The New Face of Al-Qaeda

FrontPage magazine.com :: The New Face of Al-Qaeda by Robert Spencer

An article by Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, on Adam Yahiye Gadahn (an american convert to islam). Or actually on the topic; how and why does someone become a terrorist?
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 1, 2004

The new face of Islamic terrorism is
quite a departure from the spacy half-smile of Osama bin Laden and the dead-eyed
glare of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; ever since the latest FBI wanted poster came out,
it�s a pudgy, long-haired American kid who appears to be locked in a desperate,
losing struggle to grow a beard: Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American convert to
Islam.

Just as they did in the cases of
Gadahn�s fellow converts to Islamic radicalism (John Walker Lindh, the �American
Taliban,� British shoe bomber Richard Reid, and others), Western analysts have
rushed to ascribe Gadahn�s involvement with al-Qaeda as a product of his
disaffection and alienation, cannily capitalized upon by al-Qaeda operatives to
make the boy feel important and give him a place in the world.

Gadahn obligingly supplied the talking
heads with plenty of ammunition for this sort of thing in an account of his
conversion, apparently self-penned, that is posted on the website of the USC
Muslim Students Association. His father was a Muslim, although evidently not a
particularly active one, and his mother a Christian. Neither, by his account at
least, seems to have made much effort to raise him in either faith, and he says
he had some friction with them. For reasons unexplained at one point he tells us
that he moved in with his grandparents. �I had become obsessed with demonic
Heavy Metal music,� he says, to the extent that he �eschewed personal
cleanliness and let my room reach an unbelievable state of disarray."[1]

Around that time he discovered Islam by
cruising the Internet.

 

Unfortunately, Gadahn�s conversion story ends before he can
tell us how he came to be involved with Islamic terrorists and undergoing
training in al-Qaeda camps. But that is the fundamental question that must be
answered, and all the talk of rootless, disaffected youth that has filled the
airwaves over the last few days doesn�t even come close to answering it.

 

To be sure, since James Dean and probably earlier, alienated
youth have abounded in the

United States.
Drugs, illegitimacy, and other byproducts of youthful disaffection are proof.
But Gadahn is not a rowdy teen gleefully smashing his geeky teacher�s prized
record collection in The Blackboard Jungle; he is a member of an
organized, worldwide movement determined to commit acts of violence and
institute Islamic law. Gadahn could have just as easily become a Jehovah�s
Witness, or a Mormon. None of those choices would have landed him in a terrorist
training camp and made him the new face of al-Qaeda. It�s obvious why Islamic
terrorist groups would want to recruit someone like Adam Gadahn or Richard
Reid. For one thing, a non-Arab can enter areas where security measures would
prevent an Arab from going (although the PC Left is trying to change that).

 

Less discussed is the fact that men like Gadahn and Lindh can be recruited at
all. The other day I was speaking with a Pakistani Muslim who told me that he
knew �a little� Arabic, but didn�t speak or read it fluently. He wasn�t very
involved in his religion, and had picked up what he knew of it not from a direct
confrontation with its core texts and doctrines, but from cultural habit. But
Western converts have no such luxury. They must approach the Qur�an and
other Islamic texts without the culturally ingrained ways of understanding them
that Muslims pick up in Islamic societies. Thus they come to Islam more or less
in a pure, abstract form. The force of any given passage of Qur�an or
Hadith, not blunted by culture or familiarity, can be presented by
whoever is instructing the convert with any spin the teacher might favor.

 

Gadahn was
apparently a member of Muzammil Siddiqi�s Islamic Society of Orange County � at
least until he was expelled after a fight with someone there. Siddiqi, a
high-profile self-proclaimed moderate Muslim spokesman, said of Gadahn: �He was
becoming very extreme in his ideas and views. He must have disliked something.�[2]

 

And Siddiqi
knows extreme.
Kenneth Timmerman
has noted that �during an anti-Israel rally outside the White House on


Oct. 28, 2000,
Siddiqi openly threatened the

United States
with violence if it continued its support of

Israel.
�America
has to learn…if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will
come. Please, all Americans. Do you remember that?…If you continue doing
injustice, and tolerate injustice, the wrath of God will come.�� Timmerman adds,
�Siddiqi also has called for a wider application of Shari’a law in the

United States,
and in a 1995 speech praised suicide bombers. �Those who die on the part of
justice are alive, and their place is with the Lord, and they receive the
highest position, because this is the highest honor,� he was quoted as saying by
the Kansas City Star on
Jan. 28, 1995.�[3]

 

This is
Islamic moderation? Deliver us from the fundamentalists. One such purist, Abu
Hamza al-Masri, the one-eyed, hook-handed radical imam who was just arrested in
Britain on suspicion of aiding in terrorist acts and trying to establish a
terrorist training camp in Oregon, has always presented his teachings as the
genuine article: pure Islam. According to a March 2004 report from the BBC,
�Pure Islam has claimed the mantle of being the only real Islam as practised at
the time of the Prophet Mohammed and his companions. It regards the Islam that
came from the Indian subcontinent as corrupted and polluted by �cultural� values
such as music.� Such a presentation would be especially attractive to people
like Gadahn and other Western converts, who are already cut loose from their
cultural moorings and uninitiated as yet into Islamic culture.

