3 | United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists by Peter Bergen


“Since 9/11, more than three hundred Americans-born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere– have been indicted or conviected of terrorism charges. Some of taken the fight abroad: an American was among those who planned the attacks in Mumbai, and more than eighty U.S. citizens have been charged with ISIS-related crimes. Others have acted on American soil, as with the attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, and in San Bernardino. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our efforts to track them?”


My thoughts on this book are difficult to organize. I felt an array of emotions while reading. Genuine curiosity, as 9/11 happened when I was five and a half and even then, I was capable of realizing that horrific acts of violence were committed. Outrage too, that law enforcement, and politicians, security experts, haven’t found a way to stop all these atrocities before they happen. Since growing up, I can remember so many terrorist attacks and mass shootings motivated by some kind of extremist ideology such as all those in the aforementioned quote, including the Charleston church, Orlando nightclub, and Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, just to name a few. The outrage I felt did fester while reading the entire book, as debates about immigration and gun control are stagnating. It seems as if the political figures who are supposed to be representing and protecting their constituents are becoming immune to the mass killings and gun violence. And third, I felt despair. Despair for the Muslim communities who have escaped the persecution, bombings, gas attacks, drone strikes, starvation, and disease in their homelands only to arrive in Western countries which marginalize and stigmatize them. Despair for all the victims, their families, the state of fear and misinformation we live in. And with that, here are some other musings.

I was taken aback how well researched this book was; Bergen interviewed tens of people including leading counterterrorism experts and theorists, families of terrorists, terrorists themselves, U.S. officials from the White House, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, victims’ families, and Islamic clerics. Though this book could have easily read like a history textbook, going case by case through major cases chronologically, political debates, changing law enforcement tactics, public perception and personal stories were weaved into the narrative to read more like a story… a tragic one at that.

The title of this book is just about as provocative as it gets: The United States of Jihad. One of my immediate concerns when I picked up this book was that it might dismiss Islam and the incredibly beautiful, ancient religion that it is, for some sensationalized microscopic view of Islam as “practiced” by a minute few. Peter Bergen only dedicates a mere paragraph to explaining what exactly jihad means to the vast majority of Muslims, when in fact his entire book book is about how various militants conceptualize jihad. Bergen writes: “Jihad has an alternative, nonviolent meaning within Islam, as the internal struggle Muslims wage against un-Islamic behavior, but today’s Islamist militants explicitly reject this understanding of jihad and embrace its interpretation as a literal ‘holy war.'” This difference in the conceptualization of one term could have been explained in much more detail without forgoing the mission of the book. I think it could’ve served as a significant educational moment for those who read the book, as for decades, American media has failed to show how dynamic and multifaceted the majority of Muslims are, as peaceful individuals. Critically, the notion of an “internal-struggle” of sorts and reconciling one’s religious/spiritual beliefs with scientific teaching and lived reality is not foreign to most people of faith, whether Christian or Sufi.

The book begins in the post-9/11 period– hard to believe the 2001 attacks bore beyond an indelible mark, but one that cut so deep it changed the world order to become more fearful than ever. Bergen writes that “a large majority of Americans consider it the most memorable event of their lives, just as an earlier generation was haunted by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” This rings true for me, for I remember coming home from elementary school, my parents glued to the TV, calling my aunt who lived in New York City to make sure she was safe. At the time, Binladenism was the dominating Islamic terrorist ideology, which Bergen explains has an ultimate goal of “restoring a Taliban-style caliphate that will stretch across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. Evil people and nations stand in the way of this dream: the Jews, Israel, the United States, and any Middle Eastern regime that doesn’t follow Taliban-style rule.” Though this vision of a world order may seem unrealistic and unsubstantiated, Binladenism asserts that there are real world events that contributed and built this ideology: America’s support for Israel and U.S. foreign policy decisions in the Muslim world such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, etc.. In fact, many of the jihadists cite specific policies at their sentence hearings including CIA drone attacks (which not shockingly, kill many civilians) and U.S. military attacks in their ancestral homelands. These Islamist terrorists do not feel their beliefs and attacks are unfounded and indeed, the United States, Russia, and other European nations have committed numerous atrocities to achieve some semblance of control of these nations.

Essentially a “who’s who” of American jihadists, Bergen explains how various Americans came to commit, ideate or support various jihadist attacks both on U.S. soil and other places in the world. One of the most well-known stories is that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born cleric who in 2011 was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Others include Carlos Bledsoe, Nidal Hassan, Omar Hammami and Samir Khan. Bergen seeks to distill what the commonalities in their backgrounds are and concludes that for the most part, they aren’t first-generation immigrants who slip through the grasps of American surveillance undetected. Rather they are mostly second-generation American citizens who did not grow up in a radical environment, but instead became receptive to radical ideology through a “cognitive opening,” or moments in time which individuals become receptive/vulnerable/susceptive to different world views and new ideas, usually spurred by a personal crisis.

