America encapsulated

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/09/2011 (5208 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — Terror Town USA is one of the most appealing little villages in the Old Line State, with historic shops lining a winding Main Street, charming boutiques and fine restaurants in 19th-century buildings and a sprawling brick high school on the grassy green outskirts where an honour student from the class of 2011 drew up his plans for jihad.

“I had a lot of thoughts about you today,” the boy wrote to a Pennsylvania pen pal, just before he was apprehended a few weeks ago on federal terrorism charges and locked away in some secret facility in the Philadelphia suburbs, pending his 18th birthday and, possibly, trial as a Guantánamo-ready adult. “About us both doing martyrdom operations together in my school… it was like we both were in a big truck and had guns and we were shooting randomly at a huge crowd of kids.”

Allegedly, the studious young avenger was an online accomplice of the notorious “Jihad Jane,” the twisted sister from the City of Brotherly Love — real name Colleen LaRose — who boasted of her desire to take up residence in Sweden and murder an artist there who had depicted the head of the Prophet Muhammad on the body of a dog.

She would execute the execution, she wrote, “in a way that the whole Kufar (translation: infidel, unbeliever, godless) world get frightened.”

LaRose — who was described at trial by her neighbours as “weird” because she talked to her cats — copped a guilty plea last winter and has yet to be sentenced.

Meanwhile, 10 years after 9/11, we have a generation of cockamamie converts and pure-wool Muslim-Americans who are so bewildered by events in their fathers’ homelands — and in this favoured land, as well — that they tweet each other to brag about their plans to commit Allah-assisted suicide and share helpful hints on how to leverage their celestial glory with a double- or triple-digit body count of their own classmates and best friends.

One of these days, one of these people will park a wired van in Times Square that actually explodes, or succeed in setting his underwear on fire on board a 767, and this will inspire even tighter airport security, even cornier star-spangled Nashville anthems and even angrier indictments of Islam as a death’s-head religion, thus shaming and inflaming even more amateurs to strike at the apostate West.

Back in beautiful Ellicott City, the identity of the recent graduate of Mount Hebron High School (“Home of the Vikings”) who mused about doing a Columbine for the Caliphate is a rather poorly kept secret. He is referred to as “Mohammed K.” in public documents, and has been characterized only as the 17-year-old son of immigrants from Pakistan. But if you search through the list of the students who won prizes at last year’s Maryland Young Writers Contest in Baltimore, you can find his full name there, gaining honorable mention for an essay entitled Voices Around the World.

“Perhaps you have a clandestine inner voice just screaming for you to let it out,” the competition’s website urges the state’s budding auteurs.

Burrow a little deeper, and you learn that the same young bookworm was to enter his freshman year at Johns Hopkins University this month on a full-tuition grant and that he had been awarded the grand prize of $1,500 for the best submission in the 2010 Dorothy Málaga Memorial Scholarship Competition, whose rules require that an entrant prepare an essay explaining:

“In the last five years, how have you impacted the lives of people around you in a substantial, beneficial and enduring manner (you may discuss more than one example)?”

One assumes that, as a sample of his literary prowess, Mohammed K. did not submit his blog post about Jihad Jane that was included in her indictment: “I know the sister and by Allah, all money will be transferred to her. The sister will then transfer the money to the brother via a method that I will not disclose.” Either way, he won’t be needing the bursary.

(The other winners of the Maryland Young Writers Contest have had their work collected in a book entitled Speak the Truth, Even if Your Voice Shakes under the collective nom de plume of “Writers of Mass Destruction.” The teens who have grown up in the long shadow of the Twin Towers cannot remember this country at peace.)

On the last lush weekend of summer, curious about how the age of terror could come to haunt a model outpost of the Kufar world, I pass an hour on the playing fields of Mount Hebron High.

The varsity soccer team is practising free kicks and sideline throw-ins, the coach’s infant son is crawling around the pitch, and young Vikings of manifold races and ethnicities are sweating to make the squad: America encapsulated.

On the sidelines, I meet two men who ask to be identified only as Soccer Dad One and Soccer Dad Two. The first father tells me his family moved to Ellicott City because of its ethnic diversity and excellent schools, that his son shared several classes with Mohammed K. and that the boy was known as brilliant, studious and quiet.

“Shocked,” says Soccer Dad One. “Completely shocked.”

“Not shocked at all,” counters Soccer Dad Two.

“Not shocked that it was Mohammed K.?” I ask.

“Not shocked that this is happening anywhere, even here,” he replies.

I get back in my car and head towards another nearby town called Catonsville, where, last December, a 21-year-old shopping mall sales clerk (specialty: children’s clothing) named Antonio Martinez — now calling himself Muhammad Hussein — was charged with trying to pack a pickup with propane and detonate it in front of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center on bustling National Pike.

“Jihad is not only in Afghanistan or Pakistan but also in the United States,” Martinez-Muhammad told an undercover FBI man. His bomb was a dud.

On the radio, as I head for the hills, Katy Perry is singing Baby, you’re a firework.

 

 

 

 

 

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.