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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
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.
Mr. Hand : Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?
Jeff Spicoli : Learning about Cuba, and having some food.
While reading this I could see David Horowitz’ quote hovering over the article: Inside every progressive( hippie) is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
Indeed. That expression is like a mantra for me. I remember it every time I am around a leftist.
Or an adolescent screaming to get out. Like BO.
Thanks for the article. These people, rejecting the culture and history of what they come from, are but a step away from the rot of the parents that gave birth to them – and set in motion these losing their minds for Islam. Few can recover themselves, but must be rejected as being as evil as Islam.
Will all you who convert to Islam just plain Leave America and don’t come back
And stay away from Britain too, Saudi Arabia is vast enough for them.
Atlantis is real and accepting immigrants
Some teenagers are very suggestable.
Yeah, like almost all of them. And by keeping our kids emotionally immature, adolescence now extends way beyond the teens.
I think this is a very good article, funny yet deadly serious.
Above and beyond our physical battles, we take sides in a spiritual battle between the One True God (Yahweh) and the Devil.
As Daniel writes, politics and religion are often just rationalizations for murder and destruction.
Adam Gadanh should have changed his first name to Shazamm
Yeah, like almost all of them. And by keeping our kids emotionally immature, adolescence now extends way beyond the teens.
Don’t know why this posted twice. Sorry about that.
Their primary role model was/is BHO.
the eternal raging spiteful teen-ager. Really gets a kick out of rebelling against the man.
Even though he is now “the man.”
Maybe it’s just that some people are shitty, and that Islam is the natural place for them.
The Letter to America was part of a duplicitous game, al Qaeda would speak one way to Americans (grievances, western injustices, “occupation”; a laundry-list of reasons why you are making them have to kill you, as if the jihad had its origin in kaffirs setting foot in Saudi Arabia). This appealed to the “what have we done to make you mad?” crowd in the West. Gadahn, the shape-shifting drama queen for whom Islam filled his “emptiness”, was a useful idiot.
Al Qaeda spoke another way to fellow Muslims. They justified 9/11 with Qur’an, Sunnah, and jihad doctrine from Islamic law. Their letter (in Arabic) to the Muslims, supposedly authored by Bin Laden “Moderate Islam is a Prostration to the West”, was not centered around recent grievances, it was about 1400 years of (unholy) war against the kaffirs/infidels. “Offensive Jihad is an established and basic tenet of this religion. It is a religious duty rejected only by the most deluded…The Prophet was ‘sent in the final hours with the sword, so that none is worshipped but Allah alone, partnerless”.
“Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission to the authority of Islam; or payment of the jizya, through physical though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword–for it is not right to let him {an infidel} live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”
“The West’s notions that Islam is a religion of jihad and enmity toward the religions of the infidels and the infidels themselves is an accurate and true depiction.”
{tr. Raymond Ibrahim}.
“Islamic terrorism could not succeed unless it could rely on a fifth column inside our countries.”
Embracing a death-cult that seeks the destruction or enslavement of everyone you know takes the impulse for collective suicide and apocalyptic sadomasochism to new lows. Such people are also known as traitors, and they are everywhere, in Europe and America,
None of this is about them personally. None at all.
What it is about is your lack of obedience to them when Allah puts them in charge.
You are the reason you will be flogged.
Grow up an accept responsibility or the proceedings become surgical.
If you do not understand your enemy you have already lost the Battle… The Art of War…
Western youth today cannot see the enemy as they are of the Useful Idiot Generation that thinks they know everything about nothing whatsoever.
Back in the day we screamed Make Love, Not War… this current generation seems to be screaming Make War, Not Love as that is the way of Hamas and the other islamic morons we hear and see today.
islamism is the new nazism.
and it is also the old Naziism.
Hi moderator, please let me know why you moderate me when I have used no offensive words nor suggested anything illegal or threatening. I do feel targeted. And I am wondering if it is discriminatory.
I am very politely requesting that you cease and desist. Thank you.
I just want to thank you for such a well written article. Making learning and enlightenment fun!
‘The Age of Aquarius always ends in Altamont and gulag.’ that should be etched in stone.
I wasn’t raised by “California hippies” but, in my teen years, I was surrounded by those types. We railed against the empire, condemned capitalism and wanted to see the fall of the West. Then one day I asked myself ‘if you’re so fucking smart what’s your better way to run the world? All you do is complain but have no answers to justify your disdain.’ That was the day I grew up and realized how good I had it. As they say, the rest is history. In those days it really was a fad for us “pretend” hippies. Almost all of us grew out of it and joined the human race. In today’s world this revolutionary mindset is taught, beginning at a very young age, in our public schools and universities. They are steeped in Critical Theory and Marxism. They know nothing else.. They think they are the agents of change that will bring about…..something. I hold out very little hope these Zoomers will have an epiphany that opens their eyes to the rot and hatred forced upon them by the captured education systems that have indoctrinated them, recruited them and will sacrifice them when the time comes.
I must admit, I had actually forgotten about this most unremarkable Bozo.
Perhaps if teens/20 somethings read the real life of Mohammad they might not bother reading the Koran. But then there are always some psychopaths.
I am retired law enforcement. I hearken back to the days when ‘communes’ were part of the landscape. I had a rather large one on my beat. I would intermittently go this their remote location in response to a complaint from the nearby community. There were about 50 or 60 of them wandering around in white sheets and living in nearby caves.
I would make contact with them and listen to their gibberish while explaining my purpose for being there. They never gave me hard time. The fact is, these were young white people from middle or upper class families.
They were actually kind of pathetic. Some were true believers in the latest counter culture bullshit being touted at that time. Others were just lost aimless souls. Today, for those that are still alive, many are or were in government. Still causing trouble for their fellow Americans leaving a trail of abject failures that are now peddled as modern day successes I believe that these people mostly have some emotional or personality issues that they want resolved at someone else’s expense. And that’s the way its played itself out. And momma and daddy are so proud of their creations……
Parent to child: “if something is not true don’t believe it”