Here is an extensive profile of the American jihadist Omar Hammami, a.k.a. Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, and how he moved from a middle-class Alabama upbringing to the jihad in Somalia and a life full of hatred and violence. "The Jihadist Next Door," by Andrea Elliott in the New York Times, January 27 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
ON A WARM, cloudy day in the fall of 1999, the town of Daphne, Ala., stirred to life. The high-school band came pounding down Main Street, past the post office and the library and Christ the King Church. Trumpeters in gold-tasseled coats tipped their horns to the sky, heralding the arrival of teenage demigods. The star quarterback and his teammates came first in the parade, followed by the homecoming queen and her court. Behind them, on a float bearing leaders of the student government, a giddy mop-haired kid tossed candy to the crowd.Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.
Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like "sugar" and "darlin'." Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang "Away in a Manger" on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. "It felt cool just to be with him," his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. "You knew he was going to be a leader."
A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world's most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.
More than 20 of those fighters have come from the United States, many of them young Somali-Americans from a gritty part of Minneapolis. But it is Hammami who has put a contemporary face on the Shabab's medieval tactics. In a recent propaganda video viewed by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a soundtrack of jihadi rap plays in the background.
He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, "the American," and speaks to the camera with a cool, almost eerie confidence. "We're waiting for the enemy to come," Hammami whispers, a smile crossing his face. Later he vows, "We're going to kill all of them." [...]
There follows an account of a gregarious and charming child raised a Christian, with a Christian mother (Debra) and a Muslim father (Shafik). After awhile, in adolescence, Omar turns toward Islam -- and grows more hateful:
Debra learned to walk a fine line when it came to religion. But Christianity remained the compass of her life. She called Shafik's mosque "his church" and the Koran "his bible." She wasn't going to let her son defect without a fight. "Where are the verses about love in your bible?" she prodded him. They "argued and argued and argued," she recalled. "Then he said, 'That's enough.' "Like his mother, Hammami was stubborn. When he became convinced of something, he turned to convincing others. At Daphne High, he managed to persuade a handful of students, including his girlfriend, to explore Islam -- a striking development at a school where Christian teenagers routinely gathered at the flagpole for prayer.
"He would say, 'So if Jesus is God, who does he pray to?' " recalled his friend Bernie Culveyhouse. "And if you said, 'God,' he'd say, 'Doesn't that make Jesus a narcissist?' "
Culveyhouse soon converted. Stevenson decided it was not for her, and Hammami broke it off. His other friendships were already strained when, one afternoon in 2000, the subject in class turned to Osama bin Laden. Then a relatively obscure terrorist, bin Laden had claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One boy in the class suggested that bin Laden should be shot dead.
"What if I said that about Billy Graham?" Hammami demanded.
"Billy Graham is a peaceable preacher," the boy, a Christian, recalled saying. "Osama bin Laden is a terrorist."
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," Hammami replied.
By his junior year, Hammami had become a spectacle. He made a point of praying by the flagpole outside school yet refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, friends recalled. In class, he swore at Hirsch, his longtime teacher, assailing her for being Jewish. That spring, in another class, Hammami tried to choke a student who interrupted him as he was reciting the Koran, students recalled. Hammami was promptly suspended. With high grades and an A.C.T. score in the 93rd percentile, he skipped his senior year and enrolled at the University of South Alabama. There, he no longer prayed alone. He could walk to the mosque from campus, and he soon took over as president of the fledgling Muslim Student Association. [...]
New York Times cheap shot of the year (and it's only January): explaining the rigorist Salafi movement, the self-proclaimed exponents of a "pure" Islam, to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
The Salafist interpretation of Islamic doctrine tends to be literal and originalist. "They remind me a lot of Scalia in their approach to texts," says Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University. [...]Throughout his religious transformation, Hammami kept much of his former self intact. Some nights, he and Culveyhouse darted around the mosque in their robes, sparring with invisible light sabers in homage to "Star Wars." He continued to run red lights and rack up speeding tickets, refusing to rise for a judge in traffic court. [...]
Because he did not recognize his authority, but only that of Allah.