It is astonishing how the mainstream use of the internet and social media has transformed the way terrorist organizations disseminate information and teachings, gain and interact with followers and curate images of what the utopian caliphate looks like. From the terrorist magazine Inspire, which numerous American jihadists learned from, to the use of Twitter by disgruntled people to make disturbing posts, it is not surprising how exposure to extremism on online websites and forums can quickly become an echo chamber and the ensuing radicalization of those with “cognitive openings” can result. No longer do individuals need to stumble across a radical imam giving a lecture in a mosque; instead, a quick Google search may reveals troves of information someone may seek comfort or meaning in. To me, it is shocking how little responsibility internet companies such as Twitter and Youtube take to monitor online content for violent, racist, militant messages and instead, leave the judicial system to make the call. There does exist a perpetual struggle between free speech and public safety, but we can and should agree that violent ideologies are not to be tolerated and should immediately be vehemently rejected.

One of the most compelling passages to me was this:

“Americans have long tended to overestimate the threats posed by jihadists while underestimating the sources of other forms of terrorism, generally defined as any act of violence against civilians motivated by ideology. Since 9/11, extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right-wing credos, including white supremacists, antiabortion extremists, and anti-government militants, have killed around the same number of people in the United States as have extremists motivated by al-Qaeda’s ideology. As we have seen, by the end of 2015, 45 people had been killed in jihadist terrosit attacks in the United States, while right-wing racists and antigovernment militants had killed 48.” 

Bergen reminds us that it isn’t Islamic extremism that is the sole ultimate threat to the United States– it is extremism in any and all forms that will breed hatred and result in violence.

2 | The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist by Mary H. Manheim

 

A quick 100+ page read constituting short 3-6 page case studies and anecdotal experiences, I found this read to have served its declared purpose. In the Introduction, Manheim writes the idea for the book was borne out of “notic[ing] and appreciat[ing] the widespread interest the general pubic has in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology” and her stated purpose for this book is to “share [her] passion” and the “human stories behind the cases.”

While I agree with many who have reviewed her book, in that Manheim is offers exceedingly little in terms of detail or methodology used in evaluating cases, I also note that this autobiographical look some of her life experiences does not necessitate gruesome descriptions or technical details. In the age of the inundation of television crime drama, including the nature of media’s macabre reporting on everyday crime, I do not think Manheim misses the mark (especially given this book was published almost 20 years ago) on sharing how much coordination it takes between law enforcement, forensic anthropologists, dental experts, entomologists, to name a few, before the advent of advanced genetic technologies.

What drew me to this work is my interest in learning about applied anthropology beyond academia. Manheim explains that as a forensic anthropologist, she belongs to a branch of anthropology sometimes referred to as “the fifth”; the accepted four branches are physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and archaeology. As her work is outside of the realms of academia for the most part, as her cases are brought to her by law enforcement, cemetery directors and even insurance agents, she explains how her work necessitates working together with forensic entomologists (the study of insects on a postmortem body), textile experts (who yields insight on when certain fabrics were used/worn/in fashion and by who/what social status/gender, the stages of decomposition of the fabric, etc.) and facial reconstruction experts/scientific sculptors (who reconstruct facial features such as skin, hair, the nose, eyeballs using forensic racial/ethnic/cultrual markers to determine what someone might have looked like based only on skeletal remains).

Manheim ties in stories her aunts and mother told her throughout her childhood with some of the cases she visits. She recalls a particular instance while retrieving horse bones in the Louisianan woods in the 1980s when storm clouds began rolling in. Manheim transports the reader back nearly thirty years to when similar storm clouds began rolling in and her Aunt Penny rushed the family into a hide beneath a massive sycamore tree. Aunt Penny grabs her Bible and an axe, opens the Bible up and places it on the ground facing the storm clouds. She then brings the axe down into the ground and turns around to face the family peering out of the storm hide as the clouds begin to part. Manheim quickly interrupts the digestion of the story as lighting, thunder, wind and rain set in as she and her colleagues trek the rest of the way through the woods back to their cars with plastic bags of bones slung over their shoulders. I appreciate the reflective and sporadic nature of the book, as yes, many reviewers point out she is not “a writer”– I agree, as in the professional sense she is not a trained writer who uses flowery language to bring a reader into the story, but I don’t think that should disqualify anyone from writing about who they are and what they know.

