The Terrorist Next Door

To this day, it is unclear whether Hinrichs planned to enter Memorial Stadium. Since he obviously isn’t available for questioning and the feds have been elusive about his case, we’ll probably never know. Perhaps it was all just an unfortunate coincidence that the young man was prowling outside a jam-packed football stadium with a bomb in his backpack. But I doubt it. Although Hinrichs was not captured on any surveillance cameras, one government intelligence analyst told me that he believed Hinrichs intended to head into the game but was probably inhibited by the sight of stadium security guards conducting bag searches. Moreover, a top Norman police official revealed that Hinrichs had been spotted fiddling with his backpack while sitting on the bench. He believed Hinrichs accidentally detonated the bomb in that spot, saying, “I think he got a little bit cocky and it went off.”²

In the days and weeks following the blast, it was hard to believe the insistence of school officials and federal investigators that this was just a run-of-the-mill suicide. Led by OU president David Boren, a former Democratic senator and governor of Oklahoma, authorities calmly reassured OU students and the local and national media that Hinrichs was a classic, depressed loner with no plans to hurt anyone but himself. So what was their message for the 84,000 unsuspecting football fans and additional passers-by situated a stone’s throw from the scene of Hinrichs’ suicide bombing? Well, uh, these things happen.

Undaunted, the mainstream media—eager, as always, to avoid any discussion that might reflect poorly on Muslims—quickly swallowed the flimsy explanations and rejected local reports that Hinrichs was a white convert to Islam. Yet I and a handful of other journalists could not ignore the glaring truth that Hinrichs’ method of self-murder was awfully similar to that used by Islamic terrorists—right down to the large quantities of bomb-making materials that investigators found in his apartment as well as his proximity to a major civilian target at the time of the blast.³ I also couldn’t shake the fact that older photos of Hinrichs showed him clean-shaven, while before his death he sported an Islamic-style beard. And all that brings us back to Norman’s Masjid An-Nur mosque.

I’d spent three days around Norman visiting the scene of the bombing, interviewing Hinrichs’ acquaintances, and scoping out the apartment he had lived in just one block from the Masjid An-Nur mosque with, interestingly, a Pakistani Muslim roommate. On my last day in town, I received an intriguing tip. Local sources put me in touch with someone who claimed to have seen Hinrichs several times at the mosque. When I met with this witness, blurring her face on camera for her safety during our interview, she was adamant about what she had observed:

I did see Joel [Hinrichs] on several occasions outside of the mosque, actually, in the parking lot of the mosque. It wasn’t in the yard, it wasn’t behind the fence, it was always in the parking lot when I would see him. And there was one time when I passed him, actually, on the sidewalk. As soon as I saw the picture of Joel Hinrichs on TV, not the clean-shaven one, but the one with the beard, I knew immediately that that was the gentleman I had seen on several occasions.

After the chilly reception, we were approached by mosque spokesman Mohamed Elyazgi. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries—and then things went quickly downhill. Before I could even ask a question, Elyazgi began complaining about CBN’s “anti-Muslim” coverage. We went back and forth a bit as Elyazgi, with barely disguised disdain for me, tried to explain away Islam’s obvious terrorism problem and disputed my well-proven assertion that the vast majority of today’s terrorist acts are committed by Muslims.

A Libyan native, Elyazgi has been known to keep some interesting company. His former business partner, Mufid Abdulqader, was one of several U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood operatives convicted in the landmark Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Abdulqader received twenty years in prison for raising funds for Hamas⁴ and just so happens to be the half-brother of Khaled Meshaal, the terror group’s so-called “political leader.” Incidentally, both Abdulqader and Elyazgi have worked for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation—helping, no doubt, to keep the Sooner State’s roads safe and sound.⁵

The Masjid An-Nur mosque, like Elyazgi, has some dubious connections. Al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of helping to plot the 9/11 attacks, worshipped there while living in Norman in 2001.⁶ His presence doesn’t seem to have left a lasting taint locally—as of this writing, the Islamic Society of Norman is planning to build a new, expanded mosque on the site of the existing one, at an estimated cost of $75 0,000.⁷ Strike another one for Islam in America’s heartland.

