Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror by Piotr M. Szpunar

Author:Piotr M. Szpunar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, General, Media Studies
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

A canny blend of photos, feature stories, insider details, snappy news bits and verse-quoting theological justifications for terrorist attacks, all of it calculated to appeal to American Muslims who grew up on glossy magazines like Details and GQ. It is also notable for its collegiate sense of humor, which includes a mention of the fact that the plotters dropped a copy of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” into one of the bomb packages—a detail illustrated by a close-up of the novel’s paperback edition.… [All] a seeming attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of Muslim hipsters.9

The Wall Street Journal wrote that the magazine’s most unnerving pages are those in which it “remixes old-school jihadist tropes for an English-speaking Western audience … [particularly] the aspiring suburban jihadist.”10 Inspire posits this suburbanite as a reluctant superhero through the visual language of videogame culture.11 It glorifies martyrdom through Hollywood-style poster spreads. Beyond flashy graphics, Inspire also covers a variety of social issues read as relevant to Americans such as materialism, poverty, and climate change—the first issue featured a piece by Osama bin Laden titled “The Way to Save the Earth.”12 Furthermore it stresses not only the persistent prejudice faced by American Muslims and Arabs but also the continued effects of institutionalized racism on African Americans, appropriating the horrific murder of Trayvon Martin, for example, to buttress its message. More than promising paradise, the magazine presents its political ideology as a solution to some of America’s most pressing problems.

Surely, the surprise expressed in media accounts in reaction to what is seen as Inspire’s American or Western style can be read as emerging from widespread Orientalist assumptions about a backward, antimodern, and unsophisticated other. However, the recognition of something uncanny in the publication also signals anxieties over a particular adversary: the Double. Inspire is thus feared to be the stuff of traitors. In a 2010 statement that uncannily mirrors that of Eric Holder quoted in the Entrance, Anwar al-Awlaki made this explicit: “Men and women in the West who were born in the West, raised in the West, educated in the West, whose culture is that of the West, who have never studied or met with any ‘radicalized’ Imams, and never attended any radical mosques are embracing the path of Jihad.”13 The magazine, in fact, features articles penned by American defectors. Al-Awlaki’s experience has been serialized in “Why Did I Choose al-Qaeda?” Samir Khan—another American killed alongside al-Awlaki (officially not targeted and classified as collateral damage) and Inspire’s original editor—penned, “I am proud to be a traitor to America.” This, and the sheer amount of American cultural references within its pages, is clear evidence for Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, that “the people who are producing the magazine are clearly American. We don’t know for sure, but it would surprise me very much if not 80 per cent of the contributors to the magazine were American.” His remarks echo those of former DHS head Janet Napolitano in a 2011 speech:

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