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Wordpress Loves Terrorists

by Garry Conn

It has been reported that Wordpress, Inc. was hosting the personal website of the terrorist Daniel Joseph Maldonado who pleaded guilty to training with al Qaeda which if you don’t know is the name given to an international alliance of militant terrorist organizations established in 1988 by Osama bin Laden.

Daniel Joseph Maldonado, a.k.a. Daniel Aljughaifi, 28, pleaded guilty to the sole charge in an Information filed on March 30, 2007 and unsealed today. During the hearing, Maldonado admitted he had traveled from Houston, TX to Africa in November 2005 and then on to Somalia in December 2006 to join the Islamic Courts Union ( ICU ) and elements of Al Qaeda to fight “jihad” against the Transitional Federal Government to establish an independent Islamic State in Somalia.

“How does Daniel Joseph Maldonado, a mild-mannered married Boston native, become transformed into Daniel Al-Jughaifi, a zealous supporter of sharia law, and then into Abu Mohammed, an armed jihadi fighting in Somalia alongside al Qaeda operatives? The internet, that’s how.” – Jawa Report

According to The Jawa Report, Wordpress, Inc. is allowing the use of their free blog and free hosting service to terrorists and terrorist support groups. In the report provided by Jawa, the site author has produced a list of terrorist sites and terrorist support sites, all of which are being hosted on Wordpress.com.

Terrorists Sites
Hosted on Wordpress.com

  • Islamic Courts Union (al Qaeda linked former government of Somalia–aka, “African Taliban”)
  • Daniel al Jughaifi (personal website of indicted (Update: he plead guilty two days ago) American jihadi Daniel Joseph Maldonado)
  • Amreekan (literature by convicted terrorist Sheik Nasir bin Hamid al Fahd who famously issued a fatwa granting al Qaeda the right to use WMD against the U.S.)

Terror Supporter Sites
Hosted on Wordpress.com

WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg. The latest release of WordPress is version 2.1.3, released on April 03, 2007. Distributed under the GNU General Public License, WordPress is free software. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and fewer users than you can count on your hands and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

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6 comments

1 Mr.Byte { 04.24.07 at 4:32 am }

Wordpress is the best software for blogging and the best part is its a open source…

2 Garry Conn { 04.24.07 at 9:30 am }

Mr. Byte,

There is no argument there! :) Wordpress software never ceases to amaze me.

3 Thor Schrock { 04.24.07 at 10:27 am }

On one hand, you want to smack WordPress for allowing their software to be used for an evil purpose, but on the other I don’t know that it is WordPress’ place to decide what is evil and what is permissible.

The best thing we can all do is not visit the blogs of these nutjob murderers and let our guys and gals in the military do their jobs.

Congress – get off your a$$ and fund our troops!

4 Matt Keegan { 04.24.07 at 4:04 pm }

I’m with Thor on this one. I doubt WP can police every site nor would I want them to do so. On the other hand, our elected officials in DC need to support our troops instead of undermining them at every turn.

5 Garry Conn { 04.24.07 at 5:10 pm }

Guys I try not to get in the middle of a debate because I am the guy that posted the article, but… :) There is always a but, right!

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According to this page, Wordpress.com takes extreme measures towards fighting people who attempt to use their personal Wordpress.com sites toward making money online through the use of third party advertisers. If Wordpress.com can exercise such extreme measures against this, then I would be lead to believe that with a little effort they could more closely monitor other types of content. Such as, terrorists sites and terrorist supporter sites.

So on the same token I agree too… but then my challenge is this, why doesn’t Wordpress.com make so much of a stink about people taking a crack at trying to make a buck, but turn the cheek when users try taking a stab at plotting their next attack against the U.S.?

6 jez { 04.27.07 at 9:51 am }

actually, I tracked some Islamic languages sites with my themes that I made as well. I wonder if they are terrorists too. But tbh I don’t care, as long as they play along fine.

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