American culture, alienation, and homegrown terrorism

Getty ImagesThis courtroom drawing shows Mohamed Alessa, 20, and Carlos Almonte, 24, appearing in U.S. District Court in Newark on terror conspiracy charges.
by John Farmer Jr.

The recent arrest of two wannabe Wahhabis at JFK airport as they attempted to fly to Somalia to engage in jihad has highlighted the problem of so-called “home-grown” terrorism. Carlos Almonte, a 24-year-old naturalized American citizen, and Mohammed Alessa, a 20-year-old natural-born citizen, have come quickly to symbolize the second generation of the Islamist threat to America: the Americans who hate America.
What are we to make of them?
At first glance, it’s hard to take these two chuckleheads seriously; why should we, when al Qaeda apparently didn’t? They traveled to Jordan, offered to travel to Iraq to blow themselves up, and were sent home. Their escapades — lifting weights, paintballing, watching real jihadists using the monkey bars — verge on goofiness. They drove their parents nuts.
But homegrown terrorists, however fatuous, are dangerous for two reasons. First, from a practical law enforcement standpoint, because they are here and have rights, they will be more difficult to identify and track than foreign terrorists — unless, of course, like our two wannabes, they decide to leave the country. Foreign terrorists, on the other hand, must run a gauntlet of security and intelligence detection measures before they ever arrive in this country.
Homegrown terrorists pose a larger, more difficult cultural challenge. To meet that challenge honestly is to face two stark realities: the alienating effect of our culture generally; and, compounding the problem, the appeal of simple solutions, particularly fundamentalism, to disaffected youth.
President Obama and the government can, as the 9/11 Commission suggested, play a role in shaping the cultural debate by providing a “vision of the future” that includes “respect for the rule of law, openness in discussing differences, and tolerance for opposing points of view.” But those values have, for many, become so entwined with the rampant greed and wasteful excesses of our culture that they have become, for some, inseparable from them.
Let’s face it, there is something profoundly alienating about our culture. It didn’t take a disaffected young Muslim to condemn western culture as rapacious, materialistic in the extreme, pornography-obsessed, drug-and-alcohol addicted and corrupt to its core. Holden Caulfield, the prototypical disaffected youth, said it more than 50 years ago in “Catcher in the Rye,” and his song of despair has been rehearsed by countless artists, reverends, rabbis, swamis and rock bands before and since.
We project throughout the world, in our movies, our television shows, our relentless marketing, a life dedicated to the fulfillment of boundless appetites. To many, images of the consequences of unbridled desire — of childhood obesity; of oil despoiling nature in the Gulf of Mexico; of whole economies rocked by our rampant speculation — have come to represent our idea of freedom.
Unfortunately, to know us — to live immersed in a culture where the burning question is who will be Paris Hilton’s new BFF — is not necessarily to love us. As a consequence, Daniel Pipes points out in “Militant Islam Reaches America,” “the experience of living in the west often turns indifferent Muslims into Islamists.” According to Pipes, fully one-eighth of the Muslim community supports militant Islam. An even greater percentage is sympathetic with its disaffection with western values.
Alienation is not limited to Muslims. Virtually every major religious and moral tradition has been dedicated, at least in part, to curbing our desires, not cultivating them. But militant Islam offers vulnerable Muslim youth a dangerously simple and murderous outlet for their disaffection.
We may face, as some have suggested, a clash of civilizations; if so, however, it is not so much a clash among Christian, Muslim or Jewish civilizations as a clash within each. It’s simple really: some think that the future of human civilization depends on the marriage of the moral restraint of tradition with a spirit of open inquiry; others believe that the answers to all important questions were recorded centuries ago, when the few who realized the world was round thought it rode on the back of a giant turtle.
By seeming to value the freedom that produces material gain over everything else, we have led many to devalue freedom itself as corrupt. The freedom that matters isn’t, however, the freedom that produces material excess but the freedom that encourages open inquiry. That freedom — a freedom that rejects both the enslavement of fundamentalism and the license of material excess — must somehow become our cultural message, or a Ghost Dance of Islam will arise from within us.

John Farmer Jr., dean of Rutgers School of Law-Newark, was senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission. He is the author of “The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11.”