"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!"How did a popular kid from a small town in Alabama wind up connected to Al Qaeda? The Jihadist Next Door [SLNYT]
... in December 2002, he dropped out of college [the University of South Alabama, where he had been studying computer science], saying that he could no longer bear to be in the company of women.At this point he was a pacifist, though. He became radicalized in Toronto, with help from the Internet:
Over the next few years, Hammami, Culveyhouse and the other Mobile Salafis traveled around the country attending Islamic conferences. With Sylvester, they opened a small Muslim bookstore in Mobile, opposite a storage lot. Hammami worked to master Arabic and talked of becoming an Islamic scholar. In the meantime, he had to earn a living, and few jobs meshed with his piety. He loaded trucks, cleaned carpets and sold light bulbs.
For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart....
Living in Canada, Hammami began to see his country through a new lens. The war in Iraq was deeply unpopular at the mosques and coffee shops he frequented. Being an American invited a stream of questions and commentary for which Hammami felt unprepared, Culveyhouse recalled. ...Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, counter-terrorism officials in the Clinton Administration, wrote in The Next Attack that the war in Iraq was like throwing gasoline on a fire, confirming the jihadist world-view that the US is warring against Muslim countries for their oil.
One afternoon in April, he and Culveyhouse dropped by an Islamic bookstore. The owner, an Afghan, told them to “pray for the people of Fallujah.” Months earlier, the U.S. military had invaded the Iraqi city, an insurgency stronghold, for the second time....
Over the next few months, Hammami became consumed with events in Iraq and Afghanistan. He began subscribing to conspiracy theories about 9/11, Dena and Culveyhouse recall. He soon found himself rethinking his nonmilitant Salafi stance.
“I was finding it difficult to reconcile between having Americans attacking my brothers, at home and abroad, while I was supposed to remain completely neutral, without getting involved,” he wrote in the December e-mail message responding to questions posed to him through an intermediary.
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.
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posted by Anything at 6:59 AM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]