Al-Qaeda Calls For the Execution Of Bill Gates and Others To 'Damage the US Economy' (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Al-Qaeda's official online propaganda magazine, Inspire, contains a montage of violent images -- things like guns and blood -- next to an image of Bill Gates. The terrorist group is urging its followers to murder successful business folks, such as Gates, which is absolutely sickening. The terrorist group says that murdering high ranking people can damage the U.S. economy.

Comments

Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[damn_registrars]

While I wish no harm upon Bill Gates - in spite of being vehemently anti-Microsoft myself - I don't see what Al-Qaeda could expect to accomplish by killing him. He stepped down how many years ago from the top of Microsoft? This seems about as logical as watching too many reruns of ER and then deciding to kill George Clooney to harm our health care system.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Al-Qaeda's the Jeb Bush of terrorist orgs. Once respected, they coasted for too long, grew fat and lazy and lost their edge. Now they're trying the tough-guy hat on again to look relevant, and it just looks weird and sad.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[halivar]

You eventually reach 0%? Or, maybe you can pick someone you like, and we'll stop culling right before it hits them? That's how people always expect these things to work. Robespierre learned the hard way that it does not.

That's why talking about killing the rich and powerful is absolutely retarded. You'd be the second guy up against the wall.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

what happens if you kill the .01% and keep culling until it doesn't exist anymore?

You're left with just the people who don't understand percentages.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[__aaclcg7560]

Al-Qaeda's the Jeb Bush of terrorist orgs. Once respected, they coasted for too long, grew fat and lazy and lost their edge.

Like Jeb Bush, Al-Qaeda has an excellent donor network to fund future activities.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[myowntrueself]

Al-Qaeda's the Jeb Bush of terrorist orgs. Once respected, they coasted for too long, grew fat and lazy and lost their edge.

Like Jeb Bush, Al-Qaeda has an excellent donor network to fund future activities.

And, similarly, they will be spending those donations on hookers and blow.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[stikves]

Nope, this has come before, and raising inflation does nothing to the richest top %0.1. In fact, it will make them richer.

It is a long discussion, but go read "Capital in the 21st Century". For a short idea, think about the ways they "park" their assets. Do you think prices of real estate will not appreciate with inflation?

Inflation is mostly harmful for the middle class which cannot invest in efficient assets, but has enough money to lose value.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[houstonbofh]

They come from a "low trust society." Put simply, by default, they do not trust each other. While the US is a high trust society, and by default we do trust each other. This makes things like disaster recovery and business continuity much easier as the people in power do not see it as a threat to their power. In much of the mid-east, it is seen as a threat and is imposable. That is why this tactic would work very well over there. But over hear all it would do is spread around capital, and pass leadership to new and potentially more vibrant leaders willing to take more risks. In short, it may actually stimulate the economy, and piss off the public at large. Talk about unintended consequences!

Re: Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately for us, they said they were only going to target successful businessmen.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[jellomizer]

Most of this stuff is due to pure ignorance of how America works. Their minds are focused on the idea of a centralized source of power. A supreme leader or a king.
The U.S. in general has power distributed where someone can be valuable however not indispensable. In theory you can kill the CEO's of the fortune 500 and still the U.S. Economy will still run. Their wealth will be transferred to next of kin, their investments will still be moving most companies can keep up to day to day operations for an while before they can replace the loss in leadership.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[CohibaVancouver]

While I wish no harm upon Bill Gates - in spite of being vehemently anti-Microsoft myself - I don't see what Al-Qaeda could expect to accomplish by killing him. He stepped down how many years ago from the top of Microsoft? This seems about as logical as watching too many reruns of ER and then deciding to kill George Clooney to harm our health care system.

The Gates Foundation funds education, including education for girls.

An educated populous is the greatest threat to a theocracy.

This is what naming Gates is all about.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[ShanghaiBill]

Like Jeb Bush, Al-Qaeda has an excellent donor network to fund future activities.

Like Jeb Bush, Al-Queda is a has-been, and donors have moved on, to Trump and ISIS respectively.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[AK Marc]

They did more damage to the US economy by using airplanes to take down the Twin Towers, than the damage done to the Twin Towers. This just proves it was an accident they were successful.

If they wanted to collapse the US economy, they should bomb 5 airports with bombs inside luggage that goes off in the scanner line. All 5 within 1 minute of each other spread around. Then, two weeks later, set off 5 more in the ticketing lines. Then, presuming the response is greater curb-side inspections, wait another few weeks and set off car bombs.

