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If, as John Brennan seems to suggest, al Qaeda terrorists are hard-wired for terrorism at birth for the "wanton slaughter of innocents," how are they able to jump-start a privileged 23-year old Nigerian, inculcate in him with the acquired characteristics of a terrorist, and persuade him to do the bidding of al Qaeda/Persian Gulf?
As indicated above, the young Nigerian seems to have had particular trouble with Israel's wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza in 2008-2009, a brutal campaign that was defended in Washington as justifiable self-defense.
Moreover, it appears that Abdulmuttallab is not the only anti-American "terrorist" so motivated. When the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda announced that they were uniting into "al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula," their combined rhetoric railed against the Israeli attack on Gaza.
And on Dec. 30, 2009, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a 32-year-old Jordanian physician from a family of Palestinian origin, killed seven American CIA operatives and one Jordanian intelligence officer near Khost, Afghanistan, when he detonated a suicide bomb.
Though most U.S. media stories treated al-Balawi as a fanatical double-agent driven by irrational hatreds, other motivations could be gleaned by carefully reading articles about his personal history.
Al-Balawi's mother told Agence France-Presse that her son had never been an "extremist." Al-Balawi's widow, Defne Bayrak, made a similar statement to Newsweek. In a New York Times article, al-Balawi's brother was quoted as describing him as a "very good brother" and a "brilliant doctor."
So what led al-Balawi to take his own life in order to kill U.S. and Jordanian intelligence operatives? Al-Balawi's widow said her husband "started to change" after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. His brother said al-Balawi "changed" during the three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza in 2008-2009, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.
When al-Balawi volunteered with a medical organization to treat injured Palestinians in Gaza, he was arrested by Jordanian authorities, his brother said. It was after that arrest that the Jordanian intelligence service apparently coerced or "recruited" al-Balawi to become a spy who would penetrate al Qaeda's hierarchy and provide actionable intelligence to the CIA.
"If you catch a cat and put it in a corner, she will jump on you," the brother said in explaining why al-Balawi would turn to a suicide attack.
"My husband was anti-American; so am I," his widow said, adding that her two little girls would grow up fatherless but that she had no regrets.
Answering Helen
Are we starting to get the picture of what the United States is up against in the Muslim world? Does Helen Thomas deserve an adult answer to her question about motive? Has President Obama been able to assimilate all this?
Or is the U.S. political/media establishment incapable of confronting this reality and/or taking meaningful action to alleviate the underlying causes of the violence? Is the reported reaction of a CIA official to al-Balawi's attack the appropriate one: "Last week's attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day."
Revenge has not always turned out very well in the past. Does anyone remember the brutal killing of four Blackwater contractors on March 31, 2004, when they took a wrong turn and ended up in the Iraqi city of Fallujah -- and how U.S. forces virtually leveled that large city in retribution after George W. Bush won his second term the following November?
If you read only the Fawning Corporate Media, you would blissfully think that the killing of the four Blackwater operatives was the work of fanatical animals who got -- along with their neighbors -- what they deserved. You wouldn't know that the killings represented the second turn in that specific cycle of violence.
On March 22, 2004, Israeli forces assassinated the then-spiritual leader of Hamas in Gaza, Sheikh Yassin -- a withering old man, blind and confined to a wheelchair. That murder, plus sloppy navigation by the Blackwater men, set the stage for the next set of brutalities. The Blackwater operatives were killed by a group that described itself as the "Sheikh Yassin Revenge Brigade."
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