Interesting post to Yahoo! News feed.
Jeff Greenfield said:Here is the key news from the Mother Jones' link: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26 year-old brother of the second Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had a YouTube page where he posted religious videos, including a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. Among those videos is one dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The videos posted on what appears to be Tsarnaev's YouTube page may shed light on the motivations for the attack on the Boston Marathon. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of "Khurasan," a large portion of territory in central Asia.
"This is a major hadith (reported saying of the prophet Muhammad) that jihadis use, it is essentially an end-time prophecy," says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy "This is definitely important in Al Qaeda's ideology." In The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan's book about his pursuit of Al Qaeda that is named after this prophecy, Soufan describes the prophecy this way:
Khurasan is a term for a historical region spanning northeastern and eastern Iran and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Because of the hadith, jihadists believe that this is the region from which they will inflict a major defeat against their enemies—in the Islamic version of Armageddon.
The older Tsarnaev seems to have posted the video four months ago under the username "muazseyfullah." According to Zelin, "Mu'az is usually a name," and "Sayf Allah means sword of God."