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Case in point: “the gleefully vicious and clownish jihadist Yousef al-Khattab,” as author and JihadWatch.com founder Robert Spencer calls him.

An American-born Jew turned Muslim, al-Khattab, 39, runs a website called RevolutionMuslim.com. As reported by FoxNews.com on April 7, the website mocks the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and calls for the implementation of Muslim sharia law in America.

The Queens, New York cab driver insists his website is providing a service to his country by “exposing the truth.”

“On any given day,” according to the FoxNews.com story, Internet surfers can “log on to al-Khattab's site and a host of startling images appear” including “the Statue of Liberty, with an ax blade cutting through her side” and a video “mocking the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl, entitled ‘Daniel Pearl I am Happy Your Dead.’” He lists his “interests and hobbies” as “Islam, Global Domination, Eye Poking, Dairy Queen.”

RevolutionMuslim.com asks readers to “support the beloved Sheik Abdullah Faisal, who’s preaching the religion of Islam and serving as a spiritual guide.”

Faisal’s “spiritual guidance” has included urging his fellow Muslims to murder “infidels” in sermons so inflammatory that he was convicted in the U.K. in 2003 for spreading racial hatred. Investigators believe those sermons influenced 2005 London subway bomber Germaine Lindsay and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, among others.

Like many homegrown jihadists, al-Khattab takes great satisfaction in using America’s freedoms, especially those guaranteed by the First Amendment, to try to undermine his own country and mock those who make those freedoms available to all. He frequently posts photographs of himself on the website, grinning broadly next to images of wounded American soldiers.

Al-Khattab doesn’t limit himself to posting treasonous commentary on his own website. Robert Spencer comments wryly on al-Khattab’s relative freedom of expression compared to his own:

“Google quickly pulled the video of my talk [about radical Islam] at Dartmouth,” writes Spencer, “although it did not meet any of their criteria for deletion of offensive material.” Yet at the same time, search for al-Khattab’s video “trying to raise money for a jihadist who has been convicted of incitement to murder -- and you'll have no problem viewing that one at YouTube.”

It’s an all too familiar phenomenon.

Take the case of University of Toronto student Salman Hossain. In February, the National Post revealed that Hossain, a political science student at the school’s Mississauga campus, had been posting online comments calling for the death of Canadian soldiers.

"Canadian soldiers in Canadian soil who are training to go to Afghanistan or Iraq are legitimate targets to be killed,” he wrote in one post. “Now it is POSSIBLE AND LEGITIMATE!!"

In another, Hossain asked, "When do I get to shoot a few Jews down for attempting to blow up dozens of mosques in America right after 911?"

Hossain’s posts were especially troubling in light of the fact “that two of the 18 men arrested in 2006 for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack in Canada were students at the school.”

One U of T student told the National Post that “the atmosphere on campus is

‘pretty charged’" around certain issues, and that the publicity surrounding Mr. Hossain's comments raised the temperature of the debate. “Definitely, students don't feel that they can speak out about certain things. Like questioning how it is that guys like this can get ideas like this... and there are people who are defending him."

Hossain continued to post messages approving of attacks on Canadian troops, even after he was visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and told he was under investigation by the RCMP. Among other things, Hossain called a "mass casualty" attack within Canada "a well-considered option" and "the best way to compel Western soldiers to get out of Afghanistan/Iraq."

Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, passed after 9/11, doesn’t outlaw incitement to terrorism. However, Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman, an expert on international terrorism, says, "I don't see how the right to free speech includes deliberate incitement to violence.” Hossain’s postings reminded Hoffman of the writings that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, such as the fictional Turner Diaries.

Meanwhile, columnist Michael Coren detected similarities to “the writings of a Muslim extremist who was convicted last week in Britain for conducting an elaborate plot to kidnap a Muslim soldier serving in the British army and cut off his head. The murder was to be filmed and shown on the Internet.”

“That man and his gang will go to prison,” Coren continued. “Hossain likely will not even be prosecuted. Unlike journalists Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, currently facing numerous Human Rights Commission hearings. Levant's crime was reprinting cartoons implying a link between terrorism and militant Islam. Steyn's was to discuss Islamic ambitions and to quote various Muslim leaders calling for Islam to conquer Europe.”

In the upside down world of the post 9/11 West, such disturbing ironies abound. The likes of al-Khattab and Hossain will presumably continue to post violent Internet screeds at will, while Dutch politician Geert Wilders struggles to find an online host for his anti-Islamist film Fitna, which consists of nothing more than pre-existing news footage of terrorist atrocities and a handful of quotations from the Koran.

Robert Spencer expects none of us have heard the last of al-Khattab and his ilk. As depressing as such stories are to report, they “bear repeating until someone remembers the meanings of the words "sedition" and "treason," or figures out a way to take at least some action against a man who openly hates this country and wants to see its downfall, followed by its Islamization.”