Daniel Greenfield November 27, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Eight years after he was taken out by a
drone strike in Waziristan, Adam Gadahn went viral on TikTok. Had the
former Al Qaeda terrorist been alive to see TikTok lefties praising his,
“Letter to America”, written in Osama bin Laden’s name, he would have
been absolutely thrilled.
Raised by California hippies, Adam
Gadahn’s message clicked with TikTok teens because he used to be one of
them. After experimenting with heavy metal to rebel against his dad’s
terrible folk music (“So tell us what the sign will be/Of the end of the
age we know/War and famine everywhere/There’s no place left to go” he
went for the ultimate in death metal.
We love nothing more than
“slitting the throats of the infidels” he bragged in his videos in a
fake Arabic accent right out of ‘Team America World Police’. “You and
your people will, Allah willing, experience things, which will make you
forget all about the horrors of September 11.”
Al Qaeda embraced
the previously useless hipster because he promised to teach them how to
reach Americans. But the ‘Azzam the American’ experiment never took off.
Even after he stopped wearing a burka-like disguise
over his square wire rimmed glasses, and wound a tablecloth around his
head instead, he never stopped looking like a dork in a costume.
Adam
never belonged in Pakistan, he belonged in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont
High’ or ‘Napoleon Dynamite’: his blank thousand yard stare had been
perfected by getting high, not in Koran study.
Americans did not
rush to enlist in Al Qaeda because of his words. Adam had aimed his
rhetoric at the Michael Moore demographic that had birthed him, but one
it was one thing to jeer Bush in between Starbucks lattes and another to
move to a cave on the Pakistani border.
The
videos mostly tapered off and he was reduced to translating the
speeches of Al Qaeda leaders. After Osama bin Laden’s death, Americans
stopped paying attention to Al Qaeda, and Adam’s death in a drone strike
took second billing to the deaths of two American hostages.
But
Adam or Azzam had been ahead of his time. He had peaked before the age
of social media, and he never reached the audience he needed. But that’s
changing now.
8 years after he was spattered over parts of Pakistan, Adam is an Al Qaeda influencer now.
The
living can catch up to the times, but the dead can only wait for the
times to catch up to them. When Adam Gadahn converted to Islam in 1996
and then assaulted his local Imam for not being antisemitic enough,
there weren’t a lot of American teenagers like him. But we now live in a
world where there are plenty of American teens converting to Islam and
going Jihad.
Take
Trevor Bickford,
a 19-year-old from Wells, Maine, a town of less than 10,000 people, who
converted to Islam, and headed down to Times Square to kill
non-Muslims. Or Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of
15,000, who joined ISIS and planned his own terror attack. Or
Jonathan Xie, a 20-year-old from a New Jersey suburb who joined Hamas and threatened to bomb Trump Tower.
When
Shannon Maureen Conley, a 19-year-old teenage girl from suburban
Colorado converted to Islam and tried to join ISIS in 2014, there were
articles and profiles on her. By the 2020s, it’s become common enough
that American teens becoming Islamic terrorists has become routine.
Hardly anyone bothers with the extended profiles of what is now a social
phenomenon.
The
handful that actually go all the way, like Adam, Trevor, Xavier,
Jonathan or Shannon are the tip of the iceberg. When Osama bin Laden’s
“Letter to America”, actually written by Adam, went viral on TikTok, it
exposed a much larger contingent of American teens friendly to the
Jihad. Most Muslims are not actually terrorists, they’re just
sympathetic to their positions. The same is true of parts of the
non-Muslim world, including Europe, and it’s true of some American
teens.
A poll showing that 51% of Americans 18-24 supported the
murders, rapes and kidnappings atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct 7 is
not just a statement about Israel. How many of them also think Al Qaeda
had a point? There’s no meaningful polling on that: only anecdotal.
Adam’s
“Letter to America”, stripped of his terrorist cosplay, the costumes
and the droning voice, proved to be effective with teens who are like
him, bored, dissatisfied and lacking in meaning. The Al Qaeda influencer
rebelled against the Christian and Jewish religions of his parents,
adopted Islam and then called for the destruction of America. In a
counterculture that prizes teenage rebellion as the ultimate form of
cultural change, Adam was the ‘it’ Jihadist.
