Ghost posts from Omar Hammami via the Twitter Medium
[ Charles Cameron — receiving messages from the dead via Twitter ]
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I was surprised late last night when a tweet from the account of the late American jihadi Omar Hammami showed up in my Twitter stream:
[arabic text, hit “refresh” if the tweet-image is slow loading]
— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013
It was in Arabic as you can see, so I took it to Google Translate — which never quite makes sense but almost — and thought I recognized it, checked it out with the Quranic Arabic Corpus translation section, and it did look very much as though what @abumamerican had posted was from the Quran 7. 43:
Praise to Allah, who has guided us to this; and we would never have been guided if Allah had not guided us.
I checked with whoever was posting in @abumamerican’s name, and got the reply “you r right. Sura E Alaraf”.
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Okay, that’s one part of any Islamist communication that interests me a great deal, and others often not so much — the epigraph, the scriptural basis on which the communication in question is based. Everything that follows should be read as a possible variation on that theme — see my earlier ZP posts Speak the Languages, Know the Modes of Thought and especially Close reading, Synoptic- and Sembl-style, for parallels, patterns.
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In any case…
Follow for current updates on #Alshabab's atrocities in #Somalia with an inside view: @ibnjubayr @eyeonsomalia_ @sayfuladl
— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013
After that first, epigraphic tweet, a whole stream of further tweets from @abumamerican followed, many of them in English, and many of them indeed dealing with the notion that Omar Hammami had died remaining faithful to the Guidance, while his killer, Zubeyr / Godane, had gone wildly astray from it.
Others are better qualified than I to discuss the details of what the spectral @abumamerican said and will perhaps continue to tell us. For the moment, I can recommend these two sources:
Clint Watts post, Omar Hammami’s Ghost Tweets On Westgate, Kenya & Shabaab Sahan Journal’s 8 Reasons Why al-Shabaab Killed al-Amriki
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Keep your eyes open, there will be more…
