Jihad Joe (30 page)

The most important forums operate mostly in Arabic, but a few have English sections or separate forums for English-language users. The Al Ansar forum, which has Arabic, English and German versions, and the Somali-language forum Al Qimmah, which features an English section, have some of the closest ties to jihadists in the field.

A larger number of English-language forums, static websites, and blogs espouse jihadist thought and encourage radical or extremist conversations but are careful to stay within the limits of American First Amendment protections. The number of these sites is estimated to be between the hundreds and the low thousands.

Within the last couple of years, these English-language outlets have become important incubators for the radicalization of American Muslims. They have also caused fundamental changes in the patterns of radicalization, which, combined with the U.S. war on terrorism, have led to shifts in the profile of American jihadists generally and American terrorists in particular.

IslamicAwakening.com is jihad for beginners. It describes its aim as “correcting” Muslims who have gone astray, fighting off the “ideological onslaught” against Muslims, and “[reviving] the abandoned and forgotten obligations without which the victory to the Ummah remains impossible”—a reference to jihad, which often called the “forgotten duty.”
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The site has an extensive news and commentary section and a lively forum. Much of the discussion is devoted to Islamic life, culture, and jurisprudence, but the most active area by far is the “Politics, Jihad and Current Affairs” forum.
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Participants in the IA forums skirt the edge of legality but rarely cross over. Moderators keep a lid on discussions about committing terrorism or threats of violence. Within those parameters, participants on the site are palpably angry.

One forum topic, which the moderators keep at the top of the first page of posts, is titled “America is a sick place” and consists of links to news stories showing various immoral acts by Americans, such as murder, child abuse, and sexual promiscuity.
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(The fact that Muslim countries such as Yemen and Saudi Arabia have similar problems, including a massive trade in child slaves who are often sexually abused, does not have its own topic.
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)

Other topics, selected from a range over time, included

• Fatwas from Anwar Awlaki

• “Are we Muslims or
Munafiqeen
[hypocrites]?”

• “Long live the Mujahideen!”

• “Atrocities of the real terrorists” (meaning Americans)

• “Israel using nude female soldiers to seduce Palestinian youth”

• “Where to find jihad videos?”

• “Fatwa on jihad in Chechnya”

Some of this material is repurposed from other, more aggressive jihadist sites; other topics are based on news stories. In some cases, topics reprint individual letters and e-mails from jihadist clerics such as Anwar Awlaki or from Muslim prisoners accused or convicted of terrorism.

The overall effect of all this posting by users based mostly in the United Kingdom and the United States is to create a giant echo chamber of complaints of
Muslim victimization, as well as explicit jihadist incitement, including overt examples and “precursor” rhetoric such as comments on the misdeeds of Americans, both individually and collectively. Disliking America does not make one a jihadist sympathizer, but virtually all jihadist sympathizers dislike America.

The forum boasts of such celebrity members as the American founders of the radical website Revolution Muslim, al Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, and would-be jihadists Zach Chesser, Daniel Maldonado, and Tarek Mehanna.

When you widen the circle out from the members of the Islamic Awakening forum, it doesn't take long to arrive at Revolution Muslim.

Spun off from a British extremist group, Revolution Muslim and its lesser-known offline affiliate, the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS), are based in and around New York City, with supporters and members scattered throughout the country.
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The core group is usually fewer than twenty people, and the names often change, due to vicious “office politics” and backbiting among key members.
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Adherents and fans are believed to number in the thousands.
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Both groups claim to be nonviolent political organizations that oppose U.S. policies and corrupt Arab regimes, while promulgating an aggressive version of Islam. Both have been widely condemned by mainstream Muslims. And both organizations are predominantly American.

“We're all just regular kids in New York City,'' said Ariful Islam, a spokesman for ITS, in 2005. “We grew up here.''
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ITS is the original group, operating in New York as early as 1986. Revolution Muslim is a more recent and wide-reaching spin-off, centered around an active and controversial blog that promotes English-speaking jihadist ideologues such as Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, American citizen Anwar Awlaki, and Abdullah Al Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric. All of them have large followings in the West.
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Faisal plays a direct role in counseling the site's operators and takes part in regular online chats with Revolution Muslim's readers. He was convicted in the UK in 2003 of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder for speeches in which he told adherents that they would go to heaven for killing non-Muslims. After serving four years in prison, he was deported back to Jamaica.
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RM was founded by Yousef Al Khattab, a Brooklyn Jew turned Muslim convert who was born in 1968 with the name Joseph Cohen, and Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a younger Caucasian American born Jesse Morton.

Deeply engaged with his Judaism, Cohen turned to Orthodoxy in his twenties and moved to Israel with his wife and children in 1998, but he became frustrated with the complexity and inconsistency of competing rabbinical interpretations of the religion.

Like many converts, he found simplicity in Islam. “In the Koran, it says not to ask so many questions,” he explained to a reporter in 2003.
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Many converts to Islam are attracted to an impression of simplicity and absolutism, although in reality the history of disputation and interpretation in Islam is at least comparable to that of other religions.
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Revolution Muslim's content is mostly tedious. Postings alternate between pedestrian news items that describe—or can be interpreted as describing—the persecution of Muslims in various contexts, and discussions of Islamic law and tradition that range from esoteric to obscurantist, in an effort to establish the site's religious credibility.
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The site enjoyed bursts of notoriety for praising terrorists. Khattab famously told CNN that he “loved Osama bin Laden,” a video clip that was replayed endlessly as Revolution Muslim and its associates became more and more known for their extremism.
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In 2009 Khattab wrote a post praising Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, shortly after the attack.

