Domestically, part of the hard power aspect of this strategy took the form of federal law enforcement agencies increasingly seeking to prosecute individuals for expressing Islamist ideology. Expressive activities, such as distributing radical documents and videos online, were criminalized more and more frequently as material support for terrorism, punishable with up to fifteen years in prison. The number of terrorism-related indictments brought in the US nearly doubled in 2009 and 2010 compared to previous years. Of these indictments, the proportion involving material support charges rose from less than 12 percent in 2007 to nearly 70 percent in 2010.116 For instance, in 2009, Tarek Mehanna, a US citizen from Boston, was charged with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization for translating a widely available online text and distributing videos online—activities historically understood as free expression protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. In April 2012, he was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison.117 He had earlier twice refused to work as an informant for the FBI.
In theory, the First Amendment to the US Constitution should have acted as a barrier to these developments. Its establishment clause requires the government to refrain from adopting an official position on any point of religious doctrine or holding up particular interpretations of theological terms as correct or incorrect. Unlike in Europe, where religion is regulated by the state through a variety of institutional arrangements, the US system claims to construct religious identity as a privileged space of near-absolute freedom from the state. The official regulation of Islam recommended by the reformists’ antiextremist agenda ought therefore to have been impossible to achieve in the US.118 Furthermore, the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause was interpreted in the three decades before 9/11 as constitutionally protecting the expression of any political or religious view that was not “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action”—the formulation that the US Supreme Court adopted in the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio case. Based on this definition the government could not criminalize expressions of extremist ideology except in those rare circumstances where it could be shown to directly incite terrorist activity.
In practice, however, the First Amendment proved less of a barrier than might have been expected. The US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project found that expressive activity coordinated with, or under the direction of, a foreign group which the speaker knows to be a terrorist organization may constitutionally be prohibited as material support for terrorism. The government’s argument was that a person who is not a member of a terrorist organization but advocates on behalf of it is indirectly supporting terrorism, because as a result of such advocacy, the organization needs to invest less of its own resources in communicating its message and can focus more on increasing its capacity for violence. The Mehanna case implicitly widened still further what might qualify as material support. There was no evidence that he was acting in coordination with or under the control of a terrorist group, yet he was still convicted on the basis that his expressive activities amounted to material support for terrorism. There was certainly no plausibility to the claim that his expressive activities were likely to “incite imminent lawless action” as that phrase had normally been understood. But under the influence of radicalization models in which ideology is seen as the root cause of terrorism, the legal interpretation of free speech shifted.
Since around 2007, the reformist approach has constituted the official narrative of the global war on terror among state bureaucracies and mainstream policy think tanks in the US and UK, and has represented the default position of liberal writers and analysts. Beginning in 2009, US officials began to believe they needed to apply this approach domestically, too. But culturalism remains a trend among elements of the national security apparatus, and its narrative continues to be propagated by right-wing agitators and propagandists. Together, reformism and culturalism set the terms of a narrow debate on the Muslim problem. Reformists criticize the crude generalizations of the culturalists—their assumption that Islam can only be interpreted as a doctrine of fanaticism and their counterproductive alienating of Islam from the West. Culturalists respond by charging reformists with naiveté for thinking governments can bring about cultural change in Muslim communities, with wishful thinking in attempting to find a moderate Islam, and with overlooking the danger that partnering with Muslims facilitates infiltration. Culturalists argue that the war on terror is a battle between Judeo-Christian civilization and Islam’s premodern values; reformists reply that it is better conceived as a battle between liberal values and an antimodern political ideology called Islamism. The reformists are optimistic that their assimilatory strategy can transform Islamic culture and draw Muslims into a pro-Western stance, while the culturalists, believing Islamic culture unreformable, pessimistically peddle fear, suspicion, and distancing. Both reify Muslim culture, the former to manipulate it, the latter to vilify it.
To the culturalists, Western Muslims can never be equal citizens. To the reformists, the equal citizenship of Muslims is, in practice, precariously dependent on their being able to prove their allegiance to ill-defined Western values. But placing Muslims under constant suspicion for fear they are about to break the rules of the liberal political game is a poor basis for true equality.119 The only question becomes how to integrate Muslims into a preexisting liberal society that remains basically the same. But what if citizens do not want just to be accepted in the existing system but seek to change it, for example, by challenging fundamental assumptions of its foreign policy? The solution for liberals is to allow difference so long as it does not make a difference. Culture is held to be a private matter of quaint lifestyle choices that present no real challenge to the system. But that only works if a set of universal values can be presumed, at some deep level, to be shared by everyone.120 In times of political conflict, when that assumption looks less plausible, liberals tend to abandon their principles and reach for coercive methods to defend the status quo. Conservatives are more consistent in asserting that the basis for political order is a single cultural tradition organically rooted in a particular people, but such a notion also offers no answer to the question of multicultural coexistence, except to declare it impossible. What both neglect is the basic political question thrown up by multiculturalism: how can a common way of life, together with full participation from all parts of society, be created?
