The question asked in this headline is never answered in the article. The AP can't bring itself to consider the possibility that Moeed Abdul Salam read the Qur'an and Sunnah and was "radicalized" in that way. "Why did boarding school graduate join al-Qaida?," by Chris Brummitt and Gene Johnson for AP, January 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Moeed Abdul Salam didn't descend into radical Islam for lack of other options. He grew up in a well-off Texas household, attended a pricey boarding school and graduated from one of the state's most respected universities.
What? But doesn't poverty cause terrorism? Isn't that what the learned analysts always tell us? Was Moeed Abdul Salam simply a Misunderstander of Islam?
But the most unlikely thing about his recruitment was his family: Two generations had spent years promoting interfaith harmony and combating Muslim stereotypes in their hometown and even on national television.Salam rejected his relatives' moderate faith and comfortable life, choosing instead a path that led him to work for al-Qaida. His odyssey ended late last year in a middle-of-the-night explosion in Pakistan. The 37-year-old father of four was dead after paramilitary troops stormed his apartment.
His Nov. 19 death went largely unnoticed in the U.S. and rated only limited attention in Pakistan. But the circumstances threatened to overshadow the work of an American family devoted to religious understanding.
And his mysterious evolution presented a reminder of the attraction Pakistan still holds for Islamic militants, especially well-educated Westerners whose Internet and language skills make them useful converts for jihad....
It is not clear to what extent Salam's family knew of his radicalism, but on his Facebook page the month before he died, he posted an image of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American al-Qaida leader who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, beside a burning American flag.
He had also recently linked to a document praising al-Awlaki martyrdom and to a message urging Muslims to rejoice "in this time when you see the mujahideen all over the world victorious."
After his death, the Global Islamic Media Forum, a propaganda group for al-Qaida and its allies, hailed Salam as a martyr, explaining in an online posting that he had overseen a unit that produced propaganda in Urdu and other South Asian languages....
The family, originally from Pakistan, immigrated to the U.S. decades ago. Salam's father was a pilot for a Saudi airline, and the family eventually settled in the Dallas suburb of Plano. Their cream-colored brick home, assessed at nearly $400,000, stands on a corner lot in a quiet, upper-class neighborhood....
Salam went on to study history at the University of Texas at Austin and graduated in 1996. His Facebook profile indicated he moved to Saudi Arabia by 2003 and began working as a translator, writer and editor for websites about Islam....
Back in the United States, Salam's mother is a prominent resident of Plano, where she is co-chairwoman of a city advisory group called the Plano Multicultural Outreach Roundtable, as well as a former president of the Texas Muslim Women's Foundation....
Salam's brother, Monem Salam, has traveled the country speaking about Islam, seeking to correct misconceptions following the 9/11 attacks. He works for Saturna Capital, where he manages funds that invest according to Islamic principles — for example, in companies that do not profit from alcohol or pork. He recently moved from the company's Bellingham, Wash., headquarters to head its office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
After the 2001 attacks, he and his wife made a public-television documentary about his efforts as a Muslim man to obtain a pilot's license. They also wrote a column for The Bellingham Herald newspaper that answered readers' questions about Islam....
Officers said they pushed through the flimsy door, and Salam killed himself with a grenade when he realized he was surrounded.
The Islamic media group and the al-Qaida contact in Karachi disputed that account, saying Salam was killed by the troops....
Neighbor Syed Mohammad Farooq was woken by an explosion. Minutes later, one of the troops asked him to go inside the apartment and see what had happened, he said.
"He was lying on the floor with blood pooling around him. One of his arms had been blown off. I couldn't look for long. He was moaning and seemed to be reciting verses from the Koran," he said. "I could hear the children crying, but I couldn't see them."
Hours later, Salam's wife and father-in-law, a lawyer in the city, came to collect the children from the apartment in Gulistane Jauhar, a middle-class area of Karachi, Farooq said. On the night he died, Salam led evening prayers at the small mosque on the ground floor of the apartment building.
"His Koranic recitation was very good," said Karim Baloch, who prayed behind him that night. "It was like that of an Arab."
The AP can't bring itself to consider the possibility that Moeed Abdul Salam read the Qur'an and Sunnah and was "radicalized" in that way.
*****
That the all-too-obvious answer is avoided time and time again demonstrates that leftists, Democrats, the MSM, Bush, Obama are WILLFULLY evading what has become all-too-apparent: Islam is the root cause of it all.
