Mega depressing news for a Monday (sorry chaps) but ISIS, also known as Daesh, the terror organisation waging war on the Middle East, the West and, pretty much anything and everything inbetween has used a Justin Bieber hashtag to try and drum up support for the organisation from young people.
The Tweet, which has now been removed, was, according to the Express, a link to a video featuring a man with a British accent referring to killing 'Kuffars' (non-believers). It is also pupported to have shown images of 'fierce battles' and 'bodies covered in flies'. The Tweet featured the hashtag #JustinBieber as well as #Hollywood and #Bollywood.
Justin Bieber boasts nearly 76 million followers on Twitter, many of them young girls. The hashtag can be used around 750 times an hour according to analytics from Hashtag.org meaning that Tweets containing it are easily searchable by users looking for fan photos, Tweets or music.
The news comes after comedian Shazia Mirza warned that to some teenagers, ISIS are 'the One Direction of Islam', a statement she makes in her new show The Kardashian's Made Me Do It (name taken from one of the sisters of theBethnal Green girls who said 'I can’t understand why she’s gone, she used to watch The Kardashians.'). 'If some hot, hairy Muslim Brad Pitt had written to me at 15 and sent me pictures asking me to join him,' Said Shazia, 'It might have seemed like an exciting way out. But it would have been nothing to do with religion.'
Several kids are now finding out the hard way that joining ISIS has consequences. On Friday, a 17-year-old Swedish girl was sentenced to a year in prison after trying to run away to join ISIS fighters in Syria. She was caputred en route. Similarly, today it has been reported that an Italian teen who managed to make it to Syria has called her parents to say sorry and asked to come home.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.