Adam Gadahn Got California State Funding before Defecting to AQ

The New Yorker has a long narrative on Adam Gadahn, Dr. Zawahiri's American PR chief who is high in AQ's hierarchy, and who is, as the FBI says, the ultimate "home-grown" US Islamic terrorist, a breed very little studied and poorly understood, as the article proceeds to make clear.

The narrative of Gadahn portrays him as a sort of Phil Spector wannabe, a nerdy, brilliant, alienated second-generation dropout who was the home-schooled son of a '70's era hog-farm [in this case, goats] commune dweller. Adam had an isolated childhood in Riverside County and Oregon on a goat farm, and morphed into a "death-metal" tyro impresario until he collided with Islam, after which he switched his death fetish toward killing infidels.

The story of Gadahn's conversion and immersion in The Islamic Society of Orange County is convoluted and depressing, but suffice it to say that Gadahn got angry at a fellow named Bundakji, a Jordanian Sunni married to a Shi'ite who called himself "Sushi" and was reviled [called "Danny the Jew"] for his moderate views by the extremist infiltrators of the ISOC. They seceded along with Gadahn, ironically a man with Jewish antecedants, after trying to take over the organization. As he tells his tale, the article's author buries some interesting nuggets about three quarters of the way through this long article:

In the late nineties, the National Security Council, concerned about possible terrorist attacks around the millennium, asked a team of private terrorism analysts to investigate Deek and Diab’s [Gadahn's extremist mentors] activities. Rita Katz, who is now the director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors jihadi communiqués on the Internet, led the investigation. (Katz showed me a videotape of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s 1992 lecture at the Islamic Society.) Katz knew that Deek had obtained American citizenship, and she learned from intelligence reports that he had connections to a terrorist cell based in Montreal. (The cell included Ahmed Ressam, who was involved in the millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.) Katz suspected that Deek was working as a coördinator for Al Qaeda groups in the West. She discovered that he had collaborated with Diab in California; the two men had set up a bogus nonprofit group, called Charity Without Borders, in Diab’s name, and Diab had even managed to obtain grants for it from the state. (Gadahn is listed as "crew member" in the charity’s official documents.) Deek and Diab paid the rent on the apartment where Gadahn lived.....

[comments and emphasis mine]
So the State of California helped pay the rent for Islamic terrorists planning to blow up LAX, a tidbit one would think worthy of highlighting, or at least comment, were The New Yorker a more reliable publication concerning national security affairs. No irony there.....

Just another terrorist organization subsidized by the state whose Ninth Circus [oops] Circuit Court has recently honored Ahmed Ressam's appeal by throwing out parts of his conviction for planning to blow up the state's biggest airport. Yawn....

The story moves on as Adam fell into the baddest crowd in the neighborhood and emigrated to Pakistan in the late '90s, where he quickly picked up Arabic and a smattering of Pushtu, and the rest unfolds like a bad novel. The author goes on to generalize about the big question why:

.....former C.I.A. case officer...Marc Sageman..after September 11th, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to examine the process of Islamic radicalization in a way that had not been done before, empirically.....Sageman discovered that most Al Qaeda operatives had been radicalized in the West and were from caring, intact families that had solidly middle- or upper-class economic backgrounds. Their families were religious but generally mainstream. The vast majority of the men did not have criminal records or any history of mental disorders. Moreover, there was little evidence of coördinated recruitment, coercion, or brainwashing. Al Qaeda’s leaders waited for aspiring jihadists to come to them—and then accepted only a small percentage. Joining the jihad, Sageman realized, was like trying to get into a highly selective college: many apply, but only a few are accepted.

Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism”—since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals—or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.

Sageman examined scholarship on other revivalist movements and found important parallels. He learned that doctrine played a negligible role for new converts to the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, for example. “Many moved into the Moonie commune because of their attachment to group members while still openly expressing rejection of the Moon ideology,” Sageman wrote in his book, “Understanding Terror Networks,” which was published in 2004. But, once the converts experienced the social benefits of their new community, accepting their friends’ beliefs was much easier. Later, when asked by researchers about their conversion, most Moonies spoke of the irresistible appeal of the church’s religious outlook, and had forgotten their initial skepticism about the faith.

Within the “bunch of guys,” Sageman found, men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. (Gregory Saathoff, a research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the F.B.I., told me, “We’re seeing in some of the casework that once they get the fever they are white-hot to move forward.”) Generally, the distinction between converts and men with mainstream Islamic backgrounds is less meaningful than it might seem, Sageman said, since “they all become born again.” Many Muslims who accept radical Salafist beliefs consider themselves “reverts.” They typically renounce their former lives and friends—and often their families.

Sageman’s model provides clues to how radicalization unfolds, but it cannot explain why one person embraces extremism and another does not. (As a former senior intelligence analyst told me, “It’s not something you can plot on a graph and study.”) Two of Gadahn’s siblings are in college, and the third is an aesthetician; why was Adam the one to join Al Qaeda?

So a young man from a counter-cultural goat farm in Southern California promises to America from Pakistan to "make the streets of America run red with blood" and the state that produced Jonestown cadavers to the tune of 908 and Hale-Bopp cometeers to the order of the high thirties sees this as business as usual in the multiculti broth simmering as a sort of Sargasso of Lunacy just west of Nevada. One could go on, but multiplying the defects of Panglossian nitwittery just bores sophisticated liberals who wave their arms as much as Gadahn while yammering on Huffington and elsewhere...

"Charity Without Borders" is an appropriate bogus group for this endlessly deluded State of Mindset to donate dollars toward its own destruction.