Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [78]
The invocation of the bullet over the ballot was a distortion of a turn of phrase most famously deployed by Malcolm X. In recent years, it has come to be used as a jihadist slogan.
Even having gone this far, Awlaki was still holding back. At the time he issued the message, Shabab was still fighting a primarily military conflict in a contained geographical zone. It wasn’t quite the same as endorsing al Qaeda. And Awlaki couldn’t help but end the message with a suggestion that Shabab—known as an extraordinarily violent movement—practice kindness toward the Somalis it sought to conquer.
I would like to take this opportunity to advise my brothers to be kind and soft with the masses; to excuse them for centuries of ignorance and false beliefs; to teach first and hold responsible last. I would advise you to go by certainty and to leave doubts; to prefer forgiveness over revenge. The masses of the people are suffering from the illnesses of tribalism, ignorance, and a campaign of defamation of Sharia. Therefore you need to win the hearts and minds of the people and take them back to their [true nature].30
The dreaded prison cell had taken Awlaki ever closer to joining the ranks of violent jihadists, yet he still held back. It would take a fellow American to strip away all pretensions and push him firmly into the camp of terrorism.
THE FORT HOOD SHOOTINGS
On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into a medical processing center in Fort Hood and opened fire on unarmed soldiers who were between deployments. He discharged his weapon more than a hundred times, killing thirteen and wounding at least twenty-nine more.31
Within the first few hours, the media covered the story as a mass shooting consistent with such lone gunman cases as the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, where a schizophrenic college student went on a shooting spree that left thirty-two people dead. But reports soon began to filter out that during his spree, Hasan had been shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—a Muslim superlative exclamation meaning “God is great” that has been appropriated by jihadists to celebrate attacks.32
An American born in Virginia in 1970 to Palestinian immigrants, Hasan worked for the family business before attending Virginia Tech, where he majored in biochemistry. In 1997 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and enrolled in medical school, his tuition paid in full by the U.S. government. He specialized in psychiatry—according to an uncle, he chose the specialty after fainting at the sight of childbirth during medical school. In exchange for his tuition, he agreed to an extended tour of duty—he was committed to the army through at least 2010.
Hasan was a lonely man, religious to begin with and even more religious after the death of his mother in May 2001 (his father had died a few years earlier). He worshipped at the Dar Al Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, where he became captivated by the imam, Anwar Awlaki. During the same period, Hasan could count at least two of the September 11 hijackers among his fellow worshippers.33
Desperate to marry, he nevertheless rejected the few women he managed to meet for failing to meet his standards.34 To be his wife, a woman would have to be a virgin, an Arab, and young. She had to cover her head and pray five times a day and live according to the Koran and Sunnah. He considered dozens of women, but no one was right.35
At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Hasan was stationed as a psychiatrist after his graduation, things weren’t going much better. After September 11 Hasan told friends he had been harassed by fellow soldiers. He told his psychiatric patients to look for healing in Islam, and he was prone to lecture random colleagues who crossed his path about the Koran. He told his fellow soldiers he was deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and tried