Blog:
jarretbrachman.net/jrecollections2.pdf
jarretbrachman.net/?p=571
JIHAD RECOLLECTIONS 2 OUT NOW
“Al-Fursan did it again. Jihad Recollections: Part Deux, in all 61 MB, is available for download now…. HERE”
SNIPPET: “I never made it past posting on page 6 or so of the first one - to be honest, I just got bored.
I also got side-tracked with taking on one of the author’s and his friend in a debate.
Lucky me, Abu Abdullah as-Sayf makes his second appearance in this edition, so hopefully I’ll have more unkind things to say about his writing. “
Blog:
http://jarretbrachman.net/?p=587
“CT Investigative Insights from “Savvy Irhabi””
SNIPPET: “Traditionally, we think of the’ jihadi ego’ as being bad for us. Its the brazen arrogance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, for instance, that led him to think of ramming commercial jets into our buildings. It’s the unbridled cockiness of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that helped him believe that his ragtag band of thugs could seize control of a country. These men may or may not accomplish their extravagant objectives, but they sure raise hell in the process of living out their Hitlerian fantasies of grandeur.
In the case of Jihadi Recollections 2, however, the ‘jihadi ego’ is actually quite helpful. I tend to view this kind of writing, particularly from Western jihadis, in two ways. First, I take it at face-value. These guys are really trying to “instill” an “intellectual culture” among the jihadi community. And it’s the best initiative that I’ve seen in English to date. They know the right guys to discuss, they get how to leverage us against ourselves. There is no doubt that they’ve been keenly studying As-Sahab over the past four years and are now feeling their jihadi legs, so to speak.
Second, I see mags like Jihadi Recollections 2 as an existentially cathartic activity - one that helps them justify themselves and one another. Western jihadis tend to have a compulsive need to document their trans-epistemological journey and prove to some abstract ‘other’ that they are authentic ‘Muslims.’ (It’s probably because they know on some Freudian subconcious level just how deviant they are being). It’s a fascinating process to observe however, (Daniel Maldanado’s blog, Adam Gadahn’s biographical letter about his conversion, the Toronto boyz’s online poetry, Badr al-Harbi/Nasr al-Dawsari’s thousands of online postings, etc..) The problem for them, however, is that this need to incessantly profess their brilliance is inherently subversive to their goals, that is if we simply listened and used it against them.
I’ll demonstrate with an article published in JR2 by “Savvy Irhabi” (irhabi meaning terrorist) - Savvy Irhabi writes an article on global media jihad that tries to distill the various ‘lessons learned’ and ‘protocols’ floating around the jihadist web world about ‘the jihadi media enterprise.’ In the process of strutting his jihadi stuff for all his friends to see, Savvy sheds some important light on how al-Qaida supporters in the West interact with al-Qaida media. In my thinking, these are great investigative insights for law enforcement on what to look for in their CT cases.”