An officer and a gentleman was injured while partaking in a pre-emptive attack. Get well soon Major Nidal. We love you. [ … ] Rest assured the slain terrorists at Fort Hood are in the eternal hellfire.
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Khattab dropped out of the organization in 2009, when he moved from the United States to Morocco with his family and, by his account, experienced a change of heart regarding the use of violence in Islam—at least up to a point. According to Khattab, he had come around to the view that Muslims should use “the democratic process” to advance the spread of Islam. According to a post on his personal blog,

I denounce my previous misunderstanding that the rulers and tyrants that reign over the Muslim lands should be killed. I prefer less bloodshed and establishment of Islam via schools, media, and medical facilities etc. This does NOT mean I love the rulers, no it means that I will try to hold the higher moral ground & change by example rather than by bloodshed.
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Khattab passed the baton to another Revolution Muslim blogger, who was subsequently forced out by cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad, to Khattab's displeasure. The two founders had a very public falling out, with Khattab accusing Muhammad of luring young Muslims into situations that would lead to their arrest, and Muhammad claiming to have fired Khattab and accusing his former colleague of trying to get him arrested.
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Muhammad became the main public face of Revolution Muslim, appearing as a speaker at its functions and in regularly staged “street
dawah
” events in New York City. During these events, which are usually videotaped, RM members accost passersby, both Muslim and non-Muslim, with a barrage of anti-American rhetoric. Barack Obama is one of Muhammad's favorite targets:

As Barack Obama slaughters Muslims in Afghanistan, you remain silent. You are supposed, this is the change we're supposed to believe in. This is the change that you all believed in. This is the change the imams, the so-called leaders of this community, stood up at the pulpit and told you to go and vote for. This is what you believed in and this is what you got.

This is what you got. The change that the Muslim must believe in must be Islam, it must be shariah. It must be
jihad fe sabeelillah
[military jihad, that is, violence]. This is the change for the Muslims. And only if Barack Obama adheres to these terms of peace will there be peace. Anything else will be his destruction by the hands of the Muslims.
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It's difficult to pin down Muhammad's views, because they shift with the wind. Under media or government scrutiny, Muhammad backs away from his more extreme statements and attempts to recast himself as the victim of distortion. Yet in event after event, as well as on the site, Muhammad clearly works the jihadist side of the aisle.

All over the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, everywhere, that are waging
jihad fe sabeelillah
against the American occupiers should be supported. Why will they not tell you to support the mujahideen? Why will they tell you that jihad does not mean to fight, that jihad means to go to university, so you can get jobs living in their system supporting the promotion of American empire?
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In 2010 Younus Abdullah Muhammad was the latest casualty of Revolution Muslim's infighting, apparently pushed aside as a wave of British extremists took center stage. The new crew used Revolution Muslim's American mailing address in an effort to avoid British laws against inciting violence. It didn't work; its Internet service provider shut down the site after new blogger Bilal Ahmed posted a “hit list” of British parliament members who had voted to go to war in Iraq. Ahmed himself was arrested.

In the meantime Muhammad had started a new site, Islampolicy.com, which he said would work to develop a blueprint for new Islamic states rather than promote jihad. The commitment to nonviolence was short lived. Days after Revolu-tionMuslim.com went offline, Muhammed posted that Islam Policy was the old site's “new home” and soon reverted to form, featuring communiqués from Osama bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, and other al Qaeda leaders. Revolution Muslim's website might have been dead, but its media operation continued with barely a hiccup.
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Despite the problems that plagued Revolution Muslim—infighting, inconsistency, and relative lack of religious sophistication—the group and its members have proved capable of radicalizing American Muslims.

Mahmood Alessa, a Palestinian American born in the United States, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, a naturalized citizen of Dominican descent, were seen at several Revolution Muslim events in the company of Younus Abdullah Muhammad. At one event, Almonte (not the sharpest knife in the drawer) brandished a sign that read “Death to all Zionist Juice.”
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Alessa and Almonte were fans of Anwar Awlaki who devoured jihadist content online and trained in combat techniques with an eye toward joining Al Shabab in Somalia. Of course, if that didn't work out, they were prepared to settle. Alessa was recorded by the FBI while holding forth on his philosophy:

I'm gonna get a gun. I'm the type of person to use it at any time. But, if I would've had a gun, I can't—I can't even I'll, I'll have more bodies on it than—than the than the hairs on my beard. You know what I'm saying? It's already enough, you don't worship Allah, so, that's a reason for you to die. [W]e're being pushed by every corner of the earth, [meaning], they only fear you when you have a gun and when you—when you start killing them, and when you—when you take their head, and you go like this, and you behead it on camera, and you—you have to be ruthless, bro.

I swear to God, bro. Enough of this punk shit. It's that everyone has to be ruthless to—with these people. We'll start doing killing here, if I can't do it over there. I'm gonna get locked up in the airport? Then you're gonna die here, then. That's how it is. Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestiniancrazy guy, he's not better than me. I'll do twice what he did.
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The FBI recorded hours of such scintillating conversation, placing an informant near the two and arresting them before they could do any damage. People become involved with jihadism for many reasons, among them a simple predisposition toward violence. Alessa and Almonte may not have been the most sophisticated followers of Revolution Muslim and the Islamic Thinkers Society, but others would surpass them.

Bryant Vinas was a Latino American from Long Island. He was raised Catholic, but his life was thrown into chaos when his parents divorced shortly before he entered high school. He became so unruly that his exasperated mother sent him to live with his father. When he left high school, he enrolled in the military but washed out of boot camp. A friend's brother introduced him to Islam.