ISIS social media campaign reaching across US using video game, rap music PR
The Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) continues to spread its viral recruitement in the United States, calling on supporters to take up arms, attack Americans and create havor like the incident in Texas.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that this is a “new environment” as a threat to the US.
“We’re definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment,” Johnson told ABC. “It is a new environment, but we are not discouraging Americans from doing the things they do on a daily basis.”
The Pentagon raised the alert level at domestic military bases in response to calls for attacks on military installations from ISIS and other groups. It is the first time the threat level has been increased since the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and will result in increased security measures on all U.S. bases.
Johnson said the Internet can make it more difficult to predict and intercept a planned attack. But he disagreed with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who called the government’s response to terrorist activity online “laughable” at a committee hearing earlier this week.
Johnson said some agencies are “still a work in progress” and stressed the importance of engagement from within the Islamic community.
“It has to come from within the community,” he said. “It has to come from Islamic leaders, who frankly can talk the language better than the federal government can and so when I meet with community leaders, Islamic leaders, that’s one of the things that we urge them to do.”
Johnson spoke on referring to the group as ISIL (Broader term which implies more geography in the Middle East. All of this is a sharp contrast to the DHS, FBI and Obama administration remarks previously:
“At present, we have no credible information that [Isis] is planning to attack the homeland of the United States,” Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson told a Manhattan audience back in September.
The Guardian noted more when the conflict was in these early stages: “The Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s preferred Syrian affiliate, “does have aspirations for attacks on the homeland,” director of national intelligence James Clapper said, weeks after Isis invaded the Iraqi city of Fallujah. He and his colleagues gave relatively scant focus to Isis, which has now upended the Obama administration’s foreign policy.”
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