Ex-extremist: Rapport cracks radical mindset
A former Islamic extremist charted how he was reformed yesterday, and threw cold water on two popular ideas to counter the radicalization of Westerners — enlisting therapists and moderate imams.
Jesse Morton, who grew up in an abusive home in Pennsylvania and in 2008 changed his name to Younus Abdullah Muhammad and co-founded the website Revolution Muslim, said once someone has been radicalized, it’s impossible to get to underlying psychological problems without first intellectually countering his belief system.
“It doesn’t matter what’s in the background — you know, if someone has mental health issues or something like this. They’ve committed themselves to an ideology,” Morton said, speaking at the National Security Conference at MIT.
“If somebody knows how to establish a rapport first and then dissect the ideology, only then will you be able to say, ‘ Oh, maybe you should go see a mental health therapist,’” Morton said.
The 37-year-old ex-con, who served nearly four years of federal prison time after he called for violence against the creators of “South Park” for an episode depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bear, was thrust into the spotlight last month when he was hired by George Washington University as deputy director of its Center for Cyber and Homeland Security.
As a condition of his release, Morton is not allowed to leave the greater Washington, D.C., area. For his trip to Cambridge, Morton “coordinated his travel with the necessary agencies,” said Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, who hosted the conference.
He said what made the difference for him was the humanity and respectful manner of an FBI agent who debriefed him, and seeing cracks in the ideology he espoused while reading “great books of the Western world” in his prisons’s law library.
“I started to reconnect with Western identity,” Morton said, adding he was particularly affected by the line, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”
Morton, who allowed for the possibility that he was more easily swayed by intellectual arguments than other extremists might be, questioned the wisdom of enlisting moderate Muslim clerics to counsel those turning to extremism.
“I think that’s problematic because they are automatically de-legitimized before they even enter the room, they’re considered a hypocrite,” Morton said. “And also I think that there’s a misunderstanding that imams inside the mosques are ‘experts’ in this ideology. Because this is a whole different version of Islam.”
Morton, who described himself as a counterculture anarchist who sold drugs in parking lots of rock concerts prior to converting to Islam, said extremists who are recruited and nurtured on the internet don’t necessarily place religion higher than politics in their worldview.
“It’s about the political grievance,” Morton said, “and it’s justified because of U.S. foreign policy or Israeli existence or whatever it is, and merged with religion.”