Worldwide, the same islamic modus operandi applies with incredible similarity. Dots of course are being connected in the heads of common sense people. The same dots are being connected in the heads of leftists; they simply will not admit it for fear that freedom-loving people might be proven correct.
Bottom line here: Salam was the good Muslim and his so-called moderate Muslim relatives were the bad Muslims. If AP and their ilk could digest this bottom line in its entirety, fully, thoroughly, then the real Islam would open up to such still willfully ignorant dhimmis.
Or, put another way, realize that the term "radical Islam" is redundant and the same enlightening process about the true Islam will occur. But the folks at AP won't do this. Nope, they're not gonna'. Not yet at least. Hope they do someday because one thing definitely worse than ignorance is eternal ignorance.
There are 2 types of muz: potential and actual jihadi terrorists. We need to adapt to that fact.
At least he's dead...and he had the good sense to get himself killed in Pakistan, not in the course of trying to wage jihad on innocent non-Muslim Americans in Texas (which he might well have chosen to do, instead). One less murder-minded hate-crazed Mohammedan in the USA. Good riddance.
In a sane world, every tiniest detail about the activities and background and business dealings and finances of his wife, his parents, his siblings and his children would be gone through with the finest of combs, and the mosque or mosques and premises of all other Islamic organisations with which they are associated would be raided and searched from attic to basement and *their* finances also minutely scrutinised for irregularities.
Frankly, his wife and kids and his parents and his siblings should be packed off back to Pakistan. I would bet my bottom dollar they all knew damn well what he was up to; and they were all covering for him. If anybody had any suspicions, nobody said a word to the Texan authorities. Nobody dobbed him in, even anonymously.
Wherever there are Mohammedans, no matter how well-integrated and well-educatd and charming and 'peaceful' they may appear, there *will* be people with Jihad on their minds.
And not all of them will trot off to Pakistan or Somalia or Yemen or Afghanistan to do it.
Others, like the would-be Times Square bomber, who was *also* a well-off seemingly well-integrated Pakistani who had obtained American citizenship - will set about attempting to kill and destroy, right here in the lands of the non-Muslims.
Smilers with knives under the cloak...Muslims playing the Mecca game whilst actively planning to go Medina at the first opportunity...there are a whole hell of a lot of them among the members of the Ummah, or Mohammedan Mob, who are currently deeply entrenched all over the West and in traditionally non-Muslim lands beyond the West.
I clicked on the link and read the entire article.
It includes this information:
"Of 46 cases of "homegrown terrorism" in the U.S. since 2001, 16 have a connection to Pakistan, according to a recent RAND Corporation study.
"** Salam's background as college-educated and from a prosperous family isn't unusual among them.** {my emphasis - dda}.
Okay. 46 cases of American-passport-carrying Mohammedans waging Jihad in the USA in the past ten years, and 16 of them involve Muslims from Pakistani Muslim families.
End ALL Muslim immigration into majority non-Muslim lands.
Now.
NO Muslims should be allowed over our borders, whether as immigrants or asylum seekers or 'refugees' or businessmen or 'tourists' or 'students'...
Whether they speak English or not, whether they're well-educated or not, whether they're from Bosnia or Albania or Somalia or Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt or Iran...just don't let them in.
The fewer Mohammedans we have, the fewer Jihad plotters we will have.
Even *one* jihad plotter pulling off a mass-murder plot, is one too many. We have enough serial killers, etc., of our own, without importing card-carrying members of a cult that we know *teaches* people to hate and to kill or cruelly subjugate anyone who is not a cult member.
Hey DHS people whats the moral of the story? Multiple choice. only one correct answer.
1. He was radiclized by rev falwell into radical islam.
2. It was all accidental circumstances and he was really a peaceful muslim.
3. Bush did it.
4. He took up on the calling of the koran which call for warring against the infidals and provides the ultimate reward, when a muslim is killed in battle he goes straight to paradise and be in company of doe eyed virgins and young boys.
5. He grew to hate the west because of #3 and it had nothing to do with islam cause islam is soooo peaceful and tolerant and law abiding.
Whats the correct answer?
Well if you answered anything else except #4, you get an "F" and should be demoted to clerk duties.
How did he get radicalized? GIGO. What's so hard to understand?
You would think a family of so-called moderates would be compelled to do some real soul-searching about their faith when one of their own becomes a violent Jihadi. You would think.
What do you expect if you follow a book that divides the world into "us" and "them" and then says we must eternally fight "them".