The debate between culturalists and reformists raises real and significant issues. But the real ideological message contained in this debate is not any of the particular positions taken within it but the very fact that such a debate is taking place at all and the unspoken assumptions that underlie it. At a more basic level, the positions in this debate form a joint paradigm in which extremist ideology, whether literal Islam itself or a political perversion of it, is seen as the root cause of terrorism. For both, Muslim culture is reified and singled out as an object of wide-ranging state intervention—whether through hard or soft power. Through their dominance of the mainstream discussion of terrorism in the US’s and UK’s political cultures, these two modes of thinking, in effect, collude to sustain a shared discourse that defines Muslims as a problem.
CHAPTER 3
The Roots of Liberal Rage
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them … If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.
—Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Jesse Curtis Morton did not have cable television when he was growing up in the US in the 1980s. “When I was a child, the new wave was cabl
e TV and MTV, and I didn’t have access to it,” he said. “And I think it’s a major reason why I had some level of human consciousness as I grew up. And I could see through the lies and the hypocrisies of my own society, from the beginning.” Jesse hated the consumerism he thought had brainwashed his fellow students at his working-class high school. “They watch their favorite TV show, and they eat their favorite cereal, and they buy their favorite shoes. And that’s what life’s about. I think they’re sick. I was never part of it.” Jesse left home at an early age to escape his abusive family. For a while he traveled with the Grateful Dead, attracted to the countercultural band’s rejection of materialist values. By 2002 he was struggling with drug addiction and, while in Virginia, was charged with petty larceny and possession of crack cocaine.
But within a few years he had converted to Islam, graduated from college, and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. He described his first reading of the Qur’an as an “overwhelming epiphany,” and his subsequent conversion seemed to have given him a sense of focus and discipline. He changed his name to Younes Abdullah Muhammad and found work as a substance abuse counselor in New York. He also sought to understand the history, politics, and economics of the Middle East, and spent time in Saudi Arabia. To his dismay he encountered the same materialism that had alienated him from US society. He came to believe that through the “straitjacket of globalization” the commercialism rampant in America was being imposed around the world. The sickness he thought he had seen around him as a teenager was infecting the whole world, and nobody seemed to care. But he also started to think that Islam, the religion that had saved him from drug addiction, would, if properly followed, save Muslim societies from Western materialism. “Under the religion we have to control our resources, we have to control our own society, and we have to rule by a very basic principle-based system that Allah has given to us,” he said.
Islam, in this view, demanded freedom from US-led globalization. Abdullah Muhammad thought the US government was aware that the survival of its economic system depended on eradicating any application of Islamic principles. He concluded that to defend its empire America had declared war on Islam, calling it a war on terror. “On the periphery the people are plundered, while at the heart of the empire the people benefit,” he said. “And as long as they can carry back the spoils of war, keep the price of oil down, keep consumption up, only a few people will speak out.” The anger at American hedonism Abdullah Muhammad felt as a teenager was now channeled into a struggle to defend Islam from the destruction wrought by US-led capitalism:
Their religion is the religion of wealth, the religion of consumption, the religion of globalization, which is a satanic system. It exploits women, it exploits the family, and it exploits all of what is moral and good. It says there are no values: do what you want, no matter who it hurts or what it affects.
