generalspeaking

Americanization Assurances

"It's kind of a general consensus from people that interacted with him that he was just your average citizen there in the neighbourhood. There was no reason to suspect anything otherwise."
Ken Smith, Chattanooga City councilman

"Obviously, something has happened since then [high school graduation in Chattanooga]."
"He was as Americanized as anyone else. At least that's what it seemed like to me."
Sam Plank, Abdulazeez high school peer

"All indications are he was killed by fire from the Chattanooga police officers."
 "We have no evidence he was killed by self-inflicted wounds."
Ed Reinhold, special agent in charge of the regional FBI office

CNN

"We're going to do everything we can to make sure all of our Guardsmen are safe."

"We've got to understand that we have people in our country that want to harm our military."

Florida Governor Rick Scott 

"Arming the National Guard at these bases will not only serve as a deterrent to anyone wishing to do harm to our service men and women, but will enable them to protect those living and working on the base."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, born in Kuwait, had Jordanian citizenship. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His name, he wryly pointed out in a high school yearbook classified him as a potential national security alert. But his demeanor, his behaviour with his high school peers and his relations with them painted him as a normal teenager with a sense of humour and a circle of friends with ordinary American names.

FBI agent Ed Reinhold revealed that this Americanized young man was armed with one handgun and two long guns. Some of them bought legally and evidently in his possession for some time. The  young man was wearing a vest designed for extra ammunition storage. And he was obviously prepped to deliver some decidedly un-American messages in the city that he called home.

From his car he opened fire on two U.S. military sites in the city, an attack whose initial effect was to leave four Marines dead, and horrified his community. A fifth American service member, shot and wounded is now also dead, having succumbed to his morbid injuries. It is clear that Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez's decision to attack American military sites, each a short distance from the other had an obvious message linked to jihad.



Federal authorities had no reason to investigate the activities and connections of this young man prior to his attack. It is now, in the wake of the assault, that counter-terrorism investigators are looking deeply at his online activities and his foreign travel agenda, hoping for clues about his political outlook and his possible contacts or influences in his conversion on the way to Damascus.

Abdulazeez had lived in Hixson, Tennessee with his parents. Everything, according to neighbours seemed normal. But then his mother Rasmia Ibrahim Abdulazeez filed a divorce complaint six years earlier accusing her husband Youssuf Saed Abdulazeez of beating her constantly in front of their children and of sexually assaulting her. Obviously, living in the United States, she felt that American laws should protect her from permissible Islamic customs carried beyond caution.

Muhammad's mother accused his father of "striking and berating" the children -- another unAmerican activity -- though no provocation was involved to set off the father's violence. The father consented to attend counselling and the couple agreed to reconcile. Everyone appears to have got on with their lives, with Muhammad graduating from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012 with an engineering degree.

Afterward he worked as an intern at the Tennessee Valley Authority, the utility operating power plants and dams across the Southern U.S. Conditionally hired at the Perry nuclear power plant near Cleveland as an engineer he was in short order dismissed for failing a background check, according to Todd Schneider, a FirstEnergy Corp. spokesman.

From there, and for the past three months, Abdulazeez had worked at Superior Essex Inc., a company that designs and produces wire and cable products. Last year, according to a U.S. official, Abdulazeez travelled to Jordan and was there for months. So far, according to the FBI's Reinhold, there is "no indication he was inspired by or directed by" ISIL or other groups. So this was a self-initiated rejection of America, his home.

The writer of a blog suspected to have been Abdulazeez's posted just two entries written three days before the attacks. One reads "this life is short and bitter" while the second reads that Muslims should not let "the opportunity to submit to allah... pass you by". It seems now that Muhammad Abdulazeez took his own advice.

Allah must surely be distressed that one of his faithful hadn't the courtesy to capitalize his beloved name.

Labels: Immigration, Islamism, Jihad, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 18, 2015