We then purchased the exclusive web rights to Osama bin Laden’s Unseen tape from Maktabah Al Ansaar for a large sum of money as a special promotion to launch our JUSPLUS streaming channel with. No sooner was our credit card charged but they were actively on message boards discrediting our exclusive!! This experience is only useful now as they have inferred publicly that we are the CIA. Well, considering they know our real names, our locations and our credit card numbers which they have profited by using, we would like a refund. If they are convinced we are the CIA, they surely wouldn’t want to use our money!!

We still continued in the spirit of cooperation. We approached Maktabah Al Ansaar to joint venture with us on our streaming channel (at no cost to them) and initially they indicated some interest in this initiative. We spent an entire week preparing a proposal they never even bothered to respond to however it didn’t end there. We were then contacted by an employee of Maktabah Al Ansaar telling us that the “boss” had lost his complimentary password to JP and he wanted to have another look at it on the basis of evaluating our proposal. As it was the weekend and tech staff was off, we gave this employee an administrator’s password to the system. A few hours later, the employee contacted us to say and I quote “I lied, I was just bored at work and wanted to watch movies”. Bandwidth costs money, particularly streaming, and needless to say we had to bring a tech in on the weekend to change the passwords on our system. We have never heard another word from Maktabah Al Ansaar on this proposal and frankly I was appalled at the readiness of their staff member to state his less than pious intentions.

Shortly after that, we noticed that Azzam’s Qoqaz URL had been forwarded to Jihad Unspun. Their site had been shut down and now their mirror site was directed to us!! We had offered to help them at one point however no one even contacted us over this and considering they had been shut down by MI5, we would have like to have been at least given a choice to decide whether we wanted to take this on. Shortly thereafter, the Qoqaz URL was also down but not until after we had spent a day writing code to break this forward! In this latest attack by Azzam they claim we have used their “great” image to profile ourselves however this action raises the question whether the reverse was in fact the case.

It gets worse. Azzam was then sending us news by email. Our site is about the war on “terrorism” and therefore news must meet the criteria. There are lots of good dawa sites out there and we are focused on Jihad. We continued to publish their news items that we felt were appropriate for our portal, but once again, we came under the wrath of Azzam, who expected us to publish all of their news regardless of whether it met our mandate or not!!

We stopped carrying Azzam's news for two reasons – first it was inconsistent and so we never knew if the site would be available or if we would receive their news daily or when the next complaint would come. That’s when we secured volunteers to start translating from Pakistan and Urdu dailies. Secondly, we soon discovered that the information in Daily Islam, Ausaf etc was almost identical to that of Azzam’s and because these are established sources that publish also in hard copy, we chose to go this way so that we can be assured that daily we can deliver this kind of news. Legally, if the item is translated, the author of the translation can take credit for it so assuming that Azzam is translating from these sources, they have the right to issue this as their own accreditation however we believe that viewers should know where an article is sourced from so we credit the original source and show ourselves only as the translators.

I was then contacted by Maktabah Al Ansaar and informed that they had an opportunity to purchase the last will of Al-Hawsni tape however the cost was more than they could afford independently and we were asked to partner with them on this project. I was told that each of us (Maktabah and JUS) would be required to put in 3000 pounds which in Canadian dollars is more than $6,000 or almost a year’s college education. I asked if they could give me 24 hours to take this to our Advisory board, which they agreed to. Thank goodness I now have knowledgeable brothers who know about these matters, as when I discussed this matter with my brothers, the advised me that they had already secured the tape from Saudi Arabia and in fact this type of material doesn’t cost anywhere near that kind of money. I went back to Maktabah Al Ansaar within the allotted time frame, declining their offer and also offering to share our tape with them at no cost. Much to my surprise, they advised me that they had already gone ahead and purchased this tape with the help of other brothers! We wonder to this day what would have happened had we agreed to this large fee considering others had already been involved. That was the last we heard from Maktabah Al Ansaar and to date we have only ever purchased only one video from them.