But aside from his sister and mother, Hammami had nothing to do with women. Much of the time, he and his friends were tormented by sexual frustrations, two of them recall. Hammami would stare at a woman on the street and then chastise himself for hours, Stewart says. He surfed Islamic Internet forums in search of a wife. His father promised to help him marry a Syrian woman provided that Hammami completed his degree in computer studies. But in December 2002, he dropped out of college, saying that he could no longer bear to be in the company of women. [...]For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart. Their boss, an ex-Marine, tolerated their odd look (they tucked their pants into their socks), but he was frustrated by their demands: they refused to touch alcohol, pork, Christmas cards and even dolls. The boss finally assigned them to the women's clothing section. [...]
Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been "hiding many parts of the religion that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics," he wrote. He began searching for guidance on the Internet, Culveyhouse says, discovering a documentary about the life of Amir Khattab, a legendary jihadist who fought in Chechnya. The documentary traces Khattab's evolution as a promising Saudi student who gave up a life that "any young man would desire" to embrace a higher purpose. Hammami was mesmerized, Culveyhouse recalls.
"Once you've made that step, it's a gateway," Culveyhouse says. "Once you've legitimized the jihad in Chechnya, you're compelled to legitimize the jihad in other places as well." [...]
Later, in Egypt:
Alone with his young wife and newborn daughter, Hammami seemed overwhelmed, Dena recalls. He found freelance work translating Islamic texts into English but had trouble supporting his family. In the December e-mail message, he wrote that he was yearning to live in a country "where Shariah was being implemented completely." [...]From Egypt, Hammami followed the events closely. He was convinced that "jihad had become an obligation upon me," he wrote in his December e-mail message. He wanted to help his "captive brothers and sisters" while helping himself "obtain the highest rank available" as a Muslim. (Jihadists believe that the greatest rewards in the afterlife are granted to them.) On their Internet forum, Hammami and Maldonado made impassioned pleas for action without directly referring to Somalia. [...]
Over the next few months, Mogadishu descended into a hellish war zone. That May, Hammami suddenly reappeared at the grandmother's apartment, asking for a phone number to reach his wife, who had moved back to Toronto. Over the phone, Hammami told Sadiyo that he was still trying to leave Somalia, Ayan said. A month later, he called with a different story. He wanted his wife and daughter to join him.
"He was saying: 'It's so wonderful. There's going to be an Islamic state,' " Ayan recalled Sadiyo telling her. "He was making it this utopia of happiness." [...]
Sometimes months would pass with no word from Hammami. When he reached out through Facebook in early September, he told Dena that he hoped his infamy would prompt people to ask, "How did this guy become that?"
"They can't blame it on poverty or any of that stuff," he continued. "They will have to realize that it's an ideology and it's a way of life that makes people change. They will also have to realize that their political agendas need to be fixed." [...]
On Dec. 3, a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up at a graduation ceremony for medical students in Mogadishu, killing nearly two dozen people, including three Somali government officials. Somali and American authorities said the attack was carried out by the Shabab. That same month, Hammami seemed more taken by his cause than ever. "I have become a Somali you could say," he wrote in the December e-mail message. "I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds" -- Islamic songs -- "and play soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I'm chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!"
"I have hatred, I have love," he went on. "It's the best life on earth!"
Well, he certainly has hatred.
All those submitters who live in the US should join this mental midget in Somalia and help found an Islamic Paradise on Earth...The US should then slam the door, lock it, and throw away the key...But don't expect Rasulullahhaha Obama to treat his brothers like that...Trained jihadists are always welcome by Rasools administration...
This is taken from one of the 'Highlighted' comments:
"the same way that well-raised "gifted" kids grown up to be right-wing fanatical Christians who shoot obstetricians."
NYT readers... I give up....
An excellent portrait of the sick and twisted psychology of a Jihadist and the Religion for Losers that feeds his desire to respond from his depravity in a masochistic and sadistic form of hatred and murder. It is the ultimate expression of his sexuality and spiritual void. Love and hate are indistinguishable and merely tools to strike out at fellow humans in the sadistic pursuit of achieving orgasmic fulfillment. Thus, the way of his prophet seems so appealing, he who also relished this type of perception as the ultimate purpose of life.
