The spin today is, of course, how could a man who worked so hard to become an American citizen and follow the American Dream become a terrorist?
The AP headline simply reeks cluelessness:
NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery
A man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square had found the stable, suburban life he had spent a decade working toward, then abandoned his house in Connecticut and decided to supplement his business degrees with explosives training in Pakistan, authorities say.
The WaPo also can’t figure out why such a nice young man would go so wrong:
But the most elusive question about Shahzad — a man with no known history of violence or connection to militant Islam — is the same one that often surfaces in terrorism plots: Why?
Along the way, the writer makes some incorrect assumptions:
How could someone with a degree in computers, who authorities say admitted receiving bomb-making training in Pakistan, assemble such an unsophisticated and unsuccessful device?
His degree was in computer science, but the writer’s mistake is in thinking that a degree in computer science necessarily means you’re smart enough to handle the intricacies of bomb-making—even after taking a course in it. I took a course in XML years ago and I still can’t build a javascript wrapper to save my life. The director of Shahzad’s MBA program said he was an “unremarkable” student. That might have been a clue for the writer in answer to his question above.
Reuters searches for answers, first bringing up the hackneyed “child of poverty turns to terror” theory before blowing it away in the latter half of the article.
But I think it’s a much simpler answer than they’re looking for.
It’s the jihad, stupid.
You don’t have to go to a radical mosque every day to be hit with a desire for jihad. Religious awakenings, even those of the violent kind, can happen in a flash, over an incident you never expected. Was he watching the news and saw a group of civilians killed by a predator bombing? Was he surfing the internet and found something that one of his coreligionists said suddenly meant everything? Did a friend of his say something about the war in Afghanistan or Iraq that suddenly reverberated throughout his soul?
That could be all it took.
Why does a person become radicalized? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. I’m sure he’ll ultimately tell us. Because that’s the other thing about fanatics: They want you to know why they’re killing you.
It’s the difference between hardware and software. I can do SQL and SAS and a few other things and I’ve even assembled a PC from components – it’s like a simple jigsaw puzzle – and when it didn’t work I had to call a friend. I bought my first Mac years ago just so that I could claim not to know anything about PCs and to get people to stop asking me to fix their computer – . I wouldn’t know the first thing about wiring up a timer to get something to explode.
I’m impressed that you took a course in XML and even know what javascript is.
An electrical engineer would know how to build a timer to ignite a bomb. A chemical engineer would be able to select the best explosive, a civil engineer would know how to set it up for best effect, an engineering science graduate might be able to do all three, but generally you need multiple people with multiple skills. Similarly a suicide bomber has a bunch of people behind them to pull it off – otherwise there’s no learning curve.
It takes a village to wage a jihad.
That’s the funniest thing I ever hard about jihadis. Thanks for the laugh, L.
Oh, I’m upgrading my CSS skills, so I’m pretty sure I’m finally going to figure out XML and wrappers after all these years.
Sleeper cell?