Revolution Muslim

» see revolutionmuslim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Revolution Muslim was a website and a street operation run by somewhere between five and ten people in New York City. It was founded in 2007 by Jesse Curtis Morton, a Columbia graduate who wrote under the name Younes Abdullah Mohammed, and by Yousef al-Khattab, born Joseph Cohen in Atlantic City, who had been an Orthodox Jew in Israel before converting to Islam. The group protested outside mainstream New York mosques and published a blog.

The blog is the part that mattered. For three years it posted material that US legal and law enforcement officials described at the time as protected by the First Amendment, while the Anti-Defamation League had been tracking the group since 2006. In April 2010 the site carried a statement from Anwar al-Awlaki. That same spring a contributor, Zachary Adam Chesser, posted threats aimed at the creators of South Park, which is the part of this story most people outside New York remember.

It ended in November 2010, and the ending came from a hosting company. A user posted a list of British members of parliament on 3 November, and within about two days the account was suspended. The domain has never carried the site again. revolutionmuslim.com answers today with a hundred-odd bytes of nothing.

~ the case file ~

~ five to ten people ~

The scale is the thing most accounts get wrong. This was not an organization with offices. It was a blog with a handful of regulars, plus a protest outside a mosque on the weekend, and the reach came from American cable news repeating what the blog had said. A website run by under a dozen people could get itself discussed on national television in 2010 for the reason anyone can now: publishing cost nothing, and the people doing the amplifying were not the publishers.

Leadership turned over quickly for a group that size. al-Khattab posted a video on 12 December 2009 announcing a retirement and a move to Morocco, handing the site to Abdullah as-Sayf Jones, born David Scott Jones in Brevard County, Florida. Jones publicly left in April 2010 after becoming Shia and has spoken against the group since, counseling young Muslims away from extremist organizations.

~ who actually switched it off ~

For three years the American answer to Revolution Muslim was that the speech was legal. That is a real position and officials kept restating it in public. What ended the website was a private company deciding it did not want the account, which required no warrant and no hearing and took under a week from the post that set it off.

That is the part worth keeping. The legal question about the site was never resolved against it. The hosting question was resolved immediately, and the hosting question is the one that decides whether a page loads.

~ afterward ~

The prosecutions came later and went after specific acts rather than the publication. All three of the figures most associated with the site had been arrested and convicted in US courts by November 2013. al-Khattab pleaded guilty on 30 October 2013 to using the websites to put people in fear of serious bodily injury, over January 2009 postings that named Jewish organizations and supplied addresses, and received three years in April 2014. Morton was released in 2015 and al-Khattab in 2016. Chesser is scheduled for release in 2032.

None of this reached me directly at the time. Turkish coverage of a ten-person New York blog was thin to nonexistent, and what I have is the record rather than a memory. It belongs in a graveyard of websites because of how it ended. A site the American government had publicly declined to shut down went off when one company closed one account.

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