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Tunisia: Museum killer “intensely religious,” stayed up all night reciting Qur’an

Apr 12, 2015 4:31 pm By Robert Spencer

Jabeur KhachnaouiThis article shows, in fact, that both jihad murderers at the Bardo Museum were devout Muslims. Time for another round of “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” articles in the mainstream media — no doubt the usual suspects are in their labs now, cooking up fresh steaming piles of new explanations that will clear up your “misconceptions” about Islam.

“In Tunisia, one brother studied philosophy, another gunned down tourists,” by Carlotta Gall, New York Times, April 2, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Ebrahim Zahar, Tunisia: The same day that Jabeur Khachnaoui was gunning down foreign tourists at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis last month, one of his older brothers was on the other side of town, attending a rally against terrorism.

The two brothers grew up in a family with three other siblings in this small hamlet of olive groves in Tunisia’s impoverished southwest. They were close but in just a few years had ended up deeply divided in their outlooks, much like their country itself.

The older brother went to study philosophy in Tunis, while the youngest brother stayed at home and became intensely religious. After the older brother read about the attack online late that night, it was friends who broke the news to him that Jabeur Khachnaoui was one of the perpetrators.

“I felt very confused,” he said in an interview in his home village. Still wrestling with the shame attached to his brother’s actions, he asked that his first name not be published. “I never thought he would do this. Terrorism is a strong hypnotizer, and it happened in the blink of an eye.”

“We apologize to the whole world even though we are not responsible,” he added.

Interviews with family members and neighbors of both gunmen whose March 18 shooting rampage killed 21 foreign tourists and a police officer in the national museum similarly revealed equal measures of shock and shame. Both gunmen were killed by anti-terrorist forces but not before they had committed the worst terrorist attack in this country in more than a decade.

The radicalization of the two gunmen, Jabeur Khachnaoui, 19, and Yassine Abidi, 26, is by now a familiar tale in Tunisia. But the scale and audacity of this latest attack have revealed not only how vulnerable Tunisia is to the radical Islamist groups proliferating in North Africa, but also how deeply split, like the Khachnaoui family, Tunisian society is growing as a whole….

Khachnaoui became fanatically religious two years ago, according to his elder brother. The youngest son, he remained at home alone with his parents and grandfather and went to school by bus every day in the nearby town of Sbiba. It was there that he became drawn to radicalism. “All the trouble started in Sbiba,” his brother said.

“He has talked in a radical way since 2013, he would fast and stay up all night reciting the Quran,” his brother said. “He was always a strict person, and people would feel this awe around him. He would not make eye contact with women.”

“My father felt very afraid when he saw how radical he started to be,” he said. “But my brother assured us that however radical he was, he would never go to Syria.”

On Dec. 8 his younger brother ran away from home. He called his father sometimes but always via Skype, and it was never clear where he was.

At one point he told his father that he was training to fight in Syria and would never return to Tunisia. Yet more recently he called to ask his father to help arrange a medical certificate because he was going to miss his baccalaureate exams – which were scheduled for two days after the Bardo attack.

The elder brother said he had tried to draw Khachnaoui toward philosophy, to broaden his view of the world. And he had thought he was making some headway, he said, clearly dismayed. Instead, Jabeur Khachnaoui’s father fetched his body home for burial last week.

“My brother was a victim of dark and extremist ideas,” the elder brother said. “I don’t want to lighten his deeds, but he was much loved in the area.”

The second gunman, Abidi, hid his militancy more carefully. He had also grown more religiously observant three years earlier, and attended morning prayers in a nearby mosque, but otherwise had showed little sign of extremism.

“He was not a radical,” said his uncle, Mohammad Abidi, 63, a retired public servant. “He worked and he tried to make something of his life.” He had started a new job and bought expensive new clothes just days before the attack, according to a cousin, Dalel, who asked to be identified only by her first name.

Yet Abidi was part of an underground cell originally formed by the Islamist movement Ansar Al Sharia, the police said after the museum attack.

Ansar Al Sharia was set up soon after the 2011 revolution by a Tunisian member of al-Qaida, a close disciple of Osama bin Laden, called Seifallah bin Hussein, also known as Abu Iyadh.

Its members took over mosques and began an aggressive campaign to recruit young followers with preaching and charity events. “You could find them everywhere,” said a businessman in the neighborhood who grew up with Abidi. “They had tents all down the street.”

When the government outlawed Ansar Al Sharia – accusing it of orchestrating an attack on the US Embassy in 2012 and two high-profile political assassinations in 2013 – many members fled the country and others went underground.