 

�This has
led,� the BBC report continues, �to a split within the British Muslim community,
creating a belief amongst many young people that there is no compromise between
Islam and life in the West.� Nor is this view solely the province of a tiny
minority of extremists; on the contrary, it is winning the field: �However,
moderate Muslims leaders have remained largely silent and have yet to provide a
credible alternative.�[4]

 

Likewise, a young man like Gadahn who gains what he knows about Islam
from the internet will find dozens of jihadist websites, many of which
feature detailed explications of the Qur�an and Sunnah such
that would warm the heart of Osama bin Laden � and precious few, if any, Muslim
sites that refute the rigorist interpretation in favor of an Islam that is
essentially peaceful. Moderate Muslims in general don�t refute; they just
ignore. Not long ago a young Muslim woman told me that she didn�t think it was
necessary to respond to radical Muslim exegesis of the Qur�an � it was
so ridiculous, she said, that no one with half a brain could possibly take it
seriously.

 

Maybe. But
Adam Gadahn (and Johnny Taliban Lindh, and Richard Reid, and Jack Roche, and
Jose Padilla, and all the rest) shows that such responses are no longer
adequate, if they ever were. Gadahn and the rest were probably recruited by
straightforward appeals to numerous passages in the Qur�an and
Sunnah. In Islamic history and doctrine violent
jihad is founded on numerous verses of the Qur�an �
most notably, one known in Islamic theology as the �Verse of the Sword�: �Then,
when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them,
and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But
if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way
free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful� (Sura 9:5). Establishing �regular
worship� and paying the �poor-due� (zakat) means essentially that they
will become Muslim, as these are two of the central responsibilities of every
Muslim.

 

Such verses
are not taken �out of context� to justify armed jihad by radical imams
such as those who may have taught Gadahn; on the contrary, that�s how they have
been understood by Muslims from the beginning of Islam. Said the Muslim Prophet
Muhammad: �Allah assigns for a person who participates in (holy battles) in
Allah�s Cause and nothing causes him to do so except belief in Allah and in His
Messengers, that he will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty
(if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle
as a martyr).�[5]

 

One classic manual of Islamic sacred law, which in 1991
gained the approval of

Cairo�s
prestigious and influential

Al-Azhar

University
as conforming �to
the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,�

is quite
specific and detailed about the meaning of jihad. It defines the
�greater jihad� as �spiritual warfare against the lower self� and then
devotes eleven pages to various aspects of the �lesser jihad� and its
aftermath. It defines this jihad as �war against non-Muslims,� noting
that the word itself �is etymologically derived from the word mujahada,
signifying warfare to establish the religion.�[6]

 

This manual
stipulates that �the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and
Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.� The
requirement that non-Muslims first be �invited� to enter Islam and then warred
against until they either convert or pay the special tax on non-Muslims (jizya),
is founded upon the Qur�an: �Fight those who believe not in Allah nor
the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His
Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the
People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel
themselves subdued� (Sura 9:29).

This verse has been used in Islamic history and jurisprudence to establish three
choices for non-Muslims that Muslims are facing in jihad: conversion to
Islam, submission under Islamic rule (which involves a carefully delineated
second-class citizen status centered around but by no means limited to the
jizya tax ), or death. The goal of jihad is thus the incorporation
of non-Muslims into Muslim society, either by conversion or submission.

 

This is the explanation that radical Muslim spokesmen around
the world have given, repeatedly and consistently, for what they�re doing: they
are not terrorists, they are mujahedin, warriors of jihad. In
this they are doing nothing new, but merely carrying on an illustrious
tradition: violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Calls for
jihad went out in the seventh century against the Christians of Egypt
and

Syria
and the other areas of what is now known as the Muslim world. Such calls sounded
innumerable times against
Europe until
1683.

 

After that, although jihads became less common (at
least in
Europe), at
no point did Islamic theology reject the doctrine of jihad. It remained
part of Islamic thought and practice, to be revived again where possible and
necessary. Yet the simple fact that violent jihad remained and remains
today a vital component of Islamic theology is today smothered under a fog of
political correctness. This plays into the hands of Islamic radicals by making
it unnecessary for self-proclaimed moderates to renounce these doctrines, or
even to acknowledge their existence. But unless or until a large number of
Muslims around the world do so, the call to violent jihad will continue
to inspire young people like Adam Gadahn. After all, they want to please their
new friends in their new home and do what they have become convinced is the will
of Allah.

 

Thus,
whenever someone proclaims that Islam is a religion of peace that has been
hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists (instead of a religion that contains a
violent doctrine that sets it at odds with the rest of world and cries out for
reform), they are helping to make sure that more and more disaffected youth like
Adam Gadahn will end up in radical Muslim training camps � and will eventually
carry their struggle back to their infidel homeland.

 

Robert
Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch
and the author of

Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery
Publishing), and

Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World�s Fastest Growing Faith
(Encounter Books).