While Mohamed Elyazgi never raised his voice during our encounter, he did become slightly agitated when I asked about Moussaoui, who he claimed had little contact with fellow mosque-goers. Elyazgi became more upset when I began to press about Joel Hinrichs. “The first time we’ve seen his picture is when the news and the media put his pictures in the papers and on TV,” he told me. “Other than that, we’ve never seen him here.” When I countered that an eyewitness told me she had repeatedly seen Hinrichs at the mosque, Elyazgi gave the same response—he’d never seen Hinrichs there, and neither had any of the other congregants. Our interview ended soon after.

Before leaving Norman, I headed over to a local feed store and confirmed reports that Joel Hinrichs had stopped there in the days before his death to inquire about purchasing ammonium nitrate fertilizer—the same substance used in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in nearby Oklahoma City. If Hinrichs wasn’t looking to harm anyone but himself, as Boren and the FBI had suggested, why would he look into buying a substance that can potentially take down an entire building? And if authorities knew from the beginning that Islam played no role in Hinrichs’ actions, then why were at least seven members of OU’s Muslim community either detained or questioned following Hinrichs’ suicide?⁸

Regardless, the FBI’s official verdict was that Hinrichs was not a terrorist, and that he had no outside help, nor any involvement with terrorist organizations.⁹ Yet I got a different take from two government intelligence analysts who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. Both classified Hinrichs’ suicide as an attempted act of terrorism and believed he was indeed a Muslim convert. One opined that Hinrichs was a seriously disturbed individual who was attracted to Islamic jihadism simply because it was the darkest thing available, and that he may have selfradicalized over the Internet.

The fact that Hinrichs was a deeply troubled loner is undeniable. He’d been picked on as a boy and had struggled with depression throughout his life, and his father said Joel had a lifelong difficulty relating to and interacting with other people. Nevertheless, he was an excellent student, even a National Merit Scholar.¹⁰ But the questions remain: was Hinrichs a homegrown Islamic terrorist, and did Oklahoma University football fans narrowly avoid falling victim to the first successful suicide bombing on U.S. soil since 9/11?

Hinrichs’ profile—emotionally disturbed, brainy white kid from middle-class Colorado Springs—certainly doesn’t fit most people’s image of a jihadist. And that’s part of the problem. If academically gifted, mentally unbalanced Joel Hinrichs was indeed acting in the name of Allah on that fateful October night in 2005, he would have had plenty of company. Increasingly, terror recruiters are connecting with psychologically unstable people, usually through the Internet, and helping to transform them into the unlikeliest of jihadis. As a result, the terrorists next door are now taking up more real estate than ever before.

In recent years, social outcasts have increasingly found appeal in Islamism. They might be lonely nerds, love-starved women, ex-cons, or people who grew up in abusive families. Some are white converts to Islam, others are African-American or Hispanic. All have one thing in common: they find a meaning and purpose in the jihadist cause that they previously lacked in life. In the old days, they may have joined a cult, hooked up with a street gang, or listened to the darkest form of heavy metal music. But with the advent of the Internet came a sudden host of causes and interests that an angry, disturbed, or alienated person could latch on to simply by clicking a mouse. Some have gone out searching for answers and acceptance on the Web and found Islam’s rigid system of absolutes to be anchors in what had previously been chaotic, aimless lives.

A more fundamental transformation occurs when they learn about the Koran-mandated duty to wage jihad against all non-Muslims and to completely subjugate the world to Islam. For the first time in what they themselves often view as their wretched lives, these misfits become part of something bigger, something that matters—a powerful, worldchanging movement. Overnight, one can go from being a friendless sad sack or a directionless street thug to being a member of the ummah, or global Islamic community, simply by entering a jihadi chat room or sharing an al-Qaeda video on YouTube. For an ex-con or a lonely, tormented soul who blames his failures and unhappiness on a U.S. system and society that has done them wrong, aiding and abetting America’s enemies in a jihad against that very power structure is a perfect way to gain revenge.

