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

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.

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. 

‘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?’

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.’

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.