Was Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez radicalized, or just 'Americanized'?
Is the shooting of five U.S. servicemen in Chattanooga a sign that young Muslim-Americans becoming radicalized. Or is the real danger that they're becoming Americanized?
He is in his early 20s -- a young male, perhaps done with his education and suddenly adrift in a vast atomized society. There is trouble at home -- divorce, fighting. There is trouble adjusting to adulthood...too much drinking or drugs, a lost job, failure in academia, maybe jilted by a girlfriend. Perhaps there is medication for depression or other psychological problems. Increasingly isolated. he's drawn toward to a screen -- sometimes to violent video games, but more often to extreme ideology or crackpot theories of the universe out there on the Internet. With no prior criminal record, it's not a problem to exercise his 2nd Amendment rights and amass a small arsenal of weapons and ammunition, at Wal-Mart or his friendly neighborhood gun shop.
He is America's worst nightmare -- Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old who cut himself off from the world and ranted about "selfish" women on the Internet before gunning down kindergartners and 1st graders at a Connecticut elementary school, or Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old dropout who alternated between taking drugs and playing video games before finding neo-Confederate hate speech on the Web and killing nine black churchgoers last month, or Jared Lee Loughner, a then-22-year-old kicked out of school and drawn to conspiracy theories before killing six people in the 2011 assassination attempt on then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He is James Holmes...or Seung-Hui Cho...or Robert Hawkins.
On Thursday, he was Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the 24-year-old man outside of Chattanooga, Tenn., from a troubled home, with a recent DUI arrest, a Muslim of Jordanian descent described by a friend "as Americanized as anyone else" -- before he went on grim killing spree at two nearby military sites that claimed the lives of 5 u.S. servicemen.
In the grim aftermath of this attack, one thing is clear: America has suffered a terrible loss. The four Marines -- Gunnery Sgt Thomas Sullivan, Staff Sgt David Wyatt, Sgt Carson Holmquist and Lance Cpl Squire "Skip" Wells -- and Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Smith, who died of his wounds on Saturday -- were among the best this country had to offer. They included a Purple Heart winner as well as devoted, beloved fathers or boyfriends. In several cases, the victims had survived tour of overseas hot spots like Afghanistan or Iraq, only to be gunned down serving their country near the red-soil banks of the Tennessee River. All of us mourn along with their family, friends, and comrades.