Furthermore, for many young, radicalized converts, Islamism is the new rebellion—dangerous, scary, dark, and forbidden. Some have referred to this appeal as “Jihadi Cool.”¹¹ You want to upset your parents and rebel against authority? Forget drugs, graffiti, stealing a car, or shaving your hair into a spiked orange mohawk. These days, it doesn’t get much edgier than hooking up online with a hip-hop loving British kid who’s secretly communicating with al-Qaeda leaders—and who just happens to be planning to blow up some subway cars in London. Forget the Bloods and Crips—it doesn’t get more “gangsta” than al-Qaeda. And unlike most gangs, the jihadist movement has a clear, well-defined goal: the reestablishment of a global Islamic caliphate and the imposition of Islamic sharia law on one and all. The global jihad also has no shortage of inflammatory rallying cries: Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay, just to name a few.

You can almost hear the seductive whispers of the Islamo-pimps and martyrdom-pushers as they beckon to a lost, angry American over the Web:

America—the country that has failed you personally and spread misery throughout the world—is waging a genocidal war against peace-loving, impoverished Muslims and must be stopped. Only through Islamic unity and jihad can this be accomplished, and thus can peace, justice, and equality be established at last in a wicked world. Join our cause, my eager young convert, and you can help change the world. Oh, and if you blow yourself up and take a few infidels with you, you’ll drink the choicest wine and cavort with seventy-two virgins in the afterlife. See you in Waziristan in two weeks—pack light.

This is un fair, they say to themselves. The whole system is rigged against me. Why not turn it upside down and actively work to destroy it? Then I’ll finally end up on top as an integral part of a new order, a triumphant Islamic wave. Or in the very least, I’ll blow myself up and go to heaven, away from all these miserable fools for good. Hopefully, I’ll take a few of them with me.

Yes, the scary quiet kid with the distant stare, bad acne, and Ozzfest t-shirt that sat next to you in biology class is now a prime candidate to carry the banner of Islamic jihad. Ditto the thuggish troublemaker who was in and out of juvenile hall throughout high school. Thanks to the Internet, they can now reach out and touch an Islamic terrorist halfway across the world. And once they’re in the jihadist fold, most Americans will never see them coming. The following are some real-life examples of this threat, which will become increasingly familiar in the near future.

The date was May 29, 2007, and the bespectacled, bearded terrorist in the white turban was on a roll. Pointing at the video camera for emphasis and speaking in strangely accented English, he was clearly relishing his status as al-Qaeda’s chief spokesman to the West. Only twelve years prior, Adam Pearlman Gadahn—grandson of a Jewish Zionist—had been living on a goat farm in rural California and writing reviews for death metal publications.¹³ But by the time his threat of new “horrors” was broadcast worldwide, Gadahn was known as “Azzam the American” and had risen to become a senior operative for al-Qaeda as well as its media advisor and chief English-language propagandist. Since 2004, Gadahn has regularly appeared in the group’s video releases to threaten mass bloodshed against the country in which he was born and raised. In 2006, he became the first U.S. citizen to be charged with treason in half a century. Most likely based in Pakistan’s tribal regions along with the rest of al-Qaeda’s hierarchy, he is now one of the most wanted men in the world. In short, he’s a long way removed from his days as a chubby, homeschooled headbanger. So what on earth happened here?

Gadahn was raised a Christian by ex-hippie parents on a goat farm in rural California. His father, ironically, made a living as a halal butcher, slaughtering farm animals in an Islamically correct manner and supplying them to a Muslim food market in downtown Los Angeles.¹⁴ The young Gadahn was homeschooled by his parents and took part in Christian homeschooling support groups. He’s written that he eventually grew to loathe “fundamentalist Christianity” and became deeply immersed in death metal, an extreme subculture of heavy metal music that features violent, overtly Satanic lyrics sung through guttural growling. Gadahn was hooked, even contributing music reviews and artwork to a death metal publication called Xenocide.¹⁵ Gadahn, a self-described “revolting geek” whom friends in the death metal scene recall as highly literate and intelligent,¹⁶ later wrote of his musical fixation:

