Are his parents liberal? If so, they must be proud.
Link.WINCHESTER – It was 1988 and Michael Rowe had just moved to this dusty, one-stoplight town in rural Riverside County.
Rowe bought a place southeast of here, so far out in the country that it's reachable only by driving one-lane dirt roads.
While out walking his property one day, he met his neighbor, who lived about a mile away, and they shook hands across a barbed-wire fence.
The neighbor was tall and thin, with long hair and a beard. He said his name was Seth Gadahn and that he and his family raised goats. Rowe told Gadahn that he had moved here from Tustin because Orange County, with all its sprawling strip malls and furious freeways, was getting too crowded.
Gadahn said he, too, was originally from Orange County.
"He said, 'I left Orange County so I wouldn't have to deal with people, and you're all moving out here now,' " Rowe recalled. "When I moved in, he thought he was being invaded."
Sixteen years later, the fiercely private Gadahn faced an invasion of another kind. In May 2004, reporters and FBI agents found his Riverside County farm and peppered Gadahn, 57, with questions about his son, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, who they said was affiliated with al-Qaida.
Suddenly Seth Gadahn was pulled into a social spotlight he had run from 25 years before. Born Phil Pearlman, the son of a prominent Orange County doctor, Seth Gadahn turned his back on his father's nice homes, middle-class lifestyle and traditional career.
Then, just as he had rebelled against his father, Seth Gadahn's son rebelled against him. Adam Yahiye Gadahn became Azzam the American.
A product of the 1960s, Seth Gadahn was a peace-loving hippie who ultimately found Christianity. Completely counter to that, his son talks constantly of war and, in a Sept. 2 video, outlines the "errors" of Christianity and Judaism, the faiths of his father and grandfather.
Seth Gadahn shares many characteristics with his son – a love of obscure music, a name change to signify a fresh start, and disdain for conventional society.
But now, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the son of a man who believed in "live and let live," rants of death and destruction to all those who don't convert to the violent vision of Islam created by Osama bin Laden.