The following podcast contains advertising.

To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast,

become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair.

That's patreon.com slash law fair.

Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings,

rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.

It's not like we needed to wait two years to see charges against Muhammad Khalifa.

You know, it's been known for at least a year who he is, where he is, and what he did.

There's all kinds of evidence as Imari pointed to, you know, potentially hundreds of hours of his voice narrating these videos.

And yet, no charges came from the Canadian government and no effort was made to charge him.

So I find that quite striking.

It's that we know where he was, we knew exactly what he did, and we made no effort at all to bring him to justice.

And it seems like the United States has decided to take matters into their own hands,

likely because of the significance of who he was.

I'm Jacob Schultz, and this is the LawFair podcast, October 5th, 2021.

Over the weekend, news broke about U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia,

inditing Muhammad Khalifa, a Canadian who traveled to Syria in 2013,

and later joined the Islamic State, where he became the English language voice with a distinct North American accent,

for a series of Islamic State propaganda videos.

The indictment is a big deal, both because of the person it implicates,

and because it's a U.S. court trying a Canadian man for crimes committed in a rock insuria.

To break it all down, I talked with Leo West,

...