Sydney Hostage Taker Man Haron Monis Pledged Allegiance to ISIS on His Website

It's still not yet clear why Sydney hostage taker Man Haron Monis held up the Lindt cafe, an act that ultimately claimed three lives, including his own. But we're starting to learn some things — including that he had more than an affinity for ISIS. According to a portion of his now-deleted website (which you can see here) translated from Arabic by Foundation for the Defense of Democracy's Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Monis pledged allegiance to ISIS before the attack.

“In a long and rambling Arabic passage,” Gartenstein-Ross explained over the phone, “he talks about how there's the Khalifa, the caliphate of the age, and how he's proud to declare allegiance to the caliphate.”
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The fact that Monis declared his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's ISIS doesn't mean he's a part of it. “I can't imagine that they expended resources on this, given that this guy was a fruitcake,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

What's more, he was clearly on police radar — making him a terrible choice for jihadists' normally savvy recruiters. He had been sentenced to jail for writing horrific letters to the families of killed Australian soldiers, which turned into a high-profile legal case. He had also been charged as an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and 50 allegations of “indecent and sexual assault.” Terrorist leaders, according to Gartenstein-Ross, don't usually recruit people who have drawn that much official attention.

Moreover, it's not clear that ISIS propaganda or social media is the main reason Monis decided to hold up the café. That could have been mental illness. “In terms of the driving force for what radicalized him, that can't be known at this time,” Gartenstein-Ross says. “He's an extraordinarily strange individual.”
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“What he says — multiple times — is that Islam is the religion of peace, and that's why we oppose the terrorism of the United States and Australia,” Gartenstein-Ross explains. “In terms of what he claims for inspiration for the attack, it's clearly Islamic State.”

That's enough, according to Gartenstein-Ross, to characterize Monis's act as “political-religious terrorism.”
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