Abidi hung out with two friends who lived in the same clutch of small streets in Upper Omrane, a working-class neighborhood in northern Tunis.

They frequented a radical mosque in the nearby neighborhood of Jebel Ahmar, and the group rented an old wedding hall for their prayer meetings, the businessman said. He asked not to be named because he did not want to show disrespect by talking about the family.

He said he was not surprised the terror groups still had cells in the city. “They started in the working-class neighborhoods,” he said. “It was only when things became insecure for them that they went to the mountains.”…

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Filed Under: Tunisia Tagged With: Jabeur Khachnaoui


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Comments

  1. Nimrod says

    Apr 12, 2015 at 4:37 pm

    Funny how someone can “misinterpret” something that he memorized and recited constantly. Even with the full context in memory and recited constantly he must have somehow taken things out context.

    • mortimer says

      Apr 12, 2015 at 9:37 pm

      Terroristic statements in the Koran and hadiths and Sira and canonical commentaries and terroristic endorsements by leading Muslim scholars and leaders all have NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM.

  2. jay says

    Apr 12, 2015 at 6:31 pm

    Someone needs to do something that shows how when people get religious, they get weird. The Christian can’t stop talking about Jesus and gets upset at swearing and goes to church 5 times a week, the Jew can’t stop praying and studying embracing every little Jewish thing on earth, the Buddhist becomes a vegetarian pacifist weirdo; but the Muslim who becomes a “born again” or get “intensely religious” becomes a murderer, rapist or at the very least, only stands in the street screaming support for these things against their host nation.

    How is Islam a religion again?

    • duh_swami says

      Apr 13, 2015 at 4:28 am

      What do you have against vegetarians? Your evaluations are kind of on the ‘low’ side…Unworthy of an atheist…if that’s what you are…

      • Nimrod says

        Apr 13, 2015 at 1:31 pm

        I think his point was simply to take the most extreme negative stereotypes of the most extreme members of various religions. Even if other religions are followed to an orthodox or ultra-orthodox degree, the worst popular stereotypes that someone can come up with don’t involve killing, raping, or enslaving infidels.

        Only in Islam does orthodoxy or ultra-orthodoxy lead to an obsession with killing/enslaving infidels (including other non-ultra-orthodox members of the same religion), funding the killing of “infidels”, or propaganda support for such activities. And even those who aren’t that orthodox have a tendency to fund or support these activities

  3. Mirren10 says

    Apr 12, 2015 at 6:37 pm

    “He has talked in a radical way since 2013, he would fast and stay up all night reciting the Quran,” his brother said. “He was always a strict person, and people would feel this awe around him. He would not make eye contact with women.”

    Lord, I find all this equivocation and excuse making beyond tedious.

    It’s the koran. It’s the life of mohammed. What more do we need to know ? These vicious people do what they do, according to the tenets of their foul religion. How stupid does one have to be, not to realise this ?

    I suppose as stupid as a braindead politician. or a leftard kumbyaa wanker. May they rot in hell.

    • mortimer says

      Apr 12, 2015 at 10:22 pm

      Politicians are letting us down badly. Politicians are not studying Islam, but getting their information THIRD HAND from mendacious taqiyya-artists who provide soothing disinformation about the Death Cult of Islam.

      All Muslims support jihad against the disbelievers. If they do not, they have left Islam.

  4. ECAW says

    Apr 13, 2015 at 3:06 am

    “My brother was a victim of dark and extremist ideas”

    Wrong on twwo counts:

    1. He was not a victim, he was a perpetrator.

    2. These ideas are not extremist, they are central to Islam and therefore better described as centrist – just as jihadis should not be called extremists but centrists because they are closer to the centre of Islam, the cruel, domineering, blood soaked example of Mohammed.

    • duh_swami says

      Apr 13, 2015 at 4:35 am

      “My brother was a victim of dark and extremist ideas”

      Wrong on twwo counts:

      The ‘dark’ part is right.

  5. BC says

    Apr 13, 2015 at 9:36 am

    I once worked in a school where a Pakistani woman teacher told that her husband, a doctor of medicine, pent all his free time praying, reading the Quran and playing cards. If that is true of the ‘educated class’
    one can only assume it is about the same for most of them

    • Nimrod says

      Apr 13, 2015 at 1:39 pm

      It’s not always true but it certainly can be. I had a Pakistani coworker who was Muslim by birth, but he admitted to me that he wasn’t Muslim, didn’t believe that stuff, and occasionally made sarcastic remarks about Islam. That may have had something to do with the fact that his brother, same educational level etc, was practically a jihadi. Fortunately his brother went back to Pakistan.

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