The online Jihadi community constitutes a central component in the Jihadi propaganda array and is an important target audience for the messages sent by Al-Qaeda’s leadership and other Jihadi organizations.
The renowned Jihadi Sheikh, Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, recently discussed their great importance: “The Jihadi forums fulfill an important role in defending Jihad and the Mujahideen, in spreading their messages and documentary publications. They have become a true partner of the Mujahideen...”
This role does not go unnoticed by the forum managers, who work to strengthen the ties between the surfers and the forums, while at the same time expanding the boundaries of the forum’s “virtual community”. One of the main means for achieving that end is found in the allocation of an open forum to surfers for a predetermined period of time, through which they get the rare opportunity to address questions on various subjects directly to a senior Salafi-Jihadi Sheikh, who is a guest of the forum.
This document will focus on such an “open forum” with Sheikh Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi.

The online Jihadi community constitutes a central component in the Jihadi propaganda array and is an important target audience for the consumption of messages from Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
One of the main means for the distribution of the ideology of Salafi-Jihadi Sheikhs is found in the allocation of an open forum for surfers for a predetermined period of time, through which they get the rare opportunity to address questions on various subjects directly to a senior Salafi-Jihadi Sheikh, who is a guest at the forum.
This document will focus on such an “open forum” with Sheikh Abu Abdullah Al-Maqdisi, the Sharia officer of the Lebanese "Fatah Al-Islam" organization, an Al-Qaeda branch in Lebanon founded in 2006.

It is no secret that the western countries enjoy a clear economic, technological and military superiority over Muslim societies in the modern post-colonial age.
The Islamists believe that renewed adherence to primal Islam, is the key to the rehabilitation of the power of Muslim society. According to them, the modernization process, secularism and the import of western ideology constitute a principal and significant cause of the decline of Muslim societies and in the deterioration in the power of Islam.
At present, this view is accompanied by the additional feeling of rage and discontentment amongst the Muslims, especially immigrant Muslims, in view of the wave of rising Islamophobia in the European continent. 
Following this atmosphere and in response to these trends, we are today witnessing the publication of articles in the Arab and Muslim papers, and not only in Islamic papers, on the persistent struggle the West is waging against the Islamic religion in various ways.
In the Jihadi forums, we are also witness to many publications focusing on the strained atmosphere in the relationships between the western cultures and Islam. At the beginning of November 2009 a booklet was published, containing a manifesto titled: “This is the way the conflict between Islam and the West should be conducted”.

Recently, Jihadi online forums have been focusing attention on the western marine forces' presence in the high seas and marking them as a target for terrorist attacks. This trend stems, in all probability, from the media resonance surrounding the success of Somali pirates in taking over western ships, looting their cargo and sometimes receiving high ransoms for the release of their crews.
The abduction or attack of a sea vessel is not a new trend characterizing global Jihad. Already, in the early days of Al-Qaeda's operations, the organization’s activists carried out terrorist attacks against vessels docked in marine ports.
Abu Musab Al-Suri, one of the most prominent Al-Qaeda ideologists, noted in his book “Global Islamic Resistance Call”, the need to target western sea vessels in the Mediterranean, in light of their strategic and economic importance, and also due to the West’s extreme sensitivity to the security of the marine cruise and commercial routes.

Over the last few months several calls made on the behalf of senior Al-Qaeda members, asking for financial aid for the Jihad organizations suffering from financial trouble, were detected on Jihadi online forums. These calls engendered a wide discourse on the forums, and many online surfers posted correspondence pleading with Muslims to give generously for Jihad, alongside other correspondence dealing with the ways in which financial aid could be transferred, and the security measures that should be taken in order to do so.
Even though it seems Al-Qaeda is faced with difficulties in financing its activities, it should be clarified that the channels for obtaining financing, both on the organizational level and the local network level, are plentiful and diverse, and include: drug trafficking; acts of theft and looting; donations from individuals and charity groups; marine piracy as well as kidnapping for purposes of ransom.

The Salafi-Jihadi stream burst into the consciousness of the Arab and Western world after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 which were orchestrated by the Al-Qaeda organization, a part of the movement. The movement believes that the form of Islam which was widespread during the first three generations of Islam, should be taken as the role model and be the expression of the pure and refined faith to which Muslims should strive.
Today, the Salafi movement includes a number of sub-factions and various groups which can be divided into three main groups: The political or pragmatic Salafi stream; The puritanical salafi stream; And the Jihdai Salafi one.
This document will focus more on the Jihadi Salafi stream. One of its prominent figures, who characterized the way of thinking and in particularly its radical modus operandi, was Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi – the Al-Qaeda emir in Iraq (assassinated in 2006).

In different occasions Al-Qaeda leaders and ideologists stated their views that democracies, constitutional governments, and insufficiently Islamic monarchies are equally unacceptable forms of governance for Islamic societies, because they empower human rulers and man-made legal systems rather than the law of God.
This paper attempts to review and analyze the Jihdai ideological viewpoints regarding Western democracy.

During the past year, Lebanese Hezbollah operations outside of Lebanon have been exposed. It would appear that this exposure is the result of Hezbollah's concerted effort to perpetrate a revenge attack, against the backdrop of 'Imad Mughniyye's assassination attributed to Israel. At the end of 2008, a Hezbollah network operating in Egypt was exposed and It was recently made public, that an additional Hezbollah network was exposed in Azerbaijan.
The Lebanese Hezbollah’s operations in Yemen were also exposed. The President of Yemen publicly accused Hezbollah of supporting the terrorist group operating in Yemen.

On April 9th, 2009, the Egyptian media reported extensively on the exposure of a 49 member terrorist network, which operated in Egypt on behalf of the Lebanese Hezbollah organization. 
The exposure of Hezbollah's terrorist network in Egypt infuriated the Egyptians, who perceived this as a serious attack against the dignity and sovereignty of Egypt by Hezbollah and Iran.
The existence of a terrorist network for a number of years fits well into Hezbollah's strategy to establish operational infrastructures outside Lebanon, as a base for future operations in these areas. This infrastructure also gathered intelligence on Israeli targets in Egypt, apparently in order to perpetrate an attack in revenge for the assassination of 'Imad Mughniyye.
This modus operandi exposed in the Egyptian context, was a sort of window, enabling a glance into the way that Hezbollah establishes its terrorist networks abroad, even in countries which do not perceive Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.