The Fed Reserve Bomb Plotter: Explaining Jihadist ‘Nice Guys’
October 19, 2012 By Comments (45)
“He is very gentle and devoted to his studies,” says the father of Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, who was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb at the New York City Federal Reserve Bank. And it could be true: he could be a gentle, studious soul. His studies of Islam could have led him to the conviction that he needed to wage jihad against Infidels.
Nafis explained his action in clear Islamic terms. He told undercover agents, whom he thought were his fellow plotters: “I don’t want something that’s like, small. I just want something big. Something very big … that will shake the whole country, that will make America, not one step ahead, change of policy, and make one step ahead, for the Muslims … that will make us one step closer to run the whole world.” Islamic rule of the world is indeed a traditional Islamic imperative, delineated in Islamic law.
Nafis is an exchange student from Bangladesh who came to the U.S., authorities said, solely to wage jihad against Americans – and, as he put it, thereby to “destroy America.” Nonetheless, because his motivation is grounded in his piety, he could be as decent a fellow as his father says he is. There are abundant precedents: according to former Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Eddie Green, Kifah Jayyousi was “a great guy, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” While Green was superintendent, Jayyousi oversaw the Detroit school district’s capital improvement program. Later, Jayyousi was charged, according to the Detroit Free Press, with “conspiring to kidnap, maim and murder by providing money, recruits and equipment for Islamic struggles in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya from 1993 to 2001.
Christopher Paul, a martial arts instructor at a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, was also a terrific guy. Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice chairman of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter in Columbus, said: “From the things I know, he is a loving husband and he has a wife and parents in town. They are a good family together.”
Yet Paul, a Muslim, was charged, according to Associated Press, with “providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.” He was accused of training with Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, training people for violent jihad attacks on targets in Europe and the United States, and more.
According to a Southern California friend of Raed Albanna, who killed 132 people in a suicide attack outside a medical clinic in Iraq in 2005, “He was into partying. We hit some pretty wild clubs in Hollywood.” Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman Al-Faris, the convert to Islam from Marin County who joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American troops, has said: “In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man embarked on a spiritual quest.”
Great guys all. Some partied and some embarked on a spiritual search, but they all ended up in the same place, committing acts dedicated to furthering the cause of jihad, or facing charges of having done so.
But they may be genuinely decent fellows. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet — apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness — to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard…”
Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they weren’t interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational. It was a necessity for them to remain “decent fellows,” for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for — in their view — a goal that remained good.
Today’s jihad terrorists are likewise the adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders, here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Adolf Hitler, but one also that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good — as the Taliban showed us. But the continued reference to such people as “terrorists” pure and simple, and the refusal of the media and most law enforcement officials to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people are raving maniacs, interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using to build it, is a forbidden topic for government analysts. People like Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis are just “terrorists,” interested only in “terror.” And so we’re continually surprised when they turn out to be nice guys after all. Decent fellows. Like the SS.
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