From Niemen Reports
After the Boston bombings, 2013 Nieman fellow Souad Mekhennet argues for more Muslim voices and faces in the U.S. media
By Souad Mekhennet
It seemed surreal during the Boston area lockdown last month when my cell phone rang and two inmates at a jail in Morocco were on the line asking if I was safe. The two, accused by the Moroccan law enforcement of recruiting for jihad, had followed news of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. The call gave me flashbacks about the meetings I’ve had around the world with young men who have become radicalized.
I have known the inmates in Morocco for a couple of years now, ever since my colleague Michael Moss and I worked on a series for The New York Times called “Inside the Jihad.” Our aim was to take the reader into this world, explain the mindset of radicalized men, their recruiters and the reasons they had chosen this path. Reporting on jihad has taken me to the back streets of Zarqa in Jordan, where militants discussed beheading my reporting colleague as we sat for an interview; to neighborhoods in Hamburg, where women can’t easily go; to the barren tribal areas of Waziristan, Balochistan and Iraq. I have visited places where the smell of gunpowder hangs permanently in the air. I have looked into the eyes of thousands of young men, suddenly hardened, and old men speaking in strident and martial tones.
“See, we have told you, as long as America will not stop their war against Islam, they will never be safe,” said one of the inmates on the phone.
There it was again, the argument I had heard so often from radicalized men, in North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and, increasingly, in the West, where I had interviewed an increasing number of young people who had either been born or spent most of their lives in Britain, Germany, France or the U.S. According to newspaper reports, it was the same argument given by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reminded me of Arid Uka, a man from Kosovo, who grew up in Germany and at 19 was convicted of killing two U.S. soldiers and injuring several others in Frankfurt. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Uka was a model youth in the eyes of his family and friends, never in trouble with the police, soft spoken. But there came a moment when he couldn’t keep up in school. One of his teachers told me she had the impression that Uka was confused; she suggested he see a psychiatrist. He seemed disoriented and very disappointed with his schoolwork, according to some of his friends. He began participating in Islamist Internet forums and, during his trial, said that through these forums he came to believe that the United States was at war with Muslims.
