Popular Australian IS online persona outed as Florida man

A 20-year-old man living in the US state of Florida has been arrested for allegedly pretending to pose as an Australian Islamic State supporter who had a popular online backing with the militant group in Syria and Iraq.

Joshua Goldberg, who is Jewish and living with his parents, wrote under the pseudonym “Australi Witness” and publicly called for a series of attacks in the US and Australia.

Goldberg has no concrete ties with religious fighters in Syria or Iraq.

The FBI arrested him for trying to persuade an informant to bomb an 11 September memorial event in Kansas City, Missouri.

He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Throughout his prank, Goldberg convinced IS sympathisers that he once worked for Amnesty International and also had distributed bomb-making material similar to the bomb planted by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston in 2013.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, he tweeted the address of a Garland, Texas, exhibition where pictures of the Prophet Mohammed were shown. Two gunmen were later killed at the event after attempting to attack the exhibit.

On the open source website JustPaste.it, a site that IS supporters use to disseminate information, he posted several writings that denigrated Jewish people.

“The Jews are the worst enemies of Allah. When Islam conquers Australia, every single Jew will be slaughtered like the filthy cockroaches that they are,” he wrote.

In addition to writing as an IS member, he wrote as a white supremacist on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, a radical feminist on Daily Kos, and also created a blog on Times of Israel where he called Palestinians “subhuman”.

In response, the Times of Israel retracted the post and issued an apology.

Popular online fake personas are not a new phenomenon.

In 2011, an American studying in Scotland posed as a Syrian lesbian on the widely publicised blog Gay Girl in Damascus.