There are a couple of things about the Evangelical/Pentecostal news service ASSIST Ministries that I don’t like: the credulous reporting of faith healers like Lee Jae-Rock; stupid opinion pieces from the likes of Ted Baehr and Mikhail Margolis. But, on the other hand, ASSIST is often commendable: unlike Agape Press, it is not a creature of the US Christian Right, and it regularly covers news stories that concern Christian persecution without indulging in the kind of grotesque anti-Muslim rhetoric one finds on some other Christian websites. Radically, it covers Israel-Palestine from a perspective of compassion and cautious optimism, while Agape can only spew fatalism and hatred of Palestinians.
So hats off to Jeremy Reynalds, an ASSIST correspondent now under threat from Islamic radicals for highlighting certain pro-terror websites. As Reynalds himself reported back on Feb 6 (urls here made into hyperlinks):
For a few weeks, one of the hottest jihadi terror sites appeared to have been www.mawsuat.com.
Fortunately, a few hours before the recent very successful Iraqi elections this site was taken down by its American Internet service provider (ISP) after I alerted the company to the contents of the site.
Now thanks to my friends at Internet Haganah, I have learned that the site’s demise has made some jihadis very upset and they would like nothing better than to have my head on a platter.
The following information was posted on the Houston-based radical Islamic site Ansarnet, and the translation provided by Internet Haganah Owner Aaron Weisburd.
Weisburd wrote “The person who ran the now-defunct mawsuat.com starts by blaming Reynalds for the site’s demise, posts a P. O. Box address for Reynalds, and asks if anyone else has more information about him.
“In the discussion that follows, the Islamists first post Reynalds’ home address so that he might be ‘visited,’ then a picture of him and a wish that his ribs should be broken, and finally they offer their prayers to Allah that He should deliver to them Reynalds’ ‘fatty neck’ – a clear reference to the current fad of decapitating anyone deemed to be a critic of the more lethal forms of Islam. The thread closes with a heartfelt ‘amen.’
The Houston site has since had to move to a Chicago host, and the forum that contained the death threat has closed. Now Reynalds is scheduled to appear on the O’Reilly Factor: one hopes that more mainstream and liberal media will also take an interest. Last year, I offered solidarity (for whatever it was worth) to The Revealer after it was targeted by the Islamophobes and racists of Little Green Footballs. The same solidarity goes for ASSIST and Jeremy Reynalds.
Filed under: Uncategorized
[…] Reynalds, whose efforts at tracking down Islamist websites have been noted before on this blog, wrote last month that: …there’s http://al-qal3ah.com/, http://www.qal3ah.net/ […]
[…] news service ASSIST Ministries; Reynalds has made his own researches into internet Islamism, as I blogged on early last year. Less encouragingly, however, Jenvey also associates with the demagogues of Little […]
[…] Reynalds, a British Christian living in New Mexico who also monitors Islamic extremist websites – I noted his efforts in this regard in a positive blog entry I made in 2005. Reynalds also tells us that […]
[…] around in their business looking to expose what they’re up to, good luck to them. Indeed, I wrote a positive blog post about Jeremy Reynalds’ efforts in this regard back in 2005, and when in […]