What I think is sad is that even if the person, or persons reading this from DHS came to the conclution that #4 was the correct answer. They would have to hide the fact from any one of their peers. Otherwise they would be branded a iphobe and replaced with a more "tollerant" DHS agent.
DHS, keeping America safe from the truth...
GO team! YEA!!!
"What do you mean Im on the no fly list?!?"
Article:
"After the 2001 attacks, he and his wife made a public-television documentary about his efforts as a Muslim man to obtain a pilot's license."
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What's wrong with this picture? Anything? No?
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Ok. Back to "Jersey Shore", then.
Wellington wrote:
Bottom line here: Salam was the good Muslim and his so-called moderate Muslim relatives were the bad Muslims. If AP and their ilk could digest this bottom line in its entirety, fully, thoroughly, then the real Islam would open up to such still willfully ignorant dhimmis.
............................
Well, maybe, Wellington.
But his family was heavily involved in "combating Muslim stereotypes" and his brother traveled the country speaking about Islam, "seeking to correct misconceptions following the 9/11 attacks", and he and his wife made a public-television documentary "about his efforts as a Muslim man to obtain a pilot's license", it sounds as though his clan was involved in some pretty heavy whitewashing, positing Muslims as victims, and general Taqiyya.
MY guess is that the "slow Jihad" was just a little bit *too* slow for Salam after a while, so he finally decided to engage in violent Jihad back in Dar-al-Islam.
Basically it’s common sense and logic to say after analyzing all the facts that 2+2=4. However if someone says 2+2=5 and they believe this very strongly, then this is clearly incorrect and wrong even if you have these people insisting that is correct and to think otherwise is showing intolerance for their beliefs.
More money than sense!
Clown!
Ben laden was not poor eather, his father is loaded with saudi money. Islam is the problem not the poor prople.
Yes, you raise a good point, gravenimage. Are the Muslims who aren't violent and don't even condone violence, but who tout how wonderful Islam is---religion of peace and tolerance and all that rot---themselves ignorant of their own religion or are they quite consciously practicing a cleverer type of jihad? Close call.
Here's a question to ponder. What percentage of "moderate, peaceable Moslems" (whom CAIR and the Left--and unfortunately many naive or deluded RINOs--insist, with no real evidence, are "the vast majority" of Moslems in the U.S.), would say "No, I'm sorry, absolutely NOT!" if a coreligionist showed up on their doorstep at night with a "friend" from Pakistan and asked that they afford him "just a place to stay for a week or two, quietly--and, please, don't say anything about it to anybody"--?
Anybody care to venture a guess?
In response to GI and W, and with utmost deference...
"Yes, you raise a good point, gravenimage. Are the Muslims who aren't violent and don't even condone violence, but who tout how wonderful Islam is---religion of peace and tolerance and all that rot---themselves ignorant of their own religion or are they quite consciously practicing a cleverer type of jihad? Close call.
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These are two very good questions, but in my HO, the call is not close, W:
1.) Those Mohammedists who tout the wonders of the religion are not "ignorant". They are "partially" ignorant, just as a badly trained Catholic or Jew or Hindu must be who does not "comfortably" understand her/his faith. They are simply programmed, W and GI - brain-washed from a very early age. Koran memorization.
2.) They are not, I believe, (say, 60% of them), practicing some super-clever "nouveau Jihad" that we need to be paranoid about.
I think, more accurately, we could consider those non-violent (but ersatz "persons of piousness"), "Westernized" Mohammedists to be relatively benign, at least for the conceivable future.
The problem, to me, stems from Mustafa, himself. The insistence on taking one man's word for all that is Great and Beautiful in the world is the habit that must be quit, if we are to advance reasonably.
Hi Mike!
You sound like you know what you're talking about.
More, please.
Wellington and David Dowse, the mere fact that it is so unclear where many Muslims in the West really stand is a large part of the problem.
GI -
"...the mere fact that it is so unclear where many Muslims in the West really stand is a large part of the problem."
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I see it differently, GI. Those Mohammedists that we wonder about don't know where they stand, either. It's when they vocally, and by their acts reveal to us where they stand, that things get hairy.
As long as Westernized Mohammedists don't act out the residue of their brain-washing - I'm ok with that, for now. When the threats and acting on threats become obvious, we "know where they stand", and so do they.
Until then, they are analogous to my children, who are taught that to make a threat is to signal one's evil intentions, so one must be either ready to carry out the threat, or retract it, or not make it, in the first place.