I had become obsessed with demonic Heavy Metal music, something the rest of my family (as I now realize, rightfully so) was not happy with. My entire life was focused on expanding my music collection. I eschewed personal cleanliness and let my room reach an unbelievable state of disarray. My relationship with my parents became strained, although only intermittently so. I am sorry even as I write this. ¹⁷

Gadahn eventually moved into his grandparents’ home, where he had ready access to the Internet. While surfing the Web and looking to fill what he described as a “void,” he discovered Islam.¹⁸ Soon it was out with his long, heavy metal hair and in with a flowing Islamic beard—from one extreme to another. After his conversion to Islam in 1995, Gadahn fell under the sway of a group of hardcore jihadists at the southern California mosque where he worshipped. He was an apt pupil, and before long was assaulting a mosque leader whom his radical circle considered too moderate. Gadahn was arrested and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and battery.¹⁹ By 1998, with the sponsorship of two of his jihadi friends from the mosque, he left for Pakistan. Other then one brief trip back to California a few months later, he has remained in Pakistan ever since, working his way through the ranks of al-Qaeda to become one of the organization’s most recognizable figures. Adam Gadahn, described by one former friend as socially inexperienced, withdrawn, and lonely in his headbanger days, has found his voice as “Azzam the American,” one of al-Qaeda’s public faces.²⁰

The best clues concerning Finton’s conversion to Islam and subsequent radicalization derive from his own statements and from federal documents. Finton described himself to co-workers at the fish-andchicken shop as a troubled youth who ran away from foster care.²³ After being expelled from high school in Warren, Michigan, for fighting with a teacher, he eventually moved to Illinois, where he was sentenced to twelve years in prison in 1999 for aggravated robbery and aggravated battery.²⁴

Like a growing number of jihadists in the United States and Europe, Finton converted to Islam in prison. He was released early in 2006, and later described his pre-Muslim days on his MySpace page: “There was a time when looking inside of myself only brought forth darkness. Everybody liked me, yet I hated myself. People thought I was smart, and reasonably good-looking, but to me, I was a moron, and a freak.”²⁵

Finton’s self-loathing seems to have quickly been cured by his turn to Islam. Suddenly, he was part of a global jihadist movement in which he had the power, in his mind, to change world dynamics. He told undercover FBI agents that he hoped his acts of terror in Springfield “would cause American troops to be pulled back out of Afghanistan and Iraq,”²⁶ and that he would rather die as a martyr for Islam than live in the United States.

Even before taking matters into his own hands in Springfield, however, Finton clearly longed to join the jihadist cause. He had sent letters to imprisoned American Taliban John Walker Lindh; although authorities have never revealed the contents, the subject probably wasn’t prison food. Still more alarming, in March 2008 Finton received $1,375 from a man in Saudi Arabia, later sending that same amount to a travel agency and making his way to Saudi Arabia for a one-month stay.²⁷ The nature of Finton’s conversation with his Saudi contact, named “Asala Hussain Abiba” in court documents, and who they met with in Saudi Arabia have yet to be disclosed.²⁸ It’s clear, however, that Finton was so taken with the desert kingdom that he talked of moving there and starting a business.²⁹ But ultimately, he decided on a different course—he struck a blow for jihad by trying to massacre his countrymen here in the United States.

In conversations secretly recorded by an undercover New York police officer, the pair discussed killing U.S. troops and beheading non-Muslims. ³² “I wanna, like, be the world’s known terrorist,” Alessa boasted in one conversation, saying of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, “I’ll do twice what he did.” It was not idle talk. Alessa and Almonte simulated firefights by playing paintball, practiced hand-to-hand combat, and bought military gear. They also joined a gym to lift weights because, Alessa reasoned, “Stronger muscles means bigger muscles which means killing more non-Muslims.”³³ Almonte and Alessa supplemented their physical training by downloading the sermons of al-Qaeda leaders—especially Awlaki—and watching jihadist videos over the Internet.

