I don’t know if they read Issue #9 of al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, but they have done just what al-Qaeda asked.
He chose a military target. He evidently researched the target since he knew the man was a soldier, even though he was out of uniform. #9 is the same issues that proclaimed, without attribution, '' The mujahideen are proud to kill in the name of God. And that is exactly what God told us to do in the Qur'an”.
#9, like other issues, cognitive triggers filled the magazine. Cleverly chosen buttons that would help an already prejudiced person become radicalized to violence. Stirred up even to the point of accepting indiscriminate killing to change the things al-Qaeda assured the reader justified killing.
And there he proudly stood, waiting for the police, justifying murder as a noble act of revenge for all those of ‘his people’ killed by the British military.
Now the interrogations begin; the questioning and seeking of facts that will help in the quest to understand what so far we can’t predict. Did he read Inspire? Did he follow some of the dozens of mujahedeen forums and web sites? And so what if he did. Does it matter? Over a dozen terrorists had Inspire in their possession but so have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others who didn’t kill.
We’ve got a lot to learn, and England's criminalizing of downloading Inspire (yeah, it's true) is not going to stop terrorism.
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