While he did not “want anybody to blow up any civilians in America” as part of this struggle, he nevertheless was able to see “some strategic benefit” to the 9/11 attacks. He was clear that US forces in majority-Muslim countries “who are invading other people’s houses and homes … should be annihilated.”1
In December 2007, Abdullah Muhammad and a fellow radical, Yousef al-Khattab, created an organization called Revolution Muslim. It functioned primarily online, through a Web site, blogs, Facebook page, and YouTube channel. Videos, such as “Knowledge is for Acting upon—the Manhattan raid,” which celebrated the 9/11 attacks, were circulated online. So too were speeches by radical preachers such as Abdullah Faisal, who had been convicted in Britain in 2003 for inciting violence and later deported to Jamaica. The group also attempted to preach its message on the streets of New York. On the sidewalk outside the Islamic Cultural Center on New York’s Upper East Side, Abdullah Muhammad would denounce the silence of Muslims in the face of US foreign policy abuses; the congregants leaving the mosque after their prayers largely ignored his speeches. By 2009 the Revolution Muslim Web site was attracting a number of angry young American men and was under the close surveillance of government agencies. Samir Khan—a twenty-three-year-old online radical, who had grown up on Long Island—was in touch with Abdullah Muhammad at this point and contributing to the Web site. He would later travel to Yemen, produce propaganda material for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and eventually be killed in a US drone strike, in 2011. In January 2010, Zachary Adam Chesser, a twenty-year-old from northern Virginia who had converted to Islam two years previously and, like Samir Khan, made a name for himself within the community of online radicals, began to administer the Web site jointly with Abdullah Muhammad.2
Abdullah Muhammad saw Revolution Muslim as having a double ideological purpose. On the one hand, its role was “countering the bullcrap propaganda coming out of the American empire, and saying, ‘Look, that’s not true.’ ” On the other hand, he wanted it to develop social and economic policies that could be put into practice were an Islamic state to emerge somewhere in the world.
We’re starting to show how you can issue your own money into the economy, and you don’t need to borrow from a central bank. Or how you would be able to create livable wages for workers, and how that creates a distribution of wealth across society. We talk about environmentalism from an Islamic perspective. And, at the same time, we’re not afraid or ashamed to say that we support those fighting the imperialists across the globe. We don’t want to see the Muslim population annihilated in the way of the Native Americans.3
In his manifesto, By All Means Necessary, he imagined what would happen if an Islamic state were to be consolidated in, say, Somalia. The new state would be isolated and in need of assistance. Abdullah Muhammad fantasized that Revolution Muslim would be “the right crew with the right connections [who] could come in with some serious policy recommendations,” a kind of World Bank for emerging Islamist states.4
In April 2010, Zachary Adam Chesser heard about a forthcoming episode of the Comedy Central television series South Park, in which the Prophet Muhammad was to be depicted wearing a bear suit. To alert Revolution Muslim followers, Chesser posted a graphic picture of the murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh online and predicted that the program’s writers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, would probably suffer a similar fate. Details of the neighborhood where Parker and Stone lived in Colorado were added, with the suggestion that readers “pay a visit.” The posting was soon picked up by the mainstream news media. The television news channels had a field day. Comedian Bill Maher told the audience of his Real Time show:
Though America likes to think it’s number one, we have to admit that we’re behind the developing world in at least one thing: their religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours … Our culture isn’t just different from one that makes death threats to cartoonists—it’s better.5
“Revolution Muslim” entered Google’s list of the hundred most-searched-for phrases. Then hackers took down the site. Abdullah Muhammad got calls from journalists asking about the organization’s position, so he decided to work on a “clarification statement” with Chesser. But it hardly clarified. It began by saying that Revolution Muslim was “not against a rational dialogue” before (incorrectly) claiming that Islamic scholars are unanimous in supporting the death penalty for those who mock Muhammad. “Thus our position remains that it is likely the creators of South Park will indeed end up like Theo Van Gogh. This is a reality.” Still, they claimed, “We are not trying to directly incite violence.” Finally, they quoted Osama bin Laden’s remarks on the Muhammad cartoons published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper: “If there is no check in the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.”6
Three months later Chesser was arrested while attempting to travel to Somalia, accused of seeking to join al-Shabaab, and later sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison.7 Around the same time, Abdullah Muhammad quit his job and left the US for Morocco. While he was there I was able to conduct a telephone interview with him. He
told me he had “made some mistakes” with the Revolution Muslim Web site. “I had some buffoons work alongside of me, and you learn as you go.” But his new project, Islampolicy.com, would, he said, focus more on developing policy solutions for a future Islamic state. Nevertheless, he said, “I have no doubt that I’ll probably end up in prison some day.”8
For a while his new Web site published discussions of how to create financial systems without interest, so as to be shari’a-compliant. But when Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May 2011, Abdullah Muhammad posted an admiring tribute that called for an “army of Osama.”9 Later that month, he was arrested in Morocco, then extradited to the US and charged with conspiracy to solicit the murder of his fellow citizens, primarily for his role in coauthoring the South Park clarification statement with Chesser. Back in the US he was held in solitary confinement for months until he agreed to take a plea the government offered rather than risk a trial. He was sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison.
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 11