The pair, born and bred in the North Jersey suburbs, initially seemed more likely to become involved in a street gang than in international terrorism. Almonte, raised Catholic in a Dominican family, began to find trouble during his senior year in high school. He was arrested three times in less than four months for, variously, taking a knife to campus, punching someone in a supermarket parking lot, and drinking beer in a park. In short, Almonte appeared destined for the life of a common street punk—until he heard someone preaching about Islam at a New Jersey shopping mall. Intrigued, he began frequenting local mosques and eventually became a Muslim. He met Mohamed Alessa in 2005 while hanging with a group of troubled young Arabs in North Jersey who called themselves the “Arabian Knights.” The two quickly became inseparable.³⁴

Alessa’s lifelong history of anti-social behavior makes Almonte’s look tame by comparison. The son of a Palestinian father and Jordanian mother, Alessa had such an explosive temper and acid tongue that he was seeing a psychiatrist and was placed on medication by the age of six. Over the years, his proclivity for fighting and verbal threats forced him to change schools at least ten times, yet he refused the advice of his parents and friends to go back to therapy.³⁵ He entered the Department of Homeland Security’s radar screen around 2006 after threatening to blow up two public high schools that he attended and menacing students and staff.³⁶

Alessa, raised Muslim, was not very religious when he met Almonte, but that quickly changed. The two grew matching Islamic-style beards and seemed to feed off each other. In 2007, they traveled together to Jordan in a failed attempt to link up with al-Qaeda and enter Iraq. Their inability to join the jihad early on seems only to have upped their motivation. By the time of their arrests in 2010, Alessa and Almonte knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives—and it didn’t involve car theft, vandalism, or drug dealing. The two former hoodlums had found the ultimate thug life in the form of Islamic terrorism.

Adam Gadahn, Michael Finton, and the Jersey jihadis were all social misfits who converted to Islam and used the Internet to further their crash course in jihad. Terrorist recruiters overseas are having a field day connecting with similar outcasts through social networking websites and video sharing sites like YouTube. They’ve taken to the Web, in part, because mosques, where potential recruits would normally be sought out, are now under increased scrutiny by federal and local law enforcement. U.S. counterterrorism officials are well aware of the online trend, but their tracking abilities are at times hampered by privacy laws and constitutional concerns.³⁷ Navigating the massive scope of the Internet is another obvious hurdle.

As a result, the online push is proving a big winner for the jihadist movement. According to a September 2010 study conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, “[I]n 2009 at least 43 American citizens or residents were charged or convicted of terrorism crimes in the U.S. or elsewhere, the highest number in any year since 9/11.”³⁸ No fewer than eleven major Islamic terrorist plots were hatched in 2009 alone on U.S. soil. Two were successful: the jihadi rampage at Fort Hood and the murder of U.S. military recruiter Private William Long in Little Rock, Arkansas. The rapidly increasing pace of homegrown jihad continued in 2010, with at least twenty-four convictions or arrests of U.S. citizens and residents for terrorism crimes.

A prime example was the case of five young American Muslims who left their homes in the Washington, D.C. suburbs in November 2009 and headed to Pakistan to wage jihad against U.S. troops. One was a Howard University dental student; all were seemingly well-adjusted American citizens. Yet they made contact with a Taliban recruiter via YouTube, exchange coded e-mail messages with him over a period of months, and journeyed overseas intending to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.³⁹ The five were then arrested by Pakistani authorities and sentenced to ten years in prison each, to be served in Pakistan.⁴⁰ The ease with which these Americans established a relationship with a terrorist recruiter through the Web shows, once again, why this method has become such an attractive option for al-Qaeda and its ilk.

The five would-be jihadists apparently met at an Alexandria, Virginia mosque run by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim Brotherhood-connected group that peddles Islamic supremacist materials. ⁴¹ Notably, Alexandria is just a short drive from Falls Church, Virginia, the former stomping ground of none other than Anwar al-Awlaki. From January 2001 until March 2002, Awlaki served as imam of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, just outside the nation’s capital, where he mentored two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Before we delve any further into the world of homegrown jihadi geekdom, we should examine Awlaki’s life and times in order to better understand the charismatic cleric whose sermons and writings have galvanized everyone from freaks and geeks to honors students into joining the global jihad.

