As you probably saw, we had a couple new arrests over the weekend on the homegrown terrorism front — this time two guys from New Jersey who were trying to go to Somalia and join the local al Qaida affiliate, al Shabaab. Let me preface everything by noting once again that, as we’ve seen, even fairly shambling violent losers who can do a lot of damage, especially if they turn themselves over to more sophisticated terrorists for use as cannon fodder.
But I’m struck again by the pattern of violent and fairly sad-sac losers who look like you might have seen them in some jihadist version of Waiting for Guffman. Alessa and Almonte, the new duo had already tried to join a jihadist group in Jordan. But those guys told them to get lost. The AP describes their preparation for the trip to Somalia …
But their preparations apparently were unsophisticated. They lifted weights, bought military-style pants and water bottles, played violent video games and watched terrorist videos online.
What strikes me about these guys is that they sound like the kind of guys who probably would have become skinheads if they were white or if they were black in the 70s drifted to the criminal fringe of the Black Panthers or its spin off groups robbing banks and killing cops for the ‘revolution.’
I remember back in college in the late 80s finding myself at a panel about rap music. And most of the experts — a mix of academics and music critics, yes, you can only imagine — were going on about rap, with its mix of misogyny, puffing, willful young male aggression and occasional inchoate politics was an authentic product of inner-city African-American culture. And everyone was agreeing on this until one guy, one of the music critics, basically called BS on the reining consensus, saying, ‘Are you kidding? The white teenagers in the suburbs have all the same stuff. There it’s just heavy-metal.’
I wouldn’t want to reduce rap, which was then just breaking out into mainstream American culture, to just that. But it was a telling and clarifying rejoinder. And with a lot of these morons we’re seeing picked up trying to join the jihad I think there’s something very similar.
