Adam Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason in more than fifty years, was born in Oregon, grew up in rural California, and converted to Islam at the age of seventeen. He is now twenty-eight. No one who knew him before his religious awakening ever thought that he would join Al Qaeda, and many people who knew him after he did are still perplexed. And yet, in a short time, Gadahn has become one of Osama bin Laden’s senior operatives. (He is believed to be hiding in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan.) He is a member of Al Qaeda’s “media committee,” and his responsibilities are thought to include those of translator, video producer, and cultural interpreter. Primarily, though, Gadahn is a spokesperson, a role he performs with tremendous conviction. He has addressed the United States in five videos, most of which reach a wide audience on the Internet and, in some form or another, have been discussed on the evening news. Last year, shortly before the fifth anniversary of September 11th, Al Qaeda’s leadership featured Gadahn in a video titled “An Invitation to Islam.” The video began with an introduction from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s main theoretician, who referred to Gadahn tenderly as a brother and as “a perceptive person who wants to lead his people out of darkness into the light.”
Homegrowns in the United States are especially rare and are poorly understood; most of the scholarship about them is only a few years old. And yet, because of their cultural literacy, and because of the mobility that their citizenship provides, they are potentially the most dangerous of terrorists.
interesting.
by coincidence, I just recently ordered myself a copy of Eric Hoffer’s, ‘The True Believer,’ which I haven’t read since high school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
It sounds like many of Hoffer’s theories hit Gadahn right on the head. Particularly, “Part of Hoffer’s thesis is that movements are interchangeable and that fanatics will often flip from one movement to another.”
what a poser
You Americans and your obsession with being the best in the world in ANYTHING.
what do you do when your sworn enemies including one of your traitorous own that actually attack you on your own soil and actively recruit people to kill your citizens are concentrated in one country?
allocate all of your resources to a different country and get bogged down there, so that your enemies in the first country can roam their countryside unfettered and regroup.
THEN blame it all on the puppet governments you put in place in the first and second countries for any problems that may arise.
THEN for the piece-de-resistance, leave all completely unfinished for the next american president to clean up!
makes sense to me! go W!
Angel “Be the best that you can be” My hope is that all persons follow this creed.
Some of us just never made it.
#5, Sorry, Alice Cooper is taking the credit
Ah the sothing mind mush of Traax the Trooll. (Tool + Troll = Traaxx)
#3
*LOL* 😀
traax-
if you want your kids to pray in school, send them to a christian school. Religion has NO part in any publicly funded education system. Alas, your short-sighted (and obviously biased) thinking would have everyone, regardless of religion, converted to christianity via the public school system.
I’d suggest less hate and more love, just like your savior Jesus Christ promoted – unless, that is, you think you know more than him?
Fundamentalism of any sort is bad—be it Muslim or Christian. I recommend Eric Hoffer’s classic book, “True Believer” which describes how and why people are attracted to narrow-minded groups that see everything in black and white and are so convinced that they are right.
Great to see people rediscovering Eric Hoffer’s book. In 20 years nitwits like the subject of the news story will be remembered like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weathermen of the 1960s and 1970s. Dangerous but ultimately irrelevant wannabees, loose brained surfers on the Zeitgeist!!
What? You mean the people on talk radio and Fox News who say that if we just screened out every brown person trying to get on an airplane we could catch all the terrorists are wrong????? You mean white people can be terrorists too? Oh no!!!
Next you are going to tell me that all the security at airports is a sham because the terrorists could just as easily bomb the Super Bowl or CES!
When I was a hitchhiking college kid in the late ’70s and ’80s various cults tried to recruit me a number of times and it got me pretty interested in how these cults work.
White, college educated kids are PRIME recruitment. For starters, they don’t have the street savvy to immediately know a hustle. Also, many are alienated from family and community in a way that urban and minority kids tend not to be. Plus, of course, they have resources to bring to the cult.
Radical Islam is clearly a cult — a nihilistic death cult something like Goth but with a stronger group mentality (like Jones Town) and a large dash of homo-eroticism (like the Shriners — 😉
So, it is no surprise to me that some white middle class guys would get sucked into it.
I’ve been in some centers of radicalism and one-in-a-while will see some white guy totally accessorized like a radical. Not often, but a handful of times. I’ve always wanted to talk with one of them and get his story but I’ve never had a convenient opportunity.
For all I know, there could be white American middle class women who are also radicals but they would be harder to spot. I have, however, met several middle class American women who have converted to Islam, become very devout, and moved to Pakistan or wherever. I wouldn’t call them radicals, though.
#8 – LOL 😀
I think the mere fact that we have homegrown terrorists indicates severe problems within our nation.