Although Awlaki is now based in Yemen, where he helps lead al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, he is, in fact, a New Mexico-born U.S. citizen who attended Colorado State University. His fluent English and grasp of U.S. culture and norms are a major reason why he is so appealing to young, Western Muslims—particularly recent converts—who don’t speak Arabic and have never been overseas. And unlike Adam Gadahn, al-Qaeda’s other English-speaking mouthpiece, the 40-year-old Awlaki is an imam who teaches at length from the Koran and the Sunnah and is viewed by Islamists as a major religious authority.

A veteran al-Qaeda-linked terrorist named Saad al-Faqih spoke to me of the much younger Awlaki in reverent tones. “I highly recommend that you read him in English,” al-Faqih gushed. “He is a jewel for you. He is very impressive and sophisticated, very linguistic. He is very powerful. His message is that America must change its entire foreign policy.” He paused for a second and added, “You cannot defeat him.”

Al-Faqih’s accolades are common among Islamists; Awlaki has been dubbed the “Bin Laden of the Internet,”⁴² and due in large part to his massive online presence, U.S. intelligence officials tell me they now consider him the world’s must influential jihadist, surpassing even bin Laden himself. As described in chapter two, al-Faqih was in direct contact with both Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and the Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in the run-up to their respective terrorist acts. He’s also served as inspiration for Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and a host of other recent, homegrown Islamic terrorists. For his troubles, in 2010, Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be placed on the CIA’s target-for-assassination list.⁴³

It was a stunning turn of events, considering that just eight years prior Awlaki had been an honored guest at U.S. government functions. In 2002, Awlaki conducted a prayer service at the U.S. Capitol for the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association.⁴⁴ If it unnerves you that an al-Qaeda terrorist with 9/11 links led prayers inside the U.S. Capitol just months after the attacks, consider this: Awlaki was also a guest at a Pentagon luncheon, again, just a few months after 9/11.⁴⁵ The fact that Awlaki had been interviewed by federal agents four times in the eight days following the 9/11 attacks apparently didn’t raise any red flags among our military brass.⁴⁶ After all, Anwar al-Awlaki was a well-known local moderate and decidedly mainstream—at least, according to his resume.

However, by the time Awlaki was being feted around Washington in 2002, he had already blamed the 9/11 attacks on Israel, endorsed Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians, defended the Taliban, and referred to the 9/11 hijackers as “victims.”⁴⁷ All this was public information, but conducting a quick Google search is apparently beyond the capabilities of Congress or the Pentagon.

Awlaki’s facilitation of Islamic terrorism on U.S. soil stretches back at least to 2000. It was then, while serving as imam of a San Diego mosque, that he acted as “spiritual adviser” to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, and held lengthy, closed-door meetings with the pair. Awlaki was also in contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, who visited al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar frequently in San Diego. Unsurprisingly, members of the FBI and the 9/11 Commission, as well as participants in a Congressional inquiry, believe that Awlaki played a significant role in the 9/11 attacks.⁴⁸

When Awlaki left San Diego for northern Virginia in 2001 to take over as imam of Dar al-Hijrah, al-Hazmi and Hanjour followed. The men rented an apartment not far from Falls Church and attended Awlaki’s sermons at Dar al-Hijrah.⁴⁹ But not to worry: the mosque’s Muslim Brotherhood-connected leaders to this day insist they had no idea back then about their popular young imam’s terror ties or his fervent desire to destroy America.⁵⁰

Although Awlaki left Falls Church in 2002, spending the obligatory (for jihadis) two years in London before settling in Yemen, he is still quite popular among northern Virginia’s Muslim community—and not just over the Internet. I discovered this firsthand when I paid a visit to the largest Islamic supermarket in the Washington, D.C. area. That store, Halalco, is also located in Falls Church, about a mile from the Dar al-Hijrah mosque. But Halalco is much more than a supermarket. In addition to halal meat and various delicacies from the Middle East and South Asia, the store carries a large selection of Islamic books, recordings, and clothing. I received a tip from a federal law enforcement source in 2009 that among Halalco’s titles were a litany of Muslim Brotherhood, anti-Semitic, and pro-jihad works. Sure enough, I found exactly that in multiple visits to the store over a period of months.