Attacking the security perimeter shows that the idea of a perimeter is the failure, and nobody will ever feel safe again. Random acts of terrorism that attacks the common person will do more. Hijack a pizza delivery guy and deliver a bomb instead. Nobody will order delivery food again, if they fear getting a bomb instead. The terror will cripple the US economy.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[MightyMartian]

So, really, they're the Microsoft of terrorist organizations!

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[Dr_Terminus]

The funny thing is that this is almost a reflection of the West's understanding of how Al Qaeda works. How long did we focus on going after Bin Laden or any of the other top guys, as if taking out those guys is sufficient to wipe out an entire ideology. Likely the mis-targeted drone strikes and other operations undertaken to eliminate these figureheads only served to bring more to the extremist ideology.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[bungo]

The bombers of the airport in Brussels exploded their bombs in the check-in area (before the passport control and even further from the baggage scanners). When the airport reopened, they had pushed the security as far back as they could.

There are now military+police checkpoints for cars before you get near the airport, just off the highway exits. It would be difficult to get a car bomb past. You have to get dropped off in a specific car park and walk up to 2 km to get to the security queue to get into the temporary airport buildings.

The queue for the next security check, where they check bags is about 500m long. Everyone is in a very long, thin queue. If there were bombs in the bags to be checked in, the best they could do is explode in the queue outside of the building, which would cause little damage, except to the few within 10m or so.

The end result is a nightmare of an airport, with people avoiding it and not flying. Passenger numbers are way down. A friend who flew recently took 4 hours to get through the security lines and to his flight. He just made it, even though it was a morning flight, and he arrived 4 hours in advance, at around 6am. I would hate to see the queue at 10am or later.

It hasn't crippled the economy, but has really screwed the operators of the airport and all of the airlines using it.

Re:Wow, they really are stuck in the past

[Martin Blank]

The international jihadi movement was fragmented in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but it started to coalesce around two groups in the 90s: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. (Hamas and Hezbollah are mostly specific to a Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, respectively, with a little bit of overlap to neighboring states.) Since then, the movement has been fragmenting again: Boko Haram arose in Nigeria, ISIS in Iraq (out of what was once al-Qaeda in Iraq), and the Taliban have split at least once and maybe twice. Al-Qaeda has tried to reinvent itself, with reports of strategic changes limiting acts against civilians (particularly Muslims) and an attempt to portray themselves as somewhat more gentle than they were, especially in the face of the savagery that ISIS has taken up.

But with all of the attention to al-Qaeda over the years, the leadership really has dwindled, and their ability to adequately train operatives to undertake attacks against Western targets has similarly declined. The group has also proved to be far less adept at social media than is ISIS, limiting their recruiting capability for both front line forces and leadership. Most of their recruits come from areas that don't have strong connections to the outside world, limiting recruitment to more personal means. ISIS is also widely seen as the more effective group, since it's taken territory across large swaths of Iraq and Syria (though word of their losses has not been widely reported in the media and the group isn't keen to play them up), while al-Qaeda's holdings are mostly limited to small parts of Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.

I would not be at all surprised to see that al-Qaeda ultimately outlives ISIS. The former has more experience surviving losses than the latter, which has changed names about a dozen times since forming in the late 1990s as it keeps reinventing itself.

Woohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, the year of the Linux desktop

Because the Quran says

[Jawnn]

...to murder influential people to advance your socio-economic agenda. Right? What was that passage again?

Re:Because the Quran says

[rahvin112]

Al Qaeda was born of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They drew lessons from that and thought they were applicable to other situations. The leadership of Al Qaeda has many mistaken views.

The first is that the mujaheddin, the "faithful" who opposed the soviet invasion actually drove the soviets out. In reality the Soviets had them beat until Americans started funneling advanced weapons in which neutralized the Soviets weapons.

The second is that the expense of fighting the mujaheddin was so costly it resulted in the collapse of the Soviet economy and the unwinding of the entire Soviet state and a withdrawal from "Muslim lands". Of course the reality is that Afghanistan was a side adventure for the Soviets, it was the collapse in oil prices (the only way the Soviets could earn hard currency) in the 80's along with trying to keep up with the American defense spending of the 80's that did the Soviet government in. This double wammy exhausted the currency and gold reserves of the soviet state and resulted in collapse.

The third is that Americans were not willing to sacrifice blood and would retreat in the face of actual combat.

The first two misconceptions have driven the entire strategy of Al Qaeda since the start. They truly believed that by drawing America into a war in the middle east that not only would America be beaten handily but that the economy would collapse and America would be forced to abandon the middle east (their goal). After the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq they thought they had triggered the end of the American empire when the crash of 2008 happened.

