Global Islamic Media Front
Global Islamic Media Front is allegedly an organisation that relays news from the point of view of Al Qaeda under the title Voice of the Caliphate. [1] At best this service does not live up to the reports about it.
The first reference to it appears in a Washington Post article from August 7, 2005 [2] where Rebecca Givner-Forbes from the Terrorism Research Center makes a reference to it. Other propagators of the story are two Israeli connected websites the Search for International Terrorist Entities and the Middle East Media Research Institute. French terrorologist Jean-Pierre Filiu claims the organization has been around since 2003, except there are no references to it anywhere prior to 2005. The bulk of references to it come from a Zionist weblog, The Jawa Report. [3]
In 2007 various media outlets in UK received messages of a new terrorist initiative: an alleged organization by the name of the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) had just launched a new online channel, the Voice of the Caliphate According to Idrees Ahmad 'The message was forwarded by someone at the BBC to my PhD supervisor and media analyst, David Miller, who decided to have a look. The website seemed to have been put together in a hurry, and had nothing except screen shot of a purported broadcast. It had a link to a video, except when he tried to download, it said the site had exceeded its 16 downloads limit.'[4]
Organizations and People Who Have Made Reference to GIMF
- iDefense | Globalsecurity.org[5] | Terrorism Research Center | Search for International Terrorist Entities | Middle East Media Research Institute | Jean-Pierre Filiu | Guido Steinberg - terrorism analyst at the Berlin Foundation of Science and Politics
External Resources
The Fanonite (blog), 'Cyber Jihad: The Phantom Menace', 13 July 2007
Notes
- ↑ see, for example, Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, 'Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations', Washington Post, 7 August 2005; Shaun Waterman, 'Cyber-jihadis use of encryption', UPI, 30 January 2007; Steve Stalinsky (of MEMRI), 'Qaeda's Successful Recruiting Efforts', The New York Sun, 19 January 2007
- ↑ Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, 'Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations', Washington Post, 7 August 2005
- ↑ Via Lexis Nexis
- ↑ The Fanonite (blog), 'Cyber Jihad: The Phantom Menace', 13 July 2007
- ↑ GlobalSecurity.org Global Islamic Media Front, accessed 18 March 2009
