The Jihadist Next Door is the title the New York Times magazine gives to a long article by Andrea Elliott about a seemingly normal young man from Alabama named Omar Hammami who gradually became a radical Muslim. He went to Somalia, became a leader, and now puts out propaganda videos to recruit others to his cause under the name Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. Ann has posted on him many times.

Unlike the Somalis from Minnesota who answered the call to jihad, Omar Hammami was thoroughly American. His father came to the U.S. from Syria in 1972 and his mother is a native Alabaman, a Christian who raised her children as Christians, though the father continued to practice Islam. Omar was gifted, popular, and funny, a natural leader with an energetic, magnetic personality and a beautiful girlfriend.

During the summer before his sophomore year he visited his father’s family in Damascus, and the trip made a lasting impression. Gradually over the next couple of years he became a Muslim, and even persuaded some other students to explore Islam; at least one converted. He got permission to pray in school; he swore at a longtime teacher he liked because she was Jewish; he tried to choke a student who interrupted him as he was reciting the Koran. He even defended Osama bin Laden in class — before 9/11 but after the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Africa, for which bin Laden claimed responsibility.

In college he attended mosque, and he became president of “the fledgling Muslim Student Association.” If the writer had looked into the MSA, at Discover the Networks for instance, she would have learned that it was established by the Muslim Brotherhood and “was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s likeminded ‘organizations of our friends’ who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation.”  Not a casual group of Muslim students, in other words. A few years later he had become a full-fledged jihadist.

In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab’s leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. “To have an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization ­— we have not seen that before,” a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

The article is excruciatingly long, as NYT Magazine articles tend to be, but if you stick with it, you get a pretty good account of Omar’s radicalization at a personal level. The emphasis is on his personal journey, the path that led him deeper and deeper into radical Islam, with some suggestions about what motivated him psychologically. On the other hand, you come up almost empty if you’re looking for the pressures to radicalize that face Muslims in America today, and the reasons the number of homegrown terrorists is increasing.  

America is now at a watershed. In the last year, at least two dozen men in the United States have been charged with terrorism-related offenses. They include Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant driver in Denver who authorities say was conspiring to carry out a domestic attack; David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American from Chicago who is suspected of helping plan the 2008 attacks in Mumbai; and the five young men from Virginia who, authorities say, sought training in Pakistan to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.

These cases have sent intelligence analysts scurrying for answers. The American suspects come from different backgrounds and socioeconomic strata, but they share much in common with Europe’s militants: they tend to be highly motivated, even gifted people who were reared in the West with one foot in the Muslim world. Others may see them as rigid or zealous, but they envision themselves as deeply principled, possessing what Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, calls “an altruism gone wildly wrong.” While their religious piety varies, they are most often bonded by a politically driven anger that has deepened as America’s war against terrorism endures its ninth year.

I don’t believe in “politically driven” anger.  There’s anger, and then there are reasons to latch onto to justify the anger. Or there is energy and ambition, and there is a cause that can make use of the energy and fulfill the ambition.The political cause is a rationalization, in other words. Here’s my take, for what it’s worth, and very briefly:

It was not family influence that made a jihadist of Omar Hammami. His Muslim father was of the generation that came here for economic opportunity. Already from an educated family in Syria, he came to Alabama to go to college, and assimilated well enough that he married a Christian woman, agreed that she didn’t have to convert, and seemed to have no problem that she was raising the children in a Christian church. He seems bewildered and upset about his son. Here as in Europe, it is the next generation that is producing jihadists. What is different?

One difference is that now there is an open jihad. That’s exciting to young men who are looking for excitement and a way to use their energy and talents. It has had some successes, so joining it seems like a possible career with a future. Or if one’s future is cut short, there is glory aplenty.

Leading up to the jihad are two developments that work together to give young Muslim men a motive to join it. One is that American mosques are filled with propaganda from Saudi Arabia, pushing them into a more radical form of Islam. The curriculum of Islamic schools is filled with such propaganda — anti-American, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian in the most vicious way. Omar Hammami did not become interested in politics and jihad until after he went to college, where there were both a mosque and the Muslim Students Association to help him along the way. (Not that every mosque is radical, but the number that are is huge.) There was also a Muslim convert who taught him Salafism. Salafi is a movement back to the fundamentals of Islam. (Giving you a good idea of the reporter’s orientation, the article quotes a Princeton professor: “They remind me a lot of Scalia in their approach to texts.”) Originally Salafi was not related to violence, and in fact prescribed staying away from worldly concerns. In the U.S. especially it is often associated with jihadism. Omar’s mentor did not promote violence, but Omar gradually decided that Salafism was consonant with violent jihad. He encountered many other influences which the reporter doesn’t investigate. It’s clear that anyone who becomes interested in jihad will find countless web sites, YouTube videos, and organizations that will help him along. This reporter wanted to concentrate on Omar’s personal story, which is fine, but I’d like to see the New York Times give some emphasis to this side of jihad recruitment.

The other development is that there is very little in a young person’s education nowadays to give him much meaning. All teenagers are searching for meaning in their lives — all people are, in fact, but especially young people. Yet children in the public schools are taught throughout their schooling that our country isn’t much good, we are oppressors and are destroying the environment and making a world that won’t be any good in the future. Boys are discouraged from acting like boys and encouraged to squelch their natural impulses to fight and to develop their physical skills (unless they are athletes). What is there to get excited about? Not joining the armed forces and defending your country. Unless there is motivation from your family, why should you? And if you do, you’ve got to put up with a bunch of girls and pretend they’re just as good physically as you are. Not the kind of thing to attract idealistic boys if there’s an alternative being waved in front of your face.

This second point is something the reporter could have dealt with in her context of Omar’s story. She sort of hints at it, but I think it is something she can’t recognize. The culture in which she swims thoroughly approves of the radicalization of school curricula and the feminization of America’s institutions including the military. The dark side of these things is not something she would easily recognize. I wonder if any of the intelligence analysts searching for the roots of homegrown jihadism recognize it.

Jihad Watch has a post on the article, with more excerpts and less commentary than this one, if you want to get more of the content without having to wade through the whole article.