Mecca delendum est
One more sad-eyed Spiritual Searcher, who came down on the side of his Syrian Muslim father's offerings, but who decided to take them straight up and undiluted, not in the to-get-along-in-America, on-the-rocks fashionwhich, without more, we shall assume his father did.
And what fun to have a special new Muslim name: Abu Mansour Al-Amriki, which provides a frisson -- I'm someone special -- akin to that felt, no doubt, by Adam Gadahn.
And how it clears everything up, to have rules for everything. For those lost souls wandering in the universe, you get a complete guide and grid, you no longer have to think -- why, you are positively encouraged not to think. What could be better?
And you have laid out for you the list of what is Prohibited and what is Commanded, of whom you will love and whom you will hate. You will love fellow Muslims, you will hate all non-Muslims. Simple, and clear, and don't be confused if often those non-Muslims appear to be quite nice and generous towards you; remember, they remain non-Muslims. And if some Muslims behave in what might once have seemed to be a cruel and murderous fashion, remember they are Muslims, and acting according to the dictates of Islam, so they are not merely blameless, but admirable.
As you, too, Abu Mansour Al-Amriki, are admirable. For you have accepted everything the texts of Islam tell you,
His every phrase is pregnant with Muslim meaning.
Take for example this:
"’I have hatred, I have love,’ [Omar Hammami, now known as Abu Mansour Al-Amriki] went on.”
Strange, at first glance, isn’t it? We expect someone Who Has Found The Truth to say something like “I’ve found love” or “I know know what love is” or “I have those who love me” or something like that. Instead, we have Omar Hammami, telling the world that “I have hatred, I have love” and it is this that, he says, allows him to be so deliriously happy.
What he means here is that he no longer has to think about individuals. Islam has spared him the need to make choices, the need to make decisions, the need to exercise his own mind or what is left of his moral judgment. Islam tells him not only What Is Prohibited and What Is Commanded, but Whom He Must Love and Whom He Must Hate. And the hatred is as important in Islam – actually far more important – than love. If “love” is the most important concept in Christianity (whatever the ways of individual Christians), “hate” – hatred of all that is not-Islam -- is surely the most important concept in Islam.
This is the doctrine of Al Wala' wal Bara'. You can find out more about it in many places on the Internet, such as here:
http://islamworld.net/docs/wala.html#III
For Omar Hammami, who went on his Spiritual Search and found himself, as Abu Mansour Al-Amriki, his new life, among his Muslim brothers, off in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Yemen, or wherever he is having fun training with fellow Muslims who are his new, and instant, society, he doesn’t have to think any more. It always was painful. Who needs it? Besides, he, Abu Mansour Al-Amriki, with his nasheeds and his YouTube tapes, is having a wonderful time:
"I have hatred. I have love. It's the best life on earth!"
"It's the best life on earth!"
What radicalization looks like in process:
http://freemendo.typepad.com/undaunted/2007/11/this-post-is-ad.html
Whatever happened to Culveyhouse? Still a Muslim?
"I have hatred, I have love," he went on. "It's the best life on earth!"
The best life on earth? Sounds like HELL on earth, to me. How is living for an evil cause the best that life has to offer? Insane!
They live amongst us, folks. PC madness got us here, too .....
Good riddance Hammami.Hope you become part of the Somali desert.
Sounds like he's on his way out. What a waste of a perfectly good human being.
"Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria..."
He was never an Alabaman.
NEXT!
"Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria..."
He was never an Alabaman, much less an American.
NEXT!
Could one describe Omar Hammami, though born and raised in Alabama, as an Alabaman, just like, for example, Mike Spann? What was it, what is it, that makes us feel strange about describing Omar Hammami as either an Alabaman, or an American, despite his being -- in the most trivial of sensese -- an American citizen. I know what it is, and so do you.
Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, with his "middle-class Alabama upbringing", was—as has been noted—hardly the poverty-stricken Jihadist of popular imagination.
