Free Republic

A MAN who claimed to be an Australian-based jihadist terrorist and encouraged attacks on local Jews has been exposed as an online troll who is in fact a young Jewish-American. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force swooped on Joshua Ryne Goldberg’s Florida home, where the 20-year-old lived with his parents, early Thursday, US time, after a joint investigation with the Australian Federal Police into his online activities supporting Islamic State. Mr Goldberg, under the persona “Australi Witness”, had ... boasted about inspiring the May 3 attacks on the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas, where two mujahideen were...

It is safe to say that “Joshua Ryne Goldberg” is a convert to Islam. How did he get the idea that his new religion called for mass murder of those who don’t believe in it? Why are the peaceful aspects of Islam that are so obvious to John Kerry and David Cameron and the U.S. Catholic bishops so hard for people like Joshua Ryne Goldberg to find, while the violent passages that Kerry and Cameron and the bishops are sure do not exist call out so insistently to young men like Goldberg?

To some he was an Islamist extremist, to others a radical feminist, to others a neo-Nazi. These are all online identities that seem to have belonged to Joshua Goldberg - but in reality he was none of these things. They were simply online aliases used to whip up ideological hatred, with seemingly dangerous and even violent real-world consequences. In reality he lives in Florida, spent huge amounts of time online - and has now been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). SNIP It seems Goldberg wasn't just posing as a racist neo-Nazi. Earlier this year an Australian journalist,...