Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream the execution of convicted killer Nidal Hasan. Today, Trump said the execution would move forward but that it wouldn’t be livestreamed. But the propaganda damage is already done. Experts who watch terrorist spaces online told 404 Media that Hasan is already turning up in memes, videos, and recruitment material for groups like Al Qaeda.
Hasan—a former US Army Major who had once attempted to contact Al Qaeda—killed 13 people and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. He was shot and captured at the scene and later sentenced to death. Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution and the furor around it brought Hasan and his crimes back into the spotlight 17 years later. Hasan has mostly been a forgotten figure in Islamist and extremist circles, but is now once again a fixture of their propaganda.
“It's already started,” Moustafa Ayad, research chair in global Islamism and counter-terrorism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told 404 Media. “We're already seeing edited videos in support of Nidal Hasan, and they're specifically based around how he's a martyr and that his legacy lives on.”
In one image Ayad shared with 404 Media, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) referred to Hasan as a “heroic mujahid brother” then quoted Osama Bin Laden. “The day America makes this decision, it will have made a decision to execute whoever among you falls captive.”
According to Ayad, an Al Qaeda affiliated propaganda group made Hasan the feature of its newsletter last Friday. “So it's being viewed in that sense already in these ecosystems as he is a hero, and it's going to be used for recruitment and potentially galvanizing inspiration,” Ayad said. “We're talking about a guy who hasn't really been referenced since 2017 really or that much at all. So it has reignited conversations around his attack, how quote unquote glorious it was, and is being used as a means to to recruit people in some shape or form, and will continue to do so.
Ayad also described "rampage" edits of Hasan that are floating around extremists circles online that show footage of Hasan dancing over a number that represents how many people he killed. “You have fed the wolves,” he said. “They now have a thing they can latch on to.” In one TikTok edit viewed by 404 Media, a picture of Hasan with laser eyes throbbed to the beat of electronic music.
He added that he thinks the memes and videos are being made by younger people. “I don't think an established guy who remembers the Nadal Hassan attack is going to then go: ‘You know what makes sense? Putting out a dancing Nidal Hasan over his kill count.’ I don't think some 35-year-old dude is doing that,” he said. “You have a younger generation that is now attuned to what he did.”
Livestreaming the public execution would have given propagandists more to work with. Online nihilists, gore groups, and Islamists often use footage of death and violence to lure in young people. “Dead ideologues are continually being revered, lionized in ecosystems in support of groups like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, or any terrorist group,” Ayad said. “If you look at the saint ecosystems around accelerationism, it's a similar thing in which these individuals are the vanguard of jihad.”
Mass shooters and ideological killers that receive widespread media attention become objects of fascination online. They enter a cannon of sainted killers, totems that inspire others to commit the same acts. Some researchers have suggested news agencies should report a shooter’s crimes but refrain from naming and showing them, thus depriving them of notoriety and stemming the social contagion.
Hasan killed people almost twenty years ago and he was destined to fall out of memory until Hegseth attempted to make a spectacle of his death. “We’re already seeing it being incorporated into talking points, we’re past that,” Ayad said.
“He is still going to be labeled a martyr," Ayad added. “Will it be a public spectacle? Not anymore [...] but terror groups and their supporters took advantage of the news to highlight just how much of a contribution Nidal Hasan made to their respective movements.”
