The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Wood Graeme

Author:Wood, Graeme [Wood, Graeme]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780812988758
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

if (1+1+1 != 1 && 1 == 1) return true; else die();

Translation: if you believe the Christian Trinity (“1+1+1”) is not monotheistic (“!= 1”), and if you believe in the unity of God (“1 == 1”), then great. Otherwise: die.

Yahya saw confirmation of the Dhahiri method everywhere he looked, even in the writings of Thomas Jefferson (“Laws…should be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure”).15 He still read the Bible, too. “Remember 1 Corinthians 14:33: For God is not the author of confusion,” he wrote in one posting. “Certainly, to claim that one must believe in a single God, while saying that God is three distinct persons, is a rather confusing statement.”

“Then again,” he continued, with Ibn Hazm–like sarcasm, “perhaps my mind is but corrupt by those dangerous diseases: rational thought and logic.”

—

In September 2004, Yahya and Tania returned to the United States, continuing to rely financially on Yahya’s parents. They settled briefly in Torrance, California, with Yahya hoping to find work as an imam. His jihadism disqualified him for mosque jobs, however, and increasingly the two sought only each other’s spiritual camaraderie. Eventually they stopped frequenting mosques altogether, on the grounds that they were dens of spies.

In 2004, their first son was born in California. They intended to name him Muqatil, which means “killer” or “fighter” in Arabic. It is not a common Arabic name. In the end they settled on Hassan, after Hassan ibn Thabit, a poet and Companion of the Prophet. In English, they called him Michael, for the echo of Muqatil. Their baby needed a non-Muslim name, if he was going to be an international terrorist someday.

Yahya and Tania moved with Hassan back to Dallas, and a year later, Yahya took a job as a data technician at Rackspace, a server company based in Texas. At night, he prowled jihadist forums and offered tech support to Jihad Unspun, a Canada-based Islamist site widely thought to be a recruiting ground for would-be terrorists (and possibly a trap—a “honeypot”—that the authorities used to attract and bust them). During the day, too, Yahya looked for ways to use his position at Rackspace to wage jihad. On April 8, he accessed the password of a client, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of hijacking its website.

As hacking jobs go, it was amateurish. Rackspace found out, and the FBI, aware of Yahya’s terror links, moved fast. A SWAT team showed up early in the morning. He and Tania were already awake for dawn prayers. Yahya surrendered peacefully and warned the officers that a child was sleeping inside and that his wife needed to get dressed. The FBI prosecuted him for hacking into a protected computer—this was the source of the Department of Justice press release I found earlier—and sent him away for thirty-four months.16 He spent much of his term in a Seagoville, Texas, penitentiary. Prior

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