Jihad Joe (33 page)

In short, Tarek Mehanna was a nasty piece of work. He was arrested in 2009 for lying to the FBI about Maldonado then indicted for material support of
terrorism. Abousamra was also indicted, but he had already fled the country after he was interrogated by the FBI in 2006. He is today believed to be living in Syria, where he has family ties.
⁸²

Despite the ugliness of his private rhetoric, Mehanna became a cause célèbre, both within the local community in Boston and online, particularly on the Islamic Awakening forum. Mehanna's letters from prison, including poems and drawings, were posted online by IA members who knew him before his arrest. Campaigns were organized through the forum to write letters and provide other shows of support, including a savvy social networking effort mounted by Mehanna's brother.
⁸³

All of these efforts together have built a mythic picture of Mehanna as a political prisoner, drowning out the sordid details that were laid out in page after page of court documents. At the time of this writing, his case had not yet gone to trial, but it seems unlikely that further revelations will make a dent in the narrative created by his defenders, especially given the absence of overt violence in the charges against him. The most serious allegation was that he had appointed himself the “media wing” of al Qaeda in Iraq, but as of this writing, no evidence had emerged to suggest he had a direct connection to the terrorist organization.
⁸⁴

Evaluating the threat posed by jihobbyists online is a game that journalists often play to extremes. Either they ignore it, or they hype it to the skies. For example, Revolution Muslim has been around for years but garnered only sporadic coverage until the
South Park
incident, which inspired an explosion of stories lacking context.

The release of Samir Khan's
Inspire
in July 2010 prompted an incredible wave of hysterical and wildly inaccurate coverage from normally responsible news outlets, including stories claiming that the magazine was a website (it wasn't), that it had been published on glossy paper (it wasn't), and that it was the first English-language publication targeting Western recruits (it wasn't). None of the reporters and few quoted analysts had even heard of
Al Hussam
or the four issues of
Jihad Reflections
published just months earlier. In fact almost none of the reporters had even read
Inspire
—the PDF was corrupted when it was first uploaded, prompting jihadists and journalists alike to panic and assume that the file contained a virus (it didn't).
⁸⁵

Given the series of setbacks and failures described in this chapter, it might be tempting to dismiss the online jihad as a comedy of errors, a gang that couldn't shoot straight. It's easy enough to underestimate the significance of the jihadist Web, especially when so many of its celebrities are young and inept like Zach Chesser, or when they don't appear to be taking direct action toward violence, as in the case of Tarek Mehanna. But there are several levels on which these forums and websites are fundamentally transforming the face of American jihadists.

It's not simply a question of volume, at least not yet. Although the data set is sketchy, it appears the number of American jihadists and jihad sympathizers in 2010 is not exponentially higher than it was at the end of the 1980s. The perception of an increase is due, in part, to the fact that Americans are paying more attention now than they were then. And the jihadists themselves are far more visible to outsiders, thanks to the Internet.

There are also considerably more Muslims in America today than there were in 1990. Reliable figures on the number of U.S. Muslims are hard to come by, but even the most conservative estimate (1.3 million, almost certainly too low) shows the Muslim population more than doubled from 1990 to 2008.

That creates a bigger pool from which jihadists can recruit, but it doesn't mean that the number of jihadists, as a percentage of the American Muslim population, has increased by leaps and bounds. It should be stressed that only a tiny percentage of American Muslims are drawn into violent extremism, but it should also be recognized that Muslims represent the pool in which jihadists cast their lines. Based on the admittedly incomplete data, it appears likely that the percentage of American Muslims drawn into jihadist activity has increased somewhat but is not dramatically higher than it was in 1990.

The odds of developing credible data covering the last thirty years are slim, so the numbers game becomes something of a dead end. But we can observe, much more directly, that the Internet is creating a significant change in the patterns of radicalization and the types of people who make the decision to go from talk to action.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, recruits for jihad overseas most often entered combat from the perspective of defending Muslims from fairly unambiguous acts of aggression by non-Muslims, and they tended to be selected by recruiters or self-selected on the basis that they would be good in a fight—for instance, if they had military training. Candidates were usually filtered through a network of
recruiters who helped screen volunteers and direct them to settings where they could be most useful.

For many, perhaps most, of these first-phase recruits, sophisticated ideological structures came only after they had decided to become combatants. When they arrived at the camps, itching for combat, they were instead subjected to days or weeks of religious indoctrination before they were allowed to take part in military training, let alone fight.

That's not to say that pre-9/11 recruits were oblivious to more advanced jihadist ideas—for instance, the ambition to create Islamic states or
takfiri
ideas about killing infidels (even when the infidels were Muslims). Some were preconditioned with these ideas, through exposure to ideologues such as Omar Abdel Rahman, but others were simply attracted to the miracles described by Abdullah Azzam or moved by mainstream media reporting about atrocities in Bosnia. Even those who had a more thorough grounding in abstract jihadist theology were absorbing those lessons through a relatively limited number of sources.

Religious indoctrination at the camps was tightly controlled by al Qaeda and a handful of loosely related organizations working from more or less the same playbook, including Lashar-e-Tayyiba and the Islamic Group. Instruction was delivered within a controlled environment, where cultlike indoctrination techniques such as dislocation and isolation helped reinforce the message. This more structured environment created jihadists who were, generally speaking, more formidable and more consistent in their beliefs.