Nor, certainly, was he the sort of fellow who, supposedly, turns to Islam and Jihad because of the attitudes of his small-town Christian schoolfellows, who might be assumed by NYT's readers to be small-minded, 'racist', and "Islamophobic"—but instead, this was a popular kid who did well academically, was elected president of his class, had lots of buddies, *and* had a pretty girlfriend.
from above:
Throughout his religious transformation, Hammami kept much of his former self intact. Some nights, he and Culveyhouse darted around the mosque in their robes, sparring with invisible light sabers in homage to "Star Wars." He continued to run red lights and rack up speeding tickets, refusing to rise for a judge in traffic court.
................
Andrea Elliott is a moron. Nothing Hammami did here was out of line with Muslim supremacism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with "keeping his former self intact".
The quasi-military sparring is seen all the time with wanna-be Jihadists—how may times have we heard of them playing paintball, say, as training for warfare?
The "running red lights and racking up speeding tickets" might just seem the actions of a high-spirited kid to Elliot—but it is entirely in line with both a reckless disregard for the safety of Kufr, and a refusal to believe that Kaffir laws apply to him.
And as Robert Spencer has noted, he did not rise for the judge in traffic court"because he did not recognize his authority, but only that of Allah". You see this all the time in trials of Jihadists in the West.
more:
For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart. Their boss, an ex-Marine, tolerated their odd look (they tucked their pants into their socks), but he was frustrated by their demands: they refused to touch alcohol, pork, Christmas cards and even dolls. The boss finally assigned them to the women's clothing section.
................
More thuddingly literal Islamic "piety". The oddness about the pants and socks comes from these Hadiths:
"Narrated Ibn Umar: Allah’s Messenger, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: “Whoever lowers his clothes below his ankles arrogantly not obeying the law, Allah will not look at him on the Day of Judgment.”
and
Narrated Abi Huraira: Allah’s Messenger, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: “Whatever of clothes is lower than ankles, then he will be in the Hell-Fire."
All the rest—alcohol, pork, Christmas cards and dolls—are likewise prohibited in Islam. The only caveat is with the last article, where Muhammed allowed his child-bride, Aisha, to continue playing with dolls at first because she was such a small child.
In light of all this, one wonders how these pious idiots handled being "assigned to the women's clothing section".
more:
But aside from his sister and mother, Hammami had nothing to do with women. Much of the time, he and his friends were tormented by sexual frustrations, two of them recall. Hammami would stare at a woman on the street and then chastise himself for hours, Stewart says. He surfed Islamic Internet forums in search of a wife. His father promised to help him marry a Syrian woman provided that Hammami completed his degree in computer studies. But in December 2002, he dropped out of college, saying that he could no longer bear to be in the company of women.
................
One might have at least a small amount of sympathy for some young man brought up in the heart of Dar-al-Islam, deprived of any contact with the opposite sex until he could afford to marry.
But Hammami and his moronic friend have no such excuse—their torment is entirely self-inflicted.
Later, it seems to upset Hammami that his wife and child have returned to civilized Toronto—is his wife Canadian?—rather than follow him to the "Islamic paradise" of chaotic, war-torn Somalia.
more:
Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been "hiding many parts of the religion that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics"
................
There can *never* be enough Islam. This is again true for Hammami later in Egypt, where that Islamic state just isn't Islamic enough for him, and he e-mails a friend that he was yearning to live in a country "where Shariah was being implemented completely."
He fulfills his wish when he moves to Islamic hell-hole Somalia. The NYT article mentions the horrific suicide bombing in Mogadishu, where a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up at a graduation ceremony for medical students in killing nearly two dozen people.
I'm surprised that Andrea Elliott, with her clear love of the ironic twist, doesn't mention that Hammami, inspired by the senseless murder of medical students at a graduation ceremony, once dreamed of becoming a surgeon, before his dreams became Islamic.
Yes. That's what I thought, Isabella. What a terrible, terrible waste of a human being.
Let's pray that he lucks onto Fr Zakaria Botros' show on satellite TV one day, and gets shaken up a bit.
