Social media campaign to free ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ spiked just before the Texas synagogue hostage crisis

Social media campaign to free ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ spiked just before the Texas synagogue hostage crisis, researchers find

Last month, British-born gunman Malik Faisal Akram took four people hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, including its rabbiAkram brandished a gun and held them hostage for 10 hours Study has found references to ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ Aafia Siddiqui and calls for her to be released spiked in the days before the attack on Twitter  There was no direct link established between social media campaign and Texas synagogue attackHowever the report highlights how online activity can lead to real-world violenceA social media campaign to free Aafia Siddiqui spiked before Malik Akram attacked the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas 



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There appeared to be a sudden and coordinated spike in Twitter activity that sympathetic towards the convicted terrorist known as ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ Aafia Siddiqui just before the Texas‘ Congregation Beth Israel hostage situation last month. 

Malik Faisal Akram, a Brit, flew to New York from the UK before heading to Twxas where he bough a pistol before heading to the synagogue in Colleyville, where he took four worshippers hostage and demanded Siddiqui’s release from a prison in Fort Worth. 

Siddiqui is serving an 86-year sentence for shooting at U.S. service members in Afghanistan. She was being arrested in connection with an alleged Al Qaeda plot when she grabbed a soldier’s M4 assault rifle and opened fire on her interrogators. She was a bad shot and none were hurt.

Last month, British-born gunman Malik Faisal Akram took four people hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, including its rabbi 

A social media campaign to free Aafia Siddiqui, pictured above, spiked before Malik Akram attacked the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas

The Congregation Beth Israel synagogue is shown, January 16, 2022, in Colleyville, Texas, where Akram held four people hostage before being shot by FBI and SWAT teams

A study has found references to ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ Aafia Siddiqui and calls for her to be released spiked in the days before the attack on Twitter

Researchers have now said that in the five months before the attack there was an increase in pro-Siddiqui tweets together with a ‘bot-like activity and a network of influencers amplifying anti-Semitic content.’  

The research was conduced by Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) and the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI). 

Twitter is now looking into the information gathered in the report which spotted an increase in activity relating to Siddiqui from September before spiking once again in January just before the attack on the 15th. 

Siddiqui had hardly been mentioned in recent years with around 20 occurrences a day. 

In August, she suddenly started to be mentioned thousands of times a day prior to the protest outside her Texas prison following an alleged assault against her in the jail. 

SWAT teams from the Colleyville Police Department responded to the synagogue after emergency calls began at about 10:41 a.m. during the Sabbath service

‘The well-coordinated online and offline solidarity campaign for Aafia Siddiqui, a raving anti-Semite herself, indulged in anti-Semitic tropes and predictably inflamed supporters,’ Elan Carr, a former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism and member of CAM’s advisory council, said to Fox News.

‘While one can never determine a direct cause and effect, tragically, one of those radicalized supporters flew all the way from England to Texas to visit terror on an innocent Jewish community during Shabbat services.

‘Words matter. Antisemitic words aren’t harmless, they might be protected by the First Amendment, and I’m not suggesting that they be censored, but they’re not harmless. They do real damage. That’s take away No. 1. Take away No. 2 is that social media is remarkably effective and impactful,’ Carr explained.

 ‘This is a major question of our day, a major public policy challenge of our time,’ he said. ‘How can local communities prepare themselves for real threats that may originate online and overseas?’

Malik Faisal Akram, 44, died at the end of the 10 hour siege at a Texas synagogue on January 15

The data compiled in the report was all publicly available online. 

‘The cause Akram identified as a key motive for his attack had been promoted by a U.S.-based nonprofit organization and self-identified Pakistani Twitter accounts in the months before the attack,’ the report states.

Although there was evidence that bots were partly the blame, the report also notes that real people were pushing the campaign which coincided with a demonstration calling for Siddiqui’s release by the Council on American-Islamic Relations outside her prison. 

One of the co-authors of the report, Jack Donohue, a former NYPD Chief of Strategic Initiatives said he was worried by what the report had uncovered. 

‘It gives me some pause for concerns. The information that we have in this report is absolutely worthwhile for the investigating agencies to take notice of,’ Donohue said to Fox. ‘The investigative agencies really do have to run this sort of information down to help identify the motivation.’

One of the four hostages is seen being escorted from the building. The other three would remain inside for several hours more 

There was no direct evidence that linked the Twitter campaign to Akram’s actions, but the correlation alone appeared to be worth investigating.   

‘If we see these trends in the future, anything like this, we need to consider that there could be violent action associated with this organized online activity,’ said David Grantham, a law enforcement professional. ‘So that’s the most basic fundamental thing that law enforcement will look at from this report.’

Grantham believes police can also learn lessons from this particular case in order predict and thwart future attacks.  

