Posted on 06/23/2010 3:09:09 AM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
Mr. Shahzad struck his peers as fun-loving and professionally ambitious. But by 2004, things started to change. A longtime critic of American foreign policy, Mr. Shahzad began dabbling in jihadist ideology, listening to the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam, and Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican cleric, according to a person familiar with the case.
Mr. Shahzad took to sending incendiary e-mail messages to friends, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times...
While in some ways, Mr. Shahzad appeared to be thriving — he had married a Pakistani-American from Colorado, bought a home in Shelton, Conn., and, by 2006, was en route to becoming an American citizen and a father — he seemed frustrated. “I got this impression of a guy who just looked at his life prospects and felt unfulfilled by it all,” said an American administration official.
On frequent trips home to Pakistan, Mr. Shahzad seemed to be forming a new circle of friends. In Islamabad, he reconnected with Mr. Hussain, his former college friend, who had moved back to Pakistan after briefly living in Plantation, Fla., and then Canada.
The men sometimes prayed at...the Red Mosque, a hotbed for militancy. By the summer of 2007, the mosque had drawn international attention as its cane-wielding students, intent on installing a theocracy, kidnapped Chinese masseuses, raided music stores and took police officers hostage. It is unclear whether Mr. Shahzad was in Pakistan when the government’s security forces stormed the mosque in July, but he was “close to individuals who were associated with that event and that mosque,” an American administration official said.
If before the siege Mr. Shahzad and Mr. Hussain were on the sidelines of militancy, “they heated up after what happened,” ... “They realized that more than sympathy was required.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But in the case of Islam, drawing close one's faith and embracing it is like dabbling in the occult.
It poisons the mind.
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