My paternal grandfather’s side of the family is from Louisiana– and while ancestral records are complicated by divorce, adoption, remarriage and a certain ambiguity that comes with record keeping from generations past, I can’t help but feel some kind of pull towards these stories. As Manheim’s entire life and career was based in Louisiana, she touches on the history of the Civil War and the Confederate roots, racial/ethnic migrations, industries and spirit of Louisianans throughout the book. There is a certain mystique to the Louisiana– nothing that diminishes or eliminations the lived experiences of the people there; perhaps it is the everchanging landscape of swamps, bogs and bayous, or the patchwork of cultural heritage that remains manifest in the names of places and things that people left. Either way, I appreciate any chance I get to learn about Louisiana.

There are cases of Native Americans who protest at the exhumation of ancient graves for anthropologists’ desire simply learn at the expense of their cultural and spiritual beliefs, the discovery of the skull of a young Asian male only dead for 2-3 weeks but no missing persons report in the area’s Asian community, and the case of the 70 year old man’s body found underneath the house 20 years later after he disappeared, a self-inflicted gunshot to his head. Though disturbing, this is the nature of death– there is so much more than the remains which Manheim is responsible for analyzing. She acknowledges that her work is only piece of the puzzle in figuring out what happened and the circumstances which death prevailed over life. As an anthropologist however, I wish there was a deeper examination of death, the role ritual plays in our society and how important not just empathy for victims and their families is, but how socio-cultural understandings of death and the afterlife inform her work.

1 | Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Over the past two years or so, I’ve seen this book everywhere– from high-end department store bookstores to airport kiosks– Pachinko was not a book that stuck out to me, at least, not enough to make me immediately want to read it. But I did mark this book down in my Goodreads account a half year ago. After thinking the book might be a good one to start on my way to Japan (as the story of Sunja and the many characters in her orbit eventually takes the reader), I finally picked it up.

I don’t know how to start off other than by writing: this story was extremely heart-wrenching and uncomfortable to read. Page after page tells the story of Sunja and her family during the period from the early 1920s, beginning with the Japanese occupation of Korea and ending in the 1960s with Japan’s imminent defeat during WWII by Allied Powers. I found the story to be difficult to read due to the repeated battering each character endured and suffered, dealing with themes of starvation, rape, religious persecution, suicide, patriarchy and racism to name a few. About halfway through the book, what really got to me were glimmers of hope the characters seemed to almost grasp, but then were consequently squashed somehow or another by forces out of their control.

What you think is a story about Sunja, who makes what she believes to be a trans-generational sacrifice by marrying a man who is not the father of her unborn child, but who promises to keep this secret and take her as his wife, turns out to not be so clear cut. A mistake she made when she was in her early teens will haunt not just her, but the rest of her family, until the last page of the nearly 500 page book. The narrative caught me off guard– when I thought Lee might dedicate more to an event that occurred, she left the reader with little explanation. Yet strangely, at certain points, I felt that the examination of certain events or characters was extraneous. In attempting to reflect on why she omitted certain details yet lavishly explained others, perhaps in all it is a feature her character’s lived reality as second-class citizens in a country Sunja’s children and grandchildren are born in. They know what they know, and don’t ask questions, simply due to fear.

If this book was entirely fiction, I might not have finished; or it might have taken me much much longer. This book is historical fiction– I reminded myself that each event was someone’s lived reality lifted from the mortal world onto the pages. This thought is what kept me going but what also wore me down.

I visited Korea in the fall of 2017 and much to my dismay, I felt Seoul was just a carbon copy of any other East Asian metropolis– more specifically somewhere between a flashy fashion-forward Tokyo and a congested, new-money Beijing. I am not exaggerating when I say almost every young woman in Seoul looked like a copy of each another– pearl colored skin, long eyelashes, slim noses, a cropped hairdo and their boyfriends, usually a little on the heavy-side with their signature Korean male haircut, in tow. These couples were everywhere, from the streets of Seoul to seafood markets of Seoraksan. On the bus ride to Seoraksan, I was stunned how poor much of the countryside looked to be– tarps and corrugated tin roofs covering shack-like structures, worn-down machinery, and many older people working in the fields. Seemed a lot like China’s countryside, where the average person lives well below the means of their urban counterparts. In my imagination, I always thought Korea and Japan were in the same boat- historically, culturally and religiously divergent from China, and more similar to one another. But I began thinking about how Japan was never colonized by another nation looking to exploit resources and control people. They were the colonizers- Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Singapore, Malaysia, Austronesia and numerous other places in South East Asia. Korea had been occupied by the Japanese since 1910, a fact not visible to tourists– but nevertheless still a painful and relevant fact that Lee drove home in Pachinko. When I view Korea in light of the fact it was occupied by Japan, the site of the Korean War and other conflicts between Russians, Chinese, Japanese, and Americans, my initial judgement feels ill-informed and wrong. In considering the past century and how many people suffered at the hands of just a few egoists’ political ambitions, it makes me wonder how life can be so unjust.

And that’s just it; Sunja lives an unjust life. No matter how many sacrifices she makes to right the wrong, she can’t.