‘It’s doubtful that it was merely a coincidence, merely a mentally disturbed, emotionally disturbed person who randomly chose a synagogue,’ Grantham said. ‘This synagogue is in a residential area – you would have to find it. You wouldn’t stumble across it, and there are plenty of synagogues closer to the prison where ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ is being held.’

But whether or not Akram had additional organizational help plotting the incident, Grantham said the case as a whole shows that online activity can lead to real-world violence. 

Police are piecing together the terrorist’s final movements after arriving at JFK airport by January 2 before staying in a homeless hostel run by a Christian charity in Dallas before launching the attack on January 15 

Who is Aafia Siddiqui, the ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ terrorist who planned chemical attacks on Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge

Siddiqui, who was a biology major at MIT, said in 1993 that she wanted to do ‘something to help our Muslim brothers and sisters’ even if it meant breaking the law.

She jumped to her feet and ‘raised her skinny little wrists in the air’ in a display of defiance that shocked her friends.

An in-depth account of her journey to infamy also reveals that she took a National Rifle Association shooting class and persuaded other Muslims to learn how to fire a gun.

Siddiqui lied to her husband and after they wed over the phone he was stunned to discover she was just marrying him for his family’s connections to better enable her to wage jihad.

Two handout photos of terror suspect Aafia Siddiqui released by the FBI in May of 2004

She was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 by local forces who found her with two kilos of poison sodium cyanide and plans for chemical attacks on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building

Siddiqui, a mother-of-three, eventually got her twisted wish and became the most wanted woman in the world by the FBI. 

She was handed to the Americans and convicted of attempted murder in a U.S. court in 2010.

But her hatred for the U.S. was so strong that during her interrogation she grabbed a rifle from one of her guards and shot at them shouting: ‘Death to Americans’.

A 2014 Boston Globe profile of Siddiqui’s time in Boston sought to answer what happened during her 11 years as a student in the U.S.

Something happened to radicalize an intelligent and devout woman who not only graduated from MIT but also got a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University. 

At MIT she made few friends and was remembered as intelligent, driven and a regular at the Prospect Street mosque, which would later be attended by alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

She wore long sleeves and the hijab and was seen as ‘very sweet’ for a former roommate at her all-female dorm.

The focus of her life was the Muslim Student Association but things appear to have changed with the start of the Bosnian War, which seems to have been the beginning of her radicalization.

Siddiqui became involved with the Al-Kifah Refugee Centre, a Brooklyn-based organization which is thought to have been Al Qaeda’s focus of operations in the US.

Terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann said: ‘Aafia was from a prominent family with connections and a sympathy for jihad. She was just what they needed.’

In 1993 as she and some friends debated how to raise money for Muslims being killed during the Bosnian War, one of them joked that they didn’t want to go on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Waqas Jilani, then a graduate student at Clark University, said: ‘She raised her skinny little wrists in the air and said: ‘I’d be proud to be on the Most Wanted list because it would mean I’m doing something to help our Muslim brothers and sisters’

‘She said we should all be proud to be on that list’. 

Jilani added that Siddiqui said in her speeches that Muslims should ‘get training and go overseas and fight’.

He said: ‘We were all laughing like, ‘Uh-oh, Aafia’s got a gun!’

‘Part of it was because she was such a bad shot, but also because she was always mouthing off about the U.S. and the FBI being so bad and all.’

Siddiqui married Mohammed Amjad Khan, the son of a wealthy Pakistani family, in a ceremony carried out over the phone before he flew to Boston.

But upon arrival he discovered that far from being the quiet religious woman he had been promised, her life was very different.

He said: ‘I discovered that the well-being of our nascent family unit was not her prime goal in life. Instead, it was to gain prominence in Muslim circles.’

Khan described to the Boston Globe how she regularly watched videos of Osama bin Laden, spent weekends at terror training camps in New Hampshire with activists from Al-Kifah and begged him to quit his medical job so he could join her.

In the end he stopped bringing work colleagues home because she would ‘only to talk about them converting to Islam’.

Khan said: ‘Invariably this would lead to unpleasantness, so I decided to keep my work separate….

‘…By now, all her focus had shifted to jihad against America, instead of preaching to Americans so that they all become Muslims and America becomes a Muslim land’.

The breaking point was the September 11 2001 attacks after which Siddiqui, who was by now dressing in all black, insisted they return to Pakistan and got a divorce.

American officials suspect she remarried Ammar Al-Baluchi, the nephew of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, though her family deny this.

Siddiqui and her children disappeared in Karachi, Pakistan in 2003 shortly after Mohammed was arrested.

The following year she was named by FBI director Robert Mueller as one of the seven most wanted Al Qaeda operatives, and the only woman. 

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