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He was also an early master manipulator of the Internet and social media, using it to disseminate his videotaped teachings to a wider audience. As Awlaki began embracing more extremist views he finally fled the U. Jesse Morton was a self-proclaimed jihadist who has "ancestry in America dating back to the Mayflower," he says.
He converted to Islam in prison, where he found solace in the Koran. Later he discovered Awlaki's videos online. The self-declared Islamic scholar had a way of making American Muslims feel "they were doing nothing" about the suffering in Islamic regions overseas, says Morton, and had a duty to fight the American oppression of their Muslim brothers. It was a call to arms that provided lost young men with the direction they'd been seeking.
Morton who had become Younes Abdullah Mohammed co-founded the radical New York organization Revolution Muslim, posting anti-American and pro-extremist propaganda. When a death threat was sent to the creators of "South Park" after they released an episode mocking the prophet Muhammad, he was arrested in for soliciting murder through his organization.
American Jihad on SHOWTIME - Documentary probe into the phenomenon of home-grown Jihadism. Directed by Alison Ellwood. Radicalizing of American born or American citizens by ISIS leaders.
Morton later helped authorities break up terror plots, so he was released from prison and deployed as an undercover operative. Troy Kastigar traveled to Africa under the guise of teaching English, says his tearful mother, Julie Boada, but he really joined Somalia's Shabab militia. She describes him as a high-energy kid, always on the move, until he came under the influence of sort of substance abuse.
When he discovered mainstream Islam and converted, he was happy, even grounded. And then he fell for the teachings of Awlaki.
Kastigar was killed in battle. Awlaki has been dead for six years, but his videos are still used as recruiting tools by groups such as Islamic State. And an American jihad would not only hope for this outcome, but work toward it. We would begin at home, as every great world movement does. We would not only allow, but teach, Americans — including American children — to internalize and project their justifiable feelings of pride in our democracy as superior to all other forms of government.
And we would embrace the certain knowledge that history will eventually spread our values all over the globe. We would tie American aid to incremental changes not just in the attitudes, but in the fundamental structures, of countries.
These changes would move those countries, slowly but inexorably, toward reflecting our Constitution in their own charters. We would unabashedly fund pro-democracy movements around the world, partly with government funding and partly with donations from American citizens.
Through these donations we would seek to double the budgets of the CIA and our Special Forces, seek to fund an international mercenary force for good and provide our veterans unparalleled health care. We would urge our leaders, after their service in the U. Senate and Congress, to seek dual citizenship in other nations, like France and Italy and Sweden and Argentina and Brazil and Germany, and work to influence those nations to adopt laws very much like our own.
We might even fund our leaders' campaigns for office in these other nations. We would accept the fact that an American jihad could mean boots on the ground in many places in the world where human rights are being denigrated and horrors are unfolding.
Because wherever leaders and movements appear that seek to trample upon the human spirit, we have a God-given right to intervene — because we have been to the mountaintop of freedom, and we have seen the Promised Land spanning the globe.