In the post-9/11 era, two major changes worked together to dramatically alter the model. First, the invasion of Afghanistan virtually destroyed the existing network of al Qaeda training camps and drove non-Qaeda camps deep underground. It became much harder (though far from impossible) to travel to the fields of jihad and receive a decent education. The reconstituted camps in Pakistan operated under a cloak of extreme secrecy in a much more restrictive environment than before. In the United States, the environment for recruiters deteriorated in a corresponding manner, with mosques clamping down on the public airing of extremist rhetoric.

At the same time, the use of the Internet launched a decade of sustained and often explosive growth, not only for jihadists but for everyone. Internet access became ubiquitous, costs came down, and software and websites became easier to use. The advent of Web 2.0 led to a proliferation of blogs and message boards,
and e-mail became the preferred method of communication. All these tools spread within the jihadist community at much the same pace that they did in the general population.

The chief effect of these two changes was to reverse the old paradigm. With the rise of the jihadist Web, religious indoctrination now tends to come first, and the decision to take part in combat comes second, if at all.

Would-be jihadists are today able to immerse themselves in a dizzying array of radical Islamic literature. They can feast on hundreds or thousands of hours of video and audio lectures by established clerics, as well as enthusiastic amateurs.

Among the amateurs, many lack a sophisticated Islamic outlook, but they excel at the Wikipedia approach to expertise. Anyone armed with Google can convince himself (and a certain number of others) that he is an expert in nearly any topic with a few weeks of concerted effort. Islamic jurisprudence may be especially vulnerable to this cut-and-paste mentality, due to its dense complexity and lack of a central religious authority to settle disputes.

Eventually, aspiring jihadists convince themselves that they too are experts, capable of deciding religious questions that have life-and-death consequences. All this can happen before the jihobbyist steps one foot overseas, as it did with Samir Khan and Zach Chesser.

Where the jihobbyists start to run into trouble is when they attempt to make the transition from talk to action. The clear passages to physical jihad are long gone, and those who wish to fight are left to their own devices.

Some succeed, but many more fail. Bryant Vinas nearly got himself killed trying to reach al Qaeda. In late 2009 five young men from the Washington, D.C., area demonstrated that not everyone is as lucky or competent as Vinas. They got arrested about a week after getting off the plane.
⁸⁶

Before 9/11 someone who selected himself for jihad usually did so because he was pretty damn tough. After 9/11 someone who selected himself was more likely to be a voracious reader.

When you're fighting a war, you need foot soldiers more than poets. Whether through lack of aptitude or lack of desire, many jihobbyists simply don't make it to the front lines. Tarek Mehanna never found a connection, if he was even trying. Ahmed Abousamra managed to get to Iraq only to return after two weeks. Yousef Al Khattab apparently just dropped out. Zach Chesser couldn't even make it onto a plane.

The journey of the American jihadist spans continents and decades. Americans of every race and cultural background have made the decision to take up arms in the name of Islam and strike a blow for what they believed to be justice.

Many who embarked on this journey took their first steps for the noblest of reasons—to lay their lives on the line in defense of people who seemed defenseless. But some chose to act for baser reasons—anger, hatred of the “other,” desire for power, or an urge toward violence.

In the early days of the movement, it was possible to be a jihadist and still be a “good” American. Fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was seen as admirable in many quarters, including the American right—the same political movement that today harshly criticizes mainstream Muslims who are slow to condemn Hamas. Both the right and the left united to support the Muslims of Bosnia (in principle, at least), and there was no effort to police volunteers who would help them with weapons or their lives.

But there were flaws in the program. The Afghan jihad gave birth to al Qaeda, and the Bosnian jihad was deeply infiltrated by al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

In each country, jihadists primarily (if not exclusively) targeted soldiers of an opposing military force. Today's jihadists rarely confine themselves to military targets. They also intentionally kill civilians, including increasing numbers of Muslims, and many stage attacks outside of war zones and call those acts of
violence “jihad.” Because of this, the concept of military jihad has today been almost irrevocably welded to violent extremism and terrorism.

Modern jihad presents a clear threat to the national interest of the United States and to the safety of its citizens at home and abroad, as well as to countless innocent civilians of other nations. These countries include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, where Sunni extremists have targeted Shia Muslims, other Muslim sects they consider to be apostate, and any Muslim of any sect who dares take a stand against them.

We cannot interdict the behavior of individuals or popular masses on a global scale, but we can and must deal with the problem when it strikes closest to home. American jihadists present a unique threat to their homeland. Understanding the problem is the first step toward finding solutions.

The observations that follow pertain to the specific, peculiarly American path to jihad. On the global level, the question of radicalization and jihadism is more complex and interwoven with local political and cultural issues, but some of these points still apply.

Many jihadist ideologues are motivated by the desire to recreate some form of Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, whether regionally or in individual countries. Others seek to expand that caliphate on a global scale, with the intent to absorb Western society into a world-spanning Islamic state ruled by a strict, often brutal, interpretation of the shariah (Islamic law).

Although such motives have a place in public discourse concerning global policy, they are nearly irrelevant to the question of radicalization, especially the radicalization of Americans. Those who take up the jihadist path often end up embracing such global ambitions at a later stage, but very few Americans simply wake up one morning with a desire to impose shariah on the world.

Radicalization starts most often quietly and usually with a specific grievance. Many elements lead American Muslims to take up the banner of jihad, and some of these will be examined in the following passages, but the first element is almost always the same.

Whatever else lies in their hearts, virtually all American jihadists share an urgent feeling that Muslims are under attack. The most important religious and
political justifications for jihad are based on the idea of self-defense, striking back against aggressors and protecting the members of the global Muslim community, known in Arabic as the
Ummah
.