Let's pray that this blinded, demon-possessed fool, this walking dead man, while he's making jihad in Somalia, crosses the path of a few people like the late martyred Mohammed Ahmed Ali, Somali apostate-to-Christianity, in a context where he doesn't realize they're Christian (so can't attack and silence them), and where they therefore have a chance to cast out the demon and raise the dead.
Not strictly on message but...............
The disease of political correctness has been taken to its logical conclusion. Not only has discrimination been outlawed on the basis of race, gender, age, religious affiliation or national origin, but now also on the basis of ability.
According to a story in a daily newspaper, a Norfolk recruitment agency was rebuffed in its attempts to advertise a job at its local Job Centre which called for “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants — on the basis that it was discriminatory against the unreliable and the non-hard-working.
According to the report, recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was “especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation.”
Mrs Mamo, director of Devonwood Recruitment was, however, not prepared for the reaction of staff at the Job Centre in Thetford who said she could not ask for “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.
“In my 15 years in recruitment I haven’t heard anything so ridiculous,” Mrs Mamo told the newspaper. “If the matter wasn’t so serious I would be laughing out loud.
“Unfortunately it’s extremely alarming. I need people who are hard-working and reliable — and I am pleased to discriminate in that way. If they’re not, then I really can’t use them. The reputation of my business is on the line.
“Even the woman at the jobcentre agreed it was ridiculous but explained it was policy because they could get sued for being discriminatory against unreliable people.
“She told me they’d had lots of problems with people taking them to court for adverts stating something like ‘would suit school leaver’.”
Mrs Mamo said she was also told that the phrase “must speak English” was discriminatory.
“In the end, I had to write ‘must speak English due to health and safety reasons’ because they’re dealing with hazardous materials,” she told the newspaper.
Perhaps the dangerous materials talked about are sinomimous with the forced anonimity given to people like our jihadist warrior. Perhaps if we paid attention to commonsense and got rid of political correctness and the concept of multicuturalism and the confusions surrounding them we would not have the moral, intelectual fog surrounding young people so that they do not pursue a road that gives them certainty........
The full NYT story had additional information that was interesting. But the readers' comments were almost as interesting. Some of them were clearly of a Leftist bent, but others would fit right in here. One in particular that resonanted was:
"It should be no surprise that the Founders simply did not contemplate Muslims living as citizens in the USA when they drafted the First Amendment. It also should be no surprise (although to many secular Americans, who just don't get it, I suppose it is a surprise) that religion orders a believer's life more than any other single factor, including nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc. Religion determines one's view of the origin of the world, the origin of life, one's duties to self and to one's fellow man, one's ultimate end, etc. I would suggest, for our own self-preservation, that we strongly discourage Muslim immigration to the USA. Muslim groups are already influencing the choice of school textbooks, influencing public policy, etc. Since there is no way we can count on their loyalty to their fellow US citizens above their loyalty to their religion, as this article so poignantly demonstrates, and mainstream elements of this religon are so crushingly cruel and violent, we are foolish to voluntarily continue increasing their numbers in the USA."
To which I say, Hear, Hear.
I hope this incredible spectacle from ALABAMASTAN finally gets some of my lazy fellow Southern Baptists of the fence and paying attention. For too long here in the "Bible Belt" we have felt insulated. Most don't know of the huge Muslim population in Atlanta. The airport has a huge Somali presence. It's time to wake up.
I believe that genes do eventually come forward. I've had to reconcile English and Irish ones all my life (Don't laugh, I really mean it.). His father's genes have kicked in but sometime in the future his mother's will return. In the meantime we must pray that he is stopped asap.
I know Atlanta has a large muslim "community" but I've never noticed any Somalis at the airport, never! I usually fly into Atlanta from a small regional airport and then connect to wherever I'm going, so I seldom go outside or to baggage claim.
I was at the Atlanta airport about six weeks ago and had a 3 hour layover. I went to every concourse except International looking for a Maui Jim shop and and a bar with an empty seat, and I saw one woman who could have been a Somali; she had on a long, brown skirt and a scarf and appeared to be part of the janitorial staff. That's it!
Omar explains the allure of jihad: it's an adolescent wet dream. And it's powered by Allah, aka Satan.
And people still think we will be able to reason with these thugs!