Tag Archive for: Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish

Facebook and YouTube still feature Videos by Leading al-Qaeda Jihadis

Google/YouTube labels Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager “Nazis,” and buries content that portrays Islam in a negative light, even if it’s accurate, but jihad terror preaching is OK with them. Likewise Facebook, which recently agreed to turn over data on “hate speech” suspects to the French government. Since foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression are routinely defamed as purveyors of “hate speech,” what Facebook is essentially doing by targeting such people while allowing jihadis to post freely is aiding and abetting the global jihad. If free societies and free people survive this sorry age, and an accurate history of it is written, Mark Zuckerberg will be portrayed as the enemy of freedom that he is.

Al Qaeda’s Master Terrorists Are Still on Facebook and YouTube,” by Michael Weiss and Moustafa Ayad, Daily Beast, June 27, 2019:

In 2006, Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish was repatriated to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo Bay after he’d served more than five years as an enemy combatant for training with al Qaeda, and fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan against the United States. Released as part of the Obama administration’s plans to shutter the offshore prison, Rubaish was admitted to Riyadh’s rather lackluster “deradicalization” program.

Then, sometime in  2009, he escaped the program and Saudi Arabia with 11 other jihadists.  They all turned up in Yemen and Rubaish soon emerged as the mufti, or Islamic jurist, for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) where he spent the next six years appearing in propaganda videos for the group’s media outlet Al-Malahem, as well as releasing a number of fatwas and articles for other al Qaeda outlets including the English-language Inspire magazine.

Rubaish was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2015.  But his ideas and legacy live on through his sermons and speeches, still hosted on Facebook and YouTube.

Rubaish is joined in digital preservation by other leading lights in jihadist proselytization and virtual recruitment such as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the strategist behind the expansion of al Qaeda into Yemen, who helped invent what’s now commonly known as the “lone-wolf” terror attack; Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the leader of AQAP and the second-in command to Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s global head; and Anwar al-Awlaki, the main cleric for AQAP who is considered by counterterrorism experts to be, even from beyond the grave, one of the primary drivers of those lone-wolf attacks.

Taken together, Rubaish, Suri, Wuhayshi and Awlaki can still be found in 105 videos on both social media platforms, despite corporate avowals that this stuff was fast becoming a thing of the past. Yet we identified the videos through simple searches in Arabic using only the names of these prominent jihadists….

Contacted yesterday, Facebook said it was looking into the videos that we highlighted on its platform; YouTube did not respond to our queries in time for publication….

The most-watched video is his half-hour history on the invasions and subsequent injustices that the Muslim world has faced; it seems to have been recorded somewhere in Europe, as he refers to the “Christian world here in Europe.” Suri has Spanish citizenship and between 1994 and 1996 he lived in the London suburb of Neasden. Following the London bombings of 2005, he released a statement praising the selection of mass transit as a major, legitimate soft target….

RELATED ARTICLE: Boston mayor appoints director of Muslim Brotherhood-linked mosque head of Office for Immigrant Advancement.

RELATED VIDEO: San Francisco: Muslim cleric says Morsi was murdered by Zionist agents who work for Satan.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.