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Twitter Agent Provocateur “Ahimla Jihada” Exposed As Fake

Original guest post

by Shibli Zaman

Recently, Twitter was abuzz with its latest agent provocateur tweeting in support of the orcs of our time, ISIS.

Ahimla_Jihada_ISIS

I’ve emblazoned the image with the word “Fake” in order to avoid spreading this nonsense uwittingly.

The tweets of this person declaring her undying devotion and love for ISIS from right here within the borders of the United States garnered some pretty ludicrous responses. After all, ignorance only begets ignorance.

Fake_isis_Twitter

On the blogosphere it was much worse. There were serious efforts to locate her and murder her:

Fake_isis_pic_blog

In this crazed flurry of suggestions to bomb Mecca and Medina, to kill Muslims, and to even go as far as attempting to find and kill this girl, these folks overlooked a glaring detail that I was able to discern in 5 minutes. “Ahimla Jihada” is fake. Twitter apparently discovered this early on and any attempt to access the Twitter account @ahimla2 will reach this page:

Fake_ISIS_Twitter2 So who is she? First and foremost, the name “Ahimla” doesn’t exist in any language on earth. Google it. All you will get are nutters plotting to kill this phantom or results thinking you misspelled the Indian city “Shimla”.

You won’t find a single person on earth named “Ahimla”. People have all kinds of crazy names. Frank Zappa named his kids Dweezil, Moon Unit, and even —as awesome as it is— Rodan. Ving Rhames named his kid Reignbeau. Yes. Pronounced “Rainbow”. David Duchovny named his kid…well…Kyd. But the twit behind this fake Twitter account had to use the one name that just didn’t exist on planet earth. Finally, the last name “Jihada”? That really took a lot of thought.

As for the picture, herein is something very sad and a lesson in sleuthing fabricated propaganda on the internet. Bookmark the URL https://www.tineye.com/ right now. Using this website you can upload any image and it will search the internet for every instance of the image and even similar images going back for years.

I always use this site whenever I get images over social media allegedly portraying atrocities committed in some crisis point of the world. A majority of the time those pictures end up being lifted from something completely unrelated to what they are purported to represent. Don’t get duped! I hope everyone will start using this site to verify the authenticity of images that make claims with an objective of manipulating public opinion.

In this case I was able to find the source of this poor girl’s image. It was taken on April 1, 2009, five years ago, by a photographer who thought this girl’s infectiously cute smile would make a great picture. It was lifted from his Flickr account. Here’s the link to the original post:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/24124408@N08/3652365479/

Note, that he titled the picture “Angel Face”. How both ironic and tragic is it that this young girl’s angelic face was used to represent such great evil by someone who can be described as no less than a diabolical liar. Not only is this innocent girl’s life in danger but there are clearly people ready to exact violence upon any girl who even looks like her. That would be any Muslim woman who wears a scarf.

In the end, there are two critical details to be gleaned from this:

First, in the absence of any American-Muslims supporting such terrorist organizations they found the need to fabricate such a person. American-Muslims deserve a pat on the back for this. We have all kinds of crazies just like anyone else, but we should be proud that these incognito Islamophobes couldn’t find a real extremist to retweet. They had to fabricate one.

Second, it should make everyone painfully aware of what we’re up against. There are dubious forces from an increasingly belligerent political Right who are out to brainwash, by hook or crook, the American public into hating their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith and to justify a foreign policy in the “10/40 Window” that has tarnished America’s reputation globally and needlessly puts our men and women in uniform in harm’s way. It’s high time we fight misinformation with information.

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    • Theresa Jensen

      Thank you for this page. I am a Christian who has been blessed with the friendship of a Muslim from Pakistan during his time in the Midwest as an exchange student. I have enjoyed this page since then now that I am a recovered hater, promoter of brain rot. We do not agree on our eternal futures, but I believe that Love is the answer to life’s problems, and there is no place for hatred in God’s plan. Hate is 100% based on senseless, arrogant fear.

    • Jekyll

      Q: Why did Disneyland Paris experience some difficulties at the beginning? A: Because every night, after the fireworks, the French would surrender.

    • Mehdi

      Ok my pleasure

    • Salaams Mehdi, and thanks for clearing that up.

    • Mehdi

      My point was related to guns, I did learn karate and defended myself a few times in the past. The problem I refer to is guns, I believe that getting a gun for self defense doesn’t make people safer and ends up making matters worse, with general increases of accidents and also overall violence within society. As it’s the case in the US and Latin America, there are less guns in Asia and Europe and I feel safer from that sense. As for the point on knives, I have a 2 year old kid, having him near even a knife worries me indeed, I will teach him how to handle that but much later, that was a point to highlight the issue on guns.

  • Exactly right. A few weeks ago I was looking for a local mosque after moving, and I came upon a message board–a decidedly anti-Muslim one–in which posters were using one of the mosque-finders (salat-o-matic or IslamFinder or some such) to find Muslim organizations in their locales. Then they began making “plans” on what they intended to do with this information. My blood ran cold. I’ve read that expression many times and felt it plenty over the course of my short thirty-nine years, but never until that point had I truly felt it like this. If I wasn’t already a firm believer in arming my household (the Prophet saw mandated the study of martial arts, which in His (saw) time consisted of horsemanship and archery), that would have made me into one. Of course as a veteran and someone who grew up surrounded by guns I have my own cultural biases, but since I live in my homeland that doesn’t worry me too much…

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