The subsequent recovery has put a lie to their predictions so the natural path is to assume something prevented it. Like any good religion they've decided the reason the American economy didn't collapse was because of the wealthy Americans, not because their original assumptions were stupid and wrong. This an organization that wants to bring back slavery and the laws of 700AD Islam and that anything that goes against (capitalism and democracy) that is a perversion that's doomed to failure. The existence and success of America and western states makes this belief a lie. They will continue to come up with "reasons" why their predictions haven't come true and undoubtedly urge the killing of all kinds of people in an effort to make it happen.

They simply don't understand America or the West and what makes us collectively strong.

Re:Because the Quran says

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I know you're joking, but after seeing a few tattoos of teachings of Leviticus i can assure you that many of the most devout followers of any religious book really don't understand it. The Bible/Torah/Qu'ran can at times be seen as a Rorschach test, where you really see what's in the mind of the viewer rather than the book itself.

Of course Al Qaeda is pissed

[NewtonsLaw]

I guess Al Qaeda woke up to find their Windows 7 had been automatically upgraded to Windows 10 then? That's got to piss them off.

Re:Of course Al Qaeda is pissed

[TFlan91]

That's how the CIA found their next drone target!

Once Win10 was started, triangulation was acquired and.... 3... 2... 1... "boom".

Kill off the rich?

[ilsaloving]

So... they want to kill off rich people in the hopes of *hurting* the economy?

Can I assume that people are already tweeting them suggestions on who to go after, so that all the money that is currently being sequestered by all these rich people will finally be released back into the economy?

I hope they don't go after Steve Jobs

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I mean, if they're going after Gates, might as well try to take out Apple too...

If they were serious about destroying capitalism

[FilmedInNoir]

Instead of blowing up buildings and killing people (which for some sick reason boosts the economy) they would all get jobs as investment bankers and mortgage brokers.

Is it me or -

[Progman3K]

Those terrorists sound like idiotic schoolchildren that have no idea how things work.

Talk about moronic... They couldn't make themselves appear dumber if they tried

Re:Top people are completely replacable

[Austerity Empowers]

Top people in Western society are completely replaceable

Perhaps the one thing our economic policy ensures: the wealthy are almost criminally worthless and the most replaceable of the lot, to the point of being huge boat anchors.

Knock yourselves out Al Qaeda, purge us of our parasites, that'll show us!

This explains a lot

[overshoot]

The terrorist group says that murdering high ranking people can damage the U.S. economy.

They've been reading waaaaaaay too much Ayn Rand.

Re:Remind me why...

[overshoot]

Can anyone remind me why it's bigoted to point out that most of the terrorism in the world is Islamic?

Because if it's not being done by Muslims, we call it something else.

Re:Double standard

[rubycodez]

soooo, getting children a better education in the language of their country of residence, the US of A, is somehow comparable to ISIL and AL-Qaeda's slaughters and rapes and maimings? boohoo, the native american alaskana can no longer practice bits of their culture like euthanizing the middle aged?

go back to tumblr, you SJW whiner

We build mountains. They build flag poles.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

(Caveat: I used to belong to sort of them. Was Indian. Now American).

In the West, we have built very strong enduring institutions. For people who grew up in the USA, they seem to be slowly decaying becoming corrupt. But only when you come in from a different society, after growing up there, you would see the difference. The level of honesty and trust in the government, in the institutions, private or public, is very high in America. It would take India a century or more to build such institutions of integrity. I told my bond broker cousin in Bombay, "As the Watergate scandal was picking up steam, IRS audited the sitting President of the USA, found him in violation of tax code, and assessed half a million dollars in taxes and penalties. It cut Nixon's net worth by half. Nixon paid without complaining or creating a ruckus. Nixon!". He was stunned beyond belief. Such things do not simply happen there. Despite all the insider trading and the banksters becoming fraudsters, SEC and Wall Street is light years ahead of regulation and disclosure of Indian capital markets.

Here in USA we build mountains. Someone is on top of the mountain, but there are several who could replace him/her, and that person, single handedly does not achieve any thing big. In the Middle East and in India, probably China, it is all personality cult. Build one pedestal, put a flag pole on it, and put their leader on top of the flag pole. Leader goes down, there is no one to step and continue the system. The leader actively undermines and sabotages the career of anyone who could replace him. Surrounded by sycophants and flatterers, the leaders live in bubbles. India is way better than Pakistan in this respect, and Pakistan is better than Bangladesh and the Arab countries. But none of them even come close to USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and NZ in terms of governance and public integrity.

More likely Windows Vista

[Roger W Moore]

His philanthropy may even be what is irritating them, who knows?

Actually given how out of date they seem I suspect that it may be because they have only just upgraded to Vista.