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Note: I wrote the following in January. Now the "Cheerleaders" are threatening bloggers again, this time a UK blogger by the name of Tim Ireland over the Twitter service. Richard Bartholomew has the story here. On their Twitter feed they are listing progressiveislam.info as their home website. This is untrue. Below is the story I posted mocking them and their antics, which may be why they are harassing me by claiming my blog.
The Internet vigilante manifesto: 'F*** the law. We know extremists when we see them. And we don't need anyone's approval. And we ain't fooling ourselves, we know how effective we are...Hey, I've just worked out we're just up the road from you!'
The above is a comment left at Bloggerheads.com by one of "The Cheerleaders" (Fayruz) mentioned below. Bloggerheads rightly took the reference to having personal information about his home address as a veiled threat and banned her. The comment is in this thread - second last from the bottom.
Earlier this week I posted over at Talk Islam about a high energy Montana housewife who claims to have taught herself Arabic and invented over 20 different agent provacateur Muslim extremist 'sockpuppets' in order to spend her nights and mornings ranging across the Internet in search of Islamist bad guys. The LA Times article credits her (unsourced) with having provided information to help convict two terrorists and having "provided intelligence in dozens of other international cases."
Now Richard Bartholomew is following the oddball behavior of a bunch of wanna-bes who call themselves "The Cheerleaders" who claim to be "tracking and disrupting violent extremists, mostly Islamic extremists, based in the UK...We mess up extremists, hack their phones, PCs, bluetooth, scare them out of their houses..." They also have claimed to be involved with a fake islamist named Glen Jenvey who recently fooled the Sun Newspaper into printing a false front page story about Islamist threats against UK Jews. The threats were actually from one of Jenvey's Islamist sockpuppets.
Here's the drubbing Bloggerheads was giving to one of "The Cheerleaders" that elicited the above quote that leads off this post:
You claim your actions are justified, but it doesn't look that way from here. If anything, especially by acting without any sanction from the law, you appear to be part of the problem instead of anything approaching a solution.
(*The media are not the police. You do know that, yes?)
I find myself wondering how many actual extremists you've driven underground to the detriment of the efforts of those who are sanctioned by law. I am also dumbfounded that you would see no harm in harassing and alienating moderate Muslims when you claim your battle is against extremism.
And then in total contradiction to the 'fuck-the-law' snarl, they've made a number of outlandish claims about being affiliated with various intelligence agencies and somehow connected to the English government.
After some Googling around Bartholomew has identified them as members and hangers-on to a English beer band called "The Fighting Cocks." Here's a pic:
Stylistically, they're a cross between manga and art school girls of doom. If I had been assigned by my Islamist overlor...err, If I had to appraise their qualities as super-secret Islamist stalkers and crackerjack counter-terrorist hackers, I'd use the words "chaotic," "silly" and "harmless."
The caption to this photo at their website is "We act like we're on speed." Ironic reference maybe, but speed, or "crystal meth' or 'meth' as it is known in the US, has a well-known certainty of creating sleepless paranoia in its users, and "The Fighting Cocks" website is full of odd scrawl about intelligence agencies and Islamist bad guys. The housewife in the earlier story lives in Montana, which is currently in the middle of an epidemic of meth use. In addition to her high energy escapades, the article describes her as "nervous" (while being interviewed at a New York conference heavily attended by law enforcement agents). Anxiety or nervousness is a common side effect of meth.
For all I know "The Cheerleaders" may be strait edge (drug free) and the Montana housewife may drink a lot of coffee, so there's not enough information to assert a connection between meth use and paranoid online stalking of Muslims. Just a bunch of coincidences, I'm sure. |
