disturbingly common. Although American Muslims have made great strides in driving radical recruiters out of bricks-and-mortar mosques, on the Internet, extreme forms of Islam are only a click away.
11
The Keyboard and the Sword
The jihad movement is fueled by propaganda. In the earliest days, it was mostly ephemeral— flyers, newsletters, short handouts, and live English translations of speeches by jihadist figures visiting the United States.
Over time, more sophisticated products began to emerge, including Al Jihad magazine from Abdullah Azzam’s Services Bureau, the Al Hussam newsletter, and the Islam Report (see chapter 5). Many of these publications fell by the wayside, due in part to shifting tolerances among American Muslims, as well as the arrest and incarceration of the publishers. By September 11 a significant amount of jihadist propaganda already had moved online; this accelerated after the attack.
For many years jihadists’ use of the Internet and computer technology had tracked closely with the wider world’s. Some specific organizations, including al Qaeda, were early adopters, keeping digitized records on computers and using e-mail to communicate by the mid-1990s.
After September 11 and even more after the invasion of Iraq, terrorists began to use the Internet in increasingly innovative ways. The decentralized nature of the Internet offered terrorist leaders real promise as a way to bypass the media and distribute their message on a global scale, far more affordably than through traditional print media. The Al Hussam newsletter ran upward of $1,000 per month to publish and distribute.1 In contrast, a website might cost only a few hundred dollars per year.
For a time, a number of terrorist and jihadist organizations tried to maintain traditional static websites, but starting around 2003, and corresponding to a rise in social media generally, online message boards and forums became