ABC Credits Net Posse with Tracking Jihadists

by Maggie at Maggie's Notebook

ABC News is crediting the "net posse" that helped track and report the activities of Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose). Our friends at JawaReport, QuothTheRaven and the YouTube Smackdown Corps are rightly credited for their ongoing counterterrorism tracking - even though ABC also refers to these patriot sites as 'net vigilantes.' Oh, well, words are cheap for the lame MSM.

Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose)

The JawaReport's Rusty Shackleford said this in an interview with ABC News:

 Shackleford, a pen name, says he is a libertarian college professor who created the blog JawaReport in 2004 after he was enraged that Iraqi Islamists had beheaded an American named Nick Berg.

It was my way of venting. But mostly it was about countering violent Islamist propaganda, specifically the videos that were being produced by al Qaeda in Iraq and other Salaafist jihadists fighting our troops," he said.

Shackleford said his goal from the beginning was combating violent Islamist material and support on the Web.

I'm a blogger, but also an activist against violent Islamism. One of the things we do is try to pressure Webhosts to remove Websites that belong to terrorist organizations. An example of this would be the dozen or so times we've successfully had the Taliban's website removed. The websites sometimes pop back up, sometimes not," Shackleford said.

Shackleford and other contributors to JawaReport and sites like it noticed YouTube had become a hug for videos and comments in support of violent extremism and attacks against the West and it's allies, leading to the creation of the YouTube Smackdown.

Shackleford said the groups identify videos in support of violent Islamism and pressure the Web site to take them down, "as they would child pornography or other obscene material."

According to the Quoth the Raven blog, since the "smackdown" movement began in 2007, users have had over 31,000 videos removed from YouTube, and 695 users suspended. They say LaRose was one of those suspended.

Drop by The Jawa Report and leave a nice comment.

Read the complete story here.

More on Jihad Jane:
Colleen LaRose is Jihad Jane aka Fatime Larose - Indicted on Charges of Terrorism