Books by revered Muslim Brotherhood ideologues Sayyid Qutb and Yusuf al-Qaradawi and by convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri could be found on the shelves, while an entire section of CDs was devoted to the sermons of Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an American-born, pro-terror cleric who has described the beliefs of Christians and Jews as “filth.”⁵¹ Halalco was also stocked with a number of anti-Semitic tracts, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious nineteenth-century forgery out of Tsarist Russia. Simply put, these are the types of books and recordings that provide a gateway into Islamic radicalism—and they’re right at the fingertips of northern Virginia’s large Muslim community, courtesy of Halalco. No wonder a number of young Muslims from that region—like the five described earlier in this chapter—have been arrested on terrorism charges since 9/11.

By May 2010, I had compiled enough radical materials at Halalco to produce an exposé for CBN News. As I entered the store, cameraman in tow, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a large display that I had not seen in my previous visits—shelves featuring dozens of CDs and DVDs by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki. Coincidentally or not, just one day before, Awlaki had released a video recording calling for the murder of American civilians.⁵² Yet there I stood, staring at a prominent display of the al-Qaeda cleric’s collected works, just a few miles from the White House.⁵³

I grabbed one of the DVDs and asked a nervous-looking young clerk if I could speak with the store’s owner. He disappeared for a few moments and returned with a middle-aged man who identified himself as a store manager. He eyed my colleague’s video camera warily as I showed him the Awlaki DVD and asked for the owner. “I will check and see if he will talk to you,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”

When we returned to Halalco the next day, the Awlaki display had been taken down. After telling us the owner had agreed to talk to us, the manager from the previous day disappeared to go find him. Fifteen minutes passed as my cameraman and I—the only ones not wearing Muslim garb among the dozens of people milling around the packed store—took in the usual hostile glares. Just as I began to wonder if we were being set up, an older man with short white hair and a flowing white beard came walking toward us, followed by the manager.

“Hello,” said Abdul Mateen Chida with a nervous smile. “I am the owner of the store. Let’s go into the other room and talk.” The manager departed, and Chida led my cameraman and me into a small meeting room near the store’s entrance. As we sat down across from each other at a table, I asked permission from Chida to record the interview. He consented, and I went to work.

Chida hesitated for a moment then conceded, with a defeated look on his face, “It is possible.” But he denied that exposure to the materials sold at Halalco could inspire young Muslims to commit violence. This contradicted the testimony of Awlaki himself, who said of the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s writings, which were also sold at Halalco, “Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day. I would be so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me ... speaking to me directly.”⁵⁴

Halalco’s displaying of Awlaki’s CDs and DVDs was comparable to, say, a German-American restaurant peddling the speeches of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels during World War II. Yet according to Chida, selling Awlaki’s sermons was just a way to make a few bucks—after all, “They were very good sellers.” To put it in perspective, that means that until CBN exposed Halalco, the recordings of a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist who has declared war on America were selling like hotcakes among northern Virginia’s Muslim community—just minutes from Washington, D.C.

In the course of my investigations, I’ve discovered that Islamist materials like those sold at Halalco are readily available in Islamic bookstores throughout the United States. Indeed, pop into your local Muslim shop in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Dearborn, Michigan, and you may be surprised at what you find. For our freaks and geeks, however, who are often a homebound, anti-social lot, nothing beats the convenience and anonymity of the Internet. How else can a homely white woman like Colleen LaRose, living in the rural suburbs of Philadelphia, communicate with jihadists around the world and become a terrorist recruiter?

The 46-year-old LaRose, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, is a far cry from the usual profile of an Islamic terrorist, at least on the surface. That fact, plus her U.S. citizenship and passport, was what made her so appealing to the jihadist movement. Going by the monikers “Jihad Jane” and “Fatima LaRose” in her online postings, LaRose is now in federal custody awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to providing material support to terrorists and other charges. Specifically, she recruited men and women in the United States, Europe, and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to her indictment. She also solicited funds for terrorists online—where she frequently contributed jihadist videos and messages to YouTube and MySpace—and attempted to arrange the murder of Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had drawn a picture depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed’s head on the body of a dog. With the encouragement of her online jihadi community, LaRose even traveled to Sweden herself to track Vilks in 2009.⁵⁵ In perhaps the least surprising nugget to emerge in LaRose’s case, authorities have investigated whether there was a link between her and Anwar al-Awlaki.⁵⁶

