A Little Introduction

I am an American college student, studying Arabic and History, particularly Islamic History. In doing research for a presentation on Iraq in early 2007, I discovered that there exists a whole other Internet inhabited by potential mujahidin, extremists, and terrorists. When I read translations of some of what I had found to the class, they were absolutely shocked. I've found that most people, though aware of the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism, have no idea that the Internet is saturated with hate speech and militant Islamist rhetoric. Many of the web sites crawled for this blog have several thousand users viewing and posting at a given moment.

An important note: This is not a political blog. Commentary will be kept to a minimum, used only to identify persons or organizations in the translations. Of my own character, I will say only that I am not an Islamophobe. I've learned too much of the beauty of the Islamic religion and the glories of Islamic civilization to embrace such a narrow view. However, I do not blind myself to the reality of extremism.