By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, July 18, 2015
In the immediate aftermath of Mohammod Youssuf
Abdulazeez’s killing of four Marines and wounding of at least three other
people, there was a noticeable effort to portray the jihadist as an
all-American boy from small-town Tennessee. With just a bit of digging,
however, a different picture is emerging. The New York Times reported Friday
morning that Abdulazeez had spent about seven months in Jordan last year.
As is their wont in cases where Muslims kill Americans,
investigators hastened to point out that overseas stays in a region rife with
Islamic radicalism are not necessarily suggestive of terror ties . . . even if
the traveler, on his stateside return, promptly shoots up military
installations while the Islamic State and al-Qaeda urge Muslims to shoot up
military installations.
Abdulazeez was technically a Jordanian national when his
parents brought him to the United States from Kuwait as an infant in 1990.
Sometime during his childhood, he became a naturalized American citizen. Yet
the family appears to self-identify as Palestinian, a conclusion I’ll explain
in due course.
Extensive and mostly flattering information already
abounds about Abdulazeez’s upbringing in Colonial Shores, a subdivision of
Hixon, a small town across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga. “He seemed to
have been an all-American boy,” reports the Times, “handsome, polite, normally
in a T-shirt and jeans.”
The 24-year-old jihadist was finally killed in a shootout
with Chattanooga police Thursday morning. He had first opened fire on a
military recruiting office, shooting out the windows. He then drove to a U.S.
Naval Reserve Center about six miles away, where he murdered the four Marines.
Also wounded in the spree were a Marine recruiting officer, a police officer,
and Navy sailor who, as this is written, is still fighting for her life after a
night of surgery.
Abdulazeez’s family — father, mother, and at least two
sisters — is described by the media as “devout” and “conservative” Muslim.
Abdulazeez is said to have had a mostly normal American childhood, playing ball
in the street with the local kids; his sisters, to have been everyday American
girls who happened to wear headscarves. Neighbors appear to have thought the
children polite and well behaved.
Yet, there is plainly more to the story. According to one
Israeli press outlet, the shooter’s father, Youssef Abdulazeez, is a
Palestinian, notwithstanding his holding of a Jordanian passport. About 4.5
million Palestinians live in Jordan, about three-quarters of them holding
Jordanian citizenship. Whatever his ties to Jordan, Youssef resided in Samaria
— i.e., in the virulently anti-Israeli and anti-Western territory of the
Palestinian Authority on the West Bank — before relocating to Kuwait. The
Israeli press outlet relates:
The Palestinian connection was demonstrated by pictures posted on Facebook recently by [an unidentified family member] who put up an image featuring a fist grasping a loudspeaker in the colors of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flag with the words: “speak for Palestine!”
Indicators of the Palestinian roots of the Abdulazeez
family are corroborated by the Instagram account of one of Youssef’s daughters,
Yasmeen. In it, she describes herself as a “Palestinian Muslim living in good
old Tennessee.”
After moving to Kuwait, Youssef married his wife, Rasmia.
Mohammod was born in 1990. They left for America after the outbreak of the
Persian Gulf War — the war in which President George H. W. Bush liberated
Kuwaiti Muslims from the occupying Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein . . . although
Kuwait remains a hotbed of radical Islam and a major source of anti-American
jihadist funding.
Youssef was on a Federal Bureau of Investigation
terrorist watch list for some unspecified period of time, on suspicion of
donating money to an organization suspected of being a terrorist front. He was
even reportedly questioned by or at the behest of American law enforcement
during a trip outside the U.S. But he was eventually removed from the list. Now
he is not only employed by the Chattanooga City Department of Public Works; he
also was appointed an unarmed “special policeman” in 2005 by the Chattanooga
City Council.
The Abdulazeez children attended Red Bank High School.
The Washington Post reports that, in her years at there, as well as at
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (where Mohammod also attended), Yasmeen
drew attention for her forward and at times confrontational expression of Islam
— wearing her headscarf even on the volleyball court, and chiding fellow
students, “Do you really know what Islam is? . . . There’s this misconception
that Islam is a violent religion. Muslims are actually peaceful.”
Another sister, Dalia, eventually became a well-regarded
young elementary-school teacher. Quite abruptly, however, she left the school
and the United States. A former teaching colleague indicates that the move was
made in order to be with a man who was leaving the country. Her strict Islamic
parents wanted to choose her husband, and they disapproved of the beau she’d
chosen for herself.
Mohammad, meanwhile, is said to have been a popular,
smart, witty high-school student and athlete — a formidable wrestler who grew
into a muscular six-footer and later took up mixed martial arts for a time. He
interrupted wrestling practices for prayer breaks. He was also eerily quoted as
follows in his senior-yearbook entry: “My name causes national security alerts.
What does yours do?”
Of course it is still early in the investigation, but
little seems to be known so far about Mohammod’s college years at the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The UT system has active chapters of
the Muslim Students Association. As I’ve previously recounted, the MSA is the
primary building block of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, and
several of its leaders have gone on to become prominent Islamist activists and
even violent jihadists. Thus far, though, I’ve seen no reporting about whether
Abdulazeez was a member of, or in any way active in, the MSA.
It is clear that he had recently become a regular
attendee of the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga, where his family prayed
at the mosque. Mohammod had not been seen there in a while before he began
attending again two to three months ago — information that is consistent with
lengthy travel overseas. The Islamic Society describes itself as moderate and,
out of respect for the Marines killed by Abdulazeez, it canceled an
end-of-Ramadan celebration that was scheduled for Friday evening. A founding
board member of the Society told the Times that Abdulazeez had shown no signs
of “extremism.”
So for now, we do not know much about Abdulazeez’s
activities and influences during his college years — the time when Islamic
supremacism grips many young Muslim men. We know that he earned a degree in
electrical engineering in 2012. (Interestingly, many terrorists and Islamist
activists have studied engineering at American universities). We know that he
eventually interned at the Tennessee Valley Authority (the federally owned
utility that provides electricity and flood control for millions of Americans
in the South). And we know, finally, that the clean-cut Abdulazeez — the
high-school senior with close-cropped hair — somehow became the bearded zealot
who created an Islamic website on the eve of his jihad.
The American press has naturally focused on a recent
drunk-driving arrest; obviously, it could cut against the picture of a
committed Muslim extremist and thus suggest that some other motive — any other
motive — explains the attack. But the arrest could equally suggest a person in
the throes of an inner conflict between the life he knew and the beliefs he
harbored. Better than reading tea leaves would be reading his own words. On the
website, whose only two entries were posted on Monday, three days before the
shooting spree, he warned fellow Muslims that “life is short and bitter and the
opportunity to submit to allah [sic] may pass you by.”
The other entry, on “Understanding Islam,” refers to the
example of the prophet Mohammed’s companions: the notion that “almost every one
of them was a political leader or an army general[.] Every one of them fought
jihad for the sake of Allah.” Abdulazeez concluded:
We ask Allah to make us follow their path. To give us a complete understanding of the message of Islam, and the strength the [sic] live by this knowledge, and to know what role we need to play to establish Islam in the world.
In the hours right after the shooting, local federal
officials stated the obvious: the jihadist killing of our Marines was an act of
“terrorism.” By nighttime, the government was walking that back. President
Obama described the “assault” as a “heartbreaking circumstance.” Attorney
General Loretta Lynch prefers “national-security investigation” to the word
“terrorism.”
After all, who knows what the motive could have been?
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