Converting to Islam
is a bit of a side road from the one that his Boomer parents took to get
to their place in the counterculture. Adam went from his dad’s ‘Beat of
the Earth’ and ‘Love Will Find a Way’ to a scorched earth triumph over
the infidels, but isn’t this where the Left always ends up? Converting
to Islam and joining Al Qaeda is the Zoomer answer to the Boomer side
roads of joining Charlie Manson’s race war or drinking Kool-Aid with Jim
Jones.
The Age of Aquarius always ends in Altamont and gulags. Why not also Jihad?
Adam
Gadahn adapted Osama bin Laden’s message to a generation of teens who
grew up believing that America was racist, “freedom and democracy that
you call to is for yourselves and for white race only”, destroying the
environment, ranting that “you have destroyed nature with your
industrial waste and gasses… despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto
agreement” (Adam had started out as an environmentalist), and oppressing
the rest of the world. Starting with the leftist premise that America
was evil, Al Qaeda made perfect sense. And to leftists it still does.
The
first Al Qaeda influencer is postmortem piggybacking on a culture of
radical activism that has made Islamic terrorism into the ultimate
counterculture.
The Guardian profiles Americans who reacted to
Islamic terrorism by reading the Koran and converting to Islam. The
dead-eyed Manson followers and Jim Jones cult members are reading Korans
and shouting “ceasefire”, they’re blocking traffic and having hysterics
at the Capitol.
The Left has always drawn on fractured souls for
its causes. Even more than dynamiting buildings, it set bombs to blow
up the culture and its values. The more people it broke, the more
recruits it gained. Islamists in America have gone beyond recruiting in
prison and are recruiting from this same broken base. Mom and Dad may
have protested the war, but Junior is a Jihadist.
Islam,
like the Left, promises to destroy a failed world built on oppression
and lies, in order to save it. Behind the apocalyptic idealism is the
same perversity that led Adam Gadahn to threaten that, “the streets of
America shall run red with blood.” Was this rhetoric really all that
different from the anarchists, the Black Panthers or the Symbionese
Liberation Army?
The radicals have become one great big
apocalyptic gestalt, castrating teenagers, burning down pro-life
centers, marching through the streets, tearing down statues and looting
stores. The spectacle of it matters more than the details of the
ideology. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, some teens robotically repeat
verbose dogma they don’t understand, whether it’s Critical Race Theory
or Hadiths, because it lets them run around destroying things and
terrorizing people.
The destructive impulses that leftist
radicals and Islamic terrorists channel are fairly similar. And not so
different from the Hitler Youth. Put on a uniform, shock your parents
and wreck things. The more you rage and hate, the stronger you feel and
the more you bypass the hard work of adulthood. Radical politics is just
another way for teenagers to never grow up.
‘Azzam the American’
was a Jihadist Peter Pan who never had to grow up. He’s dead now. And
some of those radicals protesting for Hamas will eventually convert and
follow in his footsteps.
Adam
Gadahn understood instinctively how to take a foreign ideology and make
it palatable to those like him, but we’re now in a world and a country
full of Adams. Social decay has been supplemented by educational and pop
culture indoctrination. TikTok is happy to spread Osama’s message as
long as it weakens America. There is a world of strange bedfellows out
there all happy to see us fall. And if we are not careful, some of them
will be our children.
The return of ‘Azzam the American’ is a
reminder that we’re not just in a war, but a culture war. A broken and
divided nation is in no shape to defeat a vast enemy that is already
inside our borders. The War on Terror is an extension of the old culture
war we’ve been losing until now. Islamic terrorism could not succeed
unless it could rely on a fifth column inside our countries.
After
9/11, it was clear that we would have to win an internal war to win an
external one. Now as the wars come together and the enemy roams our
streets, the need is more urgent than ever.
Either we defeat the enemy within or the war is lost.
