The Candidate Shrugs

There is an interesting article in the January 22 issue of The New Yorker. In it, Raffi Khatchadourian, a staff writer at the magazine, explores how Adam Gadahn, an American kid from Southern California, became Azzam al-Amriki, a Kalashnikov-carrying member of Al Qaeda.

So how did it happen? Well, as it develops, Khatchadourian doesn't know. That doesn't stop him, of course, from proffering a number of theories, of which the best developed blames Gadahn's interest in death metal music. (To convey just a little of the flavor, much of the supporting evidence is provided by one Spinoza Ray Prozak.) And if it wasn't death metal music, Khatchadourian assures us, it must have been Gadahn's association with bad companions, including radical Islamists, in that notorious hotbed of insurrection, Orange County, California.

This nonsense, of which The New Yorker should be ashamed, calls to mind the equally inane rhetoric of George Bush in the days after September 11, 2001: "Americans are asking," Bush said, "why do they hate us?" His answer? "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

Could Bush possibly have believed that? Does anyone? Isn't it, in fact, pretty clear that those who hate us do so because we have acted, and continue to act, in hateful ways? Just as it is probable that Adam Gadahn joined Al Qaeda not because of the effects of death metal music or even of bad companions but because he was, in some fundamental way, fed up with all the bullshit? That'd be my guess, anyway.