Jan 29 2010
American Jihad
New York Times has a frightening story about a man, Omar Hammami, who grew up in Alabama and by all accounts was completely Americanized but still ended up fighting with the Islamist insurgency in Somalia.
From the New York Times Magazine:
Sometimes months would pass with no word from Hammami. When he reached out through Facebook in early September, he told Dena that he hoped his infamy would prompt people to ask, “How did this guy become that?”
“They can’t blame it on poverty or any of that stuff,” he continued. “They will have to realize that it’s an ideology and it’s a way of life that makes people change. They will also have to realize that their political agendas need to be fixed.”
It’s things like these that give more credence to Hitchens and the like who believe that this really is a fight between ideologies.
The story doesn’t have an incredible amount of details about his actual rise through the ranks of the insurgency (although it seems he has achieved a considerable amount of power within the group, the article doesn’t give many details) but what is truly fascinating is how it depicts the duality of this person.
He is by all accounts a die hard believer but still has many American tics:
[Hammami] understood how strange it might seem to “fight for beliefs,” especially as he had once been a liberal (under the influence, he wrote, of the teacher he still referred to as “Mrs. Hirsch”). But he had come to the realization that “we don’t live in a utopian society.”
“When I came here I saw that firsthand,” he wrote. “There are villages that live in a constant state of war between rival tribes. There are roads that people cannot pass except with fear of being robbed or raped.”
He and his fellow fighters, he wrote, are helping those people. “Regardless of what the media says,” he added, “we do not kill innocents.”
Throughout the exchange, Hammami seemed to slide back and forth between the boy from Daphne and the jihadi propagandist. He asked his sister for news about his grandmother in Perdido (“Maw Maw,” he called her) and signed off “later tater” and “I love you.”
Frightening and incomprehensible.
