Talking Terrorist Propaganda with a Pro

The Media Line Staff

08/13/2020

Date and time: August 19, 2020, 11 am Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)

Join former jihadist propagandist Jesse Morton and International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSV) Director Anne Speckhard to learn about radicalization and radicalizing others.

Terrorist propaganda and recruitment has been studied extensively by academics, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. Al-Qaida and ISIS have been particularly notorious for their professional-quality recruitment materials, including videos and magazines. Significantly, much of this material is available in perfect English, extending the terrorist groups’ reach into the Western world. Some of the most widely known English-language propagandists include Anwar al-Awlaki, Anjem Choudary, Abdullah Faisal, Samir Khan and Ahmad Musa Jibril. Many other lectures and written material have also been translated by al-Qaida and ISIS supporters from Arabic into English and other Western languages to make them more accessible to Western audiences. Who are the people who carry out these translations and what are their motivations for spreading terrorist hate? How is terrorist propaganda made understandable to Western audiences and what are the hooks to bring Westerners into these groups?

On August 19, meet a professional at doing just that. Jesse Morton ran Revolution Muslim from New York City in the 2000s and translated al-Qaida propaganda into English, disseminating it to Americans. At ICSVE’s seventh Zoom event, Jesse Morton will join Dr. Anne Speckhard to discuss his own process of radicalization and the impact of that prior childhood trauma often has on radicalization, his actions that radicalized many others, and his journey out of violent extremism since his arrest in 2011 as well as his current activities fighting terrorism with Parallel Networks and LightUponLight.

Jesse Morton was once a jihadist propagandist (then known as Younes Abdullah Muhammad) who ran Revolution Muslim, a New York City-based organization active in the 2000s and connected to a number of terrorism cases. He connected al-Qaida’s ideology and transformed it for America, creating English language propaganda. Morton deradicalized in 2011, following his arrest in Casablanca and then incarceration in the U.S. He currently consults on international projects and runs Parallel Networks, an organization he co-founded with the former NYPD official that monitored and ultimately incarcerated him. Morton also runs LightUponLight, an online ecosystem that utilizes a transdisciplinary network theory dedicated to combating, polarization, hate and violent extremism in the American ambit by providing the same sense of identity, meaning, significance and camaraderie extremist provide their recruits. He holds certificate licensure in substance abuse and mental health counseling, is widely read in Islamic theology and jurisprudence and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University.

Dr. Anne Speckhard is director of the ICSVE and serves as an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She has interviewed over 700 terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the past five years, she has interviewed 245 ISIS defectors, returnees and prisoners as well as 16 al Shabaab cadres and their family members (n=25) as well as ideologues (n=2), studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism, their experiences inside ISIS (and al Shabaab), as well as developing the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project materials from these interviews which include over 200 short counter-narrative videos of terrorists denouncing their groups as un-Islamic, corrupt and brutal which have been used in over 150 Facebook and Instagram campaigns globally. She has also been training key stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent extremism professionals, both locally and internationally, on the psychology of terrorism, the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced by ICSVE as well as studying the use of children as violent actors by groups such as ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has given consultations and police training to US, German, UK, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, Danish, Iraqi, Jordanian and Thai national police and security officials, among others, as well as training to elite hostage negotiation teams. She also consults to foreign governments on issues of terrorist prevention and interventions and repatriation and rehabilitation of ISIS foreign fighters, wives and children. In 2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to 20,000 + detainees and 800 juveniles. She is a sought-after counterterrorism expert and has consulted to NATO, OSCE, the EU Commission and EU Parliament, European and other foreign governments and to the US Senate & House of Representatives; the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, and Health & Human Services, and the CIA and FBI; and appeared on CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CTV, CBC and in Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, London Times and many other publications. She regularly writes a column for Homeland Security Today and speaks and publishes on the topics of the psychology of radicalization and terrorism and is the author of several books, including Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS, Undercover Jihadi and ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. Her publications are found here and on the ICSVE website.

Follow @AnneSpeckhard

The panel will each speak briefly and questions will be most welcome with a lively discussion to ensue! Questions can be posed using the Zoom chat feature or by Twitter to @ICSVE

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Talking Terrorist Propaganda with a Pro