The ISIS Jihadi next door

The folks at Vocative went out hunting jihadis with their reporters across the country. They found several and they also found a common link to this fellow Ahmad Musai Jibril, an imam in Dearborn, Michigan;

A decade ago, he was kicked out of a mosque for urging his followers to kill non-Muslims. He later spent six years in federal prison for crimes including money laundering, tax evasion and trying to bribe a juror. He was released in 2012.

What sets Jibril apart from other radical clerics is his sizable social following. He has racked up over 220,000 likes on his Facebook profile and more than 26,000 followers on Twitter, where he communicates with some of them (and their families) one-on-one. On YouTube, Jibril’s sermons average several thousand views each.

Jibril has been whipping up support for extreme Sunni Islam for years from his Michigan base—and according to eyewitnesses, his approach at times has been highly confrontational, even violent.

[…]

In an effort to neutralize Jibril’s hate speech, the Muslim Student Association at the college in 2004 organized a rotation of speakers so that Jibril would have to share the podium on Fridays. The former student tells us that this infuriated Jibril. Later, when a nearby mosque banned Jibril for trying to proselytize, the preacher began hosting fireside chats in his Dearborn basement. But again, says the former student, it went from “really nice talks” about doctrine in the Quran to labeling certain Muslims as apostates.

He’s created quite a following, especially among new converts, like Alton Alexander Nolen, the fellow who beheaded a woman in Oklahoma last week. But then you know that if he’s too radical for the Muslim Student Association which supports Hezbollah and Hamas.

Another student at the university stood up to Jibril—and paid dearly for it. “Three people attacked me,” the second former student tells Vocativ. He says they punched and kicked him while he was helpless on the ground, sending him to the hospital with cracked ribs and a broken arm.

Yet they still give him a platform from which he can poison minds.

Category: Terror War