Incitement, Anwar Al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad

Abstract

It has been over a decade now since the influential Islamist terrorist ideologue and facilitator Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed by US forces, and his legacy as a propagator of particularly pernicious propaganda and source of extremist inspiration, still lives on. In both life and death Awlaki’s methods have drawn the interest of not only counterterrorism practitioners and scholars, but captured the popular imagination as well, with his apparent facility with social media combined with his command of English and the impressive, if somewhat questionable upon closer inspection, credentials, he claimed as a scholar of Islam, casting him in a unique light, effectively rendering him, at times, an object as much of fascination of scorn in the west. This “popularity” and how Awlaki achieved, maintained, and used it to further the cause of violent jihad, is the focus of a new book by author Alexander MeleagrouHitchens, who does an excellent job of outlining the ways in which Awlaki harnessed social media and other online platforms to facilitate the spread of extremist Islamist ideology, and of terrorist violence in its name. Perhaps even more crucially, the author highlights the ways in which Awlaki is also clearly of a type, sharing both personal traits and methods with a range of other violent extremists rooted in a wide range of motivating ideologies. An awareness of these two aspects of Awlaki’s approach is critical for understanding why he was so successful. Awlaki was both highly motivated and creative when it came to his use of technology to spread violent Islamist ideology, and at the same time, it becomes clear in the this book that the backbone of his approach rested solidly on a foundation of previously proven propaganda techniques, employed by everyone from 19 century European Anarchists to left-wing radicals in 1960’s America to the militia and white supremacist movements of the last forty years. Awlaki proved a master propagandist, concocting a seemingly coherent worldview that was a mix of historical reframing, psychological manipulation, leveraging of individuals’ search for identity, as well as collective grievance and the concept of the spectacle of the deed – the same things that facilitators of terrorism and other forms of political violence have used for more than a century to transform discontent into violence. In this sense, highly effective but hardly unique. Meleagrou-Hitchens centers this work around an exploration of Awlaki’s personal evolution and his use of the aforementioned strategy and tactics, presenting a troubling portrait of an individual whose deadly influence has outlived his life as well as compelling lessons for both scholars and practitioners of counterterrorism. The observations shared and lessons gleaned from this book go beyond what one can say about Awlaki specifically, and provide both context and additional ways to think about the phenomena of both “radicalization” and “terrorism” in general, and with regard to the intersection of these two concepts and social media, in particular. As a result, it seems this volume is likely to