It’s unclear when Jihad Jane, who stands 4-feet-11-inches tall and weighs barely over 100 pounds, converted to Islam. But she had a troubled past. At the age of sixteen, LaRose, a junior high dropout, was briefly married to a 32-year-old man. She divorced and remarried, only to see her second marriage dissolve after ten years.⁵⁷ During that time, she bounced around several Texas towns and was arrested for writing bad checks and driving while intoxicated.⁵⁸ She eventually ended up living with a boyfriend in Pennsylvania where, depressed over her father’s death, she tried to commit suicide in 2005.⁵⁹ LaRose apparently buried herself in her computer not long after and became attracted to the jihadist cause online.

There, she made contact with another baggage-laden white woman who had drifted into the dark world of jihad. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez hailed from Leadville, Colorado, a tiny town in the Rocky Mountains where she worked as a medical assistant. By the time she was thirty-one years old, the tall, blue-eyed blonde had already been married four times and had a 6-year-old son who had no contact with his father. In spring 2009, Paulin-Ramirez, described by her mother as a “very insecure, unhappy person that was just looking for something to hang on to,” announced to her family that she had converted to Islam.⁶⁰

She began spending more time on the computer and dressing in full Muslim garb that covered everything but her eyes. Then suddenly she disappeared, along with her young son, whom she now called “Wahid.” It seems that Colleen LaRose had invited Paulin-Ramirez online to join a terrorist training camp in Europe. Paulin-Ramirez agreed and traveled to Ireland, where she married an Algerian jihadi she’d met on the Internet and became pregnant with his child. All this was no surprise to Paulin-Ramirez’s brother, who later told a local television station, “Any man that came along in my sister’s life, she kind of followed like a lost puppy.”⁶¹

Unfortunately, her newest squeeze was also a terrorist. On March 10, 2010, he and Paulin-Ramirez, along with five others, were arrested by Irish police in connection with a plot to kill Lars Vilks, whom Colleen LaRose had also targeted. As of this writing, Paulin-Ramirez is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

The lesson driven home by the Jihad Jane and Jihad Jamie cases, along with many others, is that Islamic terrorists are doubling their efforts to recruit disaffected, vulnerable, and quite possibly, mentally unstable U.S. citizens via the Internet. If these troubled outcasts are, say, two white, blonde-haired women like LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez who are capable of slipping detection in Western countries, even better. Had they not been lured in by Islamic extremism, the “Jihadi Chicks” likely would have found some other form of excitement among the endless array of choices presented in cyberspace. But they and a growing number of others like them have been seduced by the message of jihad—suckered in by online sweet talk and a sense of belonging, then quickly radicalized.

With each new arrest of an American Muslim terrorist, the Obama administration warns the American people that there is a growing threat posed by homegrown “violent extremists.” Yet the administration’s main solution to this problem is reaching out to groups intimately connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s preeminent Islamic supremacist group, in hopes they will be a moderating force in America’s Muslim communities. This suicidal strategy involves allowing Brotherhood-linked elements to build more mosques, which will only serve to radicalize more American Muslims, especially impressionable recent converts. Indeed, other than pandering to the Brotherhood at home and other Islamist elements abroad and praising Islam at every available public opportunity, members of the Obama national security team are at a loss as to how to tackle the growing jihadist phenomenon.

Realistically, at the end of the day, there is probably little that can be done to prevent a downtrodden freak or geek from logging on to the Internet, stumbling upon a jihadist website, and being drawn in by an Anwar al-Awlaki sermon. The easy answer would be to continue to shut down jihadi websites wherever they are found, and to continue to monitor social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, as well as online chat rooms, that are utilized by terrorist recruiters. The more difficult answer is that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers will have to take a long, hard look at why a religion they’ve branded as peaceful, tolerant, and loving seems to attract so many violent, intolerant, and hateful individuals.

THE METALHEAD

THE EX-CON

THE PROBLEM CHILDREN