Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [100]
“We’re all just regular kids in New York City,’’ said Ariful Islam, a spokesman for ITS, in 2005. “We grew up here.’’10
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.11
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.12
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 2003.13 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.14
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.15
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.16 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.17
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.18
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.19
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