Jesse Morton, whose former name was Younus Abdullah Muhammad, spent almost three years in prison after being convicted of supporting al Qaeda, denouncing the United States and threatening people who spoke negatively of Islam, WTTG-TV reported.
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During his days as an extremist, Morton earned a master’s degree in global affairs from Columbia University.
Now he has been hired as a researcher by George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, reports the New York Times.
Morton’s life shows the power of radicalization.
Morton, 37, was born in Pennsylvania and became a choir boy in his grandmother’s Baptist church.
“It gave me an outlet to have meaning, to have objective, but it also gave me an outlet to express my rage and my frustration”, he told CNN.
Two years ago, shortly after Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) was created, Morton received a letter from one of his former followers, who enthusiastically described his time in Syria, particularly swimming in the Tigris and hanging decapitated heads of ‘infidels’ from a fence.
Morton and another extremist founded “Revolution Muslim” in 2008.
“Revolution Muslim was a bug light, which attracted aspiring jihadists with their message”, Mitch Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department, told the New York Times. “Also, it helps us give a window in how to prevent other people from joining these groups”.
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“I suffer from a tremendous amount of guilt”, he added.
“I have seen things that people have done and to know that I once sympathised and supported that view – it sickens me”.
In 2011, Morton was jailed in connection with threats against the creators of “South Park”, after the cartoon depicted the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume.
According to him, he abandoned his extremist ideologies while in prison, a change that came in large part through reading works by philosophers of the Enlightenment.
“In Locke, I found tolerance and secularism”, he said. “She really was a good family person, she loved her country, and it wasn’t a manipulation, as far as I saw it, and so I opened up”, he said. He deradicalized and became an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which helped reduce his time in prison.
George Washington University (GW) has hired a former al-Qaeda recruiter who has been convicted of soliciting the jihad murder of “blasphemers”, marking what is believed to be the first time that an allegedly reformed Islamic extremist has been employed by a university in the United States..
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After serving less than four years of an 11 1/2-year sentence for his death threats, Morton joined the Washington, D.C., school’s new Program on Extremism, which researches terrorist groups like ISIS. “He considers this work an opportunity to fix some of the damage caused by his radicalization”.
