Porn Stache

The Pensacola Shooter: Portrait of an Islamic Terrorist.
by Michael Isenberg.

Before I dive into the main topic of today’s blog, the motivation of Islamic terrorist Muhammad al-Shamrani, let’s take a moment to remember the three brave sailors he murdered during a shooting spree at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola last Friday:

Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, from St. Petersburg, FL, was looking forward to his birthday and graduation from flight school next week. “Unfortunately, none of that is gonna happen,” his cousin Ashley Williams said.

Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21, from Richmond Hill, GA was one of seven children. According to his father, “When Cameron graduated bootcamp, the grin on his face said it all. ‘Look at me, Dad, I’m going to be just like you…’ To have the opportunity to earn his wings as a Navy Airman made him proud. And we, too, were so incredibly proud.”

Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, from Coffee, AL, escaped, wounded from the classroom building where the shooting took place and alerted first responders before expiring. In a Facebook post, his brother Adam Watson wrote, “He died a hero and we are beyond proud, but there is a hole in our hearts that can never be filled.”

In a statement, Capt. Tim Kinsella, commander NAS Pensacola said, “We feel the loss profoundly and grieve with the family and friends of the deceased. The Sailors that lost their lives in the line of duty and showed exceptional heroism and bravery in the face of evil. When confronted, they didn’t run from danger; they ran towards it and saved lives. If not for their actions, and the actions of the Naval Security Force that were the first responders on the scene, this incident could have been far worse.”

Another race hath been,
and other palms are won.

 

What would make a scumbag like Muhammad al-Shamrani destroy three such beloved individuals, cutting them down in their youth? Of course, such questions come up every time there’s an Islamic terror attack. One of the key points of contention is whether the terrorist was motivated by something inherent in Islam itself—Bernard Lewis’s “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis—or whether it was a response to something that was done to the Muslim world by the West in general and the United States in particular.

In the case of al-Shamrani, we have an opportunity to see into the workings of his mind thanks to a Twitter account widely believed to be his. This is despite the best efforts of Twitter, which suspended the account shortly after it was identified. I wish they wouldn’t do that. The social media posts of terrorists and shooters are of great help to the public in coming to terms with tragic events, and a crucial tool for journalists and bloggers. Fortunately, in this case, some quick thinking individual archived the account to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine about twenty minutes before Twitter dropped the axe. Twenty or so tweets were saved.

Needless to say, piecing together someone’s psyche from less than two dozen tweets requires a certain amount of detective work, reading between the lines of what he’s tweeting, and making inferences based on who he’s tweeting. But I’ll share with you what I found, and as always, I encourage you to make up your own mind.

Shamrani’s “final testament”—his last tweet, posted shortly before the attack—has been widely reported in the media.

It clearly supports the “Resentment against the West” school of thought, with its mentions of Guantanamo, US bombings, and support for Israel. Many pundits consider the last line over on the right to be particularly significant because of the apparent influence of Osama bin Laden: “You will not be safe until we live it in reality pleastain [sic], and American troops get out of our lands.”

Other tweets back up the “Resentment against the West” theory, with particular emphasis on US policy regarding Israel. Al-Shamrani retweeted a post from Palestinian Activist Hanady Halwani purporting to show brutality by Israeli security forces against a Muslim boy on the Temple Mount (I ran it by an Israeli friend who didn’t see anything in the video to make him doubt its authenticity).

More significantly, al-Shamrani’s last tweet before his “final testament” was a link to a video of a speech by Donald Trump in which the US president officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It’s highly significant that the Pensacola shooting occurred on the two-year anniversary of that speech.

Without a doubt, US policy in general, and Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem in particular, played a significant role in al-Shamrani’s motive.

Let me be clear: The US was right to give Israel the same right the world gives every other country: to choose its own capital. US policy should not be dictated by some dirtbag going on a shooting spree because he doesn’t like it. But at the same time, we bury our heads in the sand if we don’t confront the dirtbag’s motives objectively.

In any case, there is also a great deal in al-Shamrani’s Twitter account to suggest he is motivated by fundamentalist Islam as much as by the policies of the US. He is undoubtedly a dedicated Muslim, posting quotes from the Quran and a photo of the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. Of course those are things any Muslim might post, and don’t necessarily mean that he had been radicalized. On that point, al-Shamrani’s profile quotation is enlightening:

The quotation is from the Hadith—the collected sayings of Muhammad and his Companions. My first reaction to it was that it was innocuous enough. Surely every religion teaches its followers to think of themselves as part of the “body” of worshippers. But then Stephen England, author of the Shadow Warriors series of terrorism thrillers, pointed out to me that this particular hadith is popular with recruiters for radical Islam. England researched radicalization for his novel Embrace the Fire. He explained to me that the message is “sure, your life isn't half bad, and your family has it decent. . .but what about everyone else? And if you don't care about what's happening to them, are you really a part of the body after all?” Indeed, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had ties to three of the 9/11 terrorists, as well as the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, cited the hadith in a sermon he preached on this theme.

Also notable in al-Shamrani’s Twitter feed is who he chooses to retweet and quote, individuals who may have had some influence on him. Abd’ul-Aziz al-Tarefe and Hakim al-Mutairi in particular stand out in this regard. Both are prominent Islamists—believers in Muslim supremacy and the replacement of secular law with shari’ah.

According to Islam21C.com, Al-Tarefe is a graduate of the college of Sharīʿah at Imaam Muḥammad b. Sa`ud University in Riyadh. He served as a researcher in the Saudi Ministry of Islam until he fell afoul of the authorities. The Washington Examiner reported that his name surfaced in the bin Laden files captured at Abottabad as one of a “younger generation” of Saudi clerics who “proved to be more amenable to al Qaeda’s cause” than their predecessors.

To give you an idea of what kind of guy al-Tarefe is, here’s a video of him arguing that it is permissible to steal from nations that do not have a “treaties” with Islam [i.e., they haven’t submitted]. It is therefore okay to make purchases using stolen Israeli credit card numbers.

Al-Tarefe is the author of a number of books, including Words of Wisdom which is available in English on archive.org. The first page contains the ominous words, “Islam only increases, it does not decrease,” and this is followed by numerous calls for jihad throughout the book. From context, it is clear he is referring to armed conflict with the unbeliever, and not the “internal struggle” we so often hear about from apologists for Islam.

The Jerusalem Post reported that al-Tarefe was arrested in 2016 over his opposition to the Saudi government’s move to eliminate the authority of the shari’ah police, the so-called Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The shari’ah police were one of the worst and most hated excesses of Saudi Arabia’s medieval-style theocracy. I wrote previously about some of their powers: “to enforce hours of prayer, smash bottles of alcohol, eject men from malls where women are shopping, shame women for wearing make-up, and break up gatherings of public lute playing.” These powers were stripped in recent reforms, and it was these reforms that al-Tarefe opposed. Al-Tarefe was subsequently acquitted of the charges against him, according to Islam21C.com.

Like Abd’ul-Aziz al-Tarefe, Hakim al-Mutairi has vast influence on Twitter, with 1.1 million followers. According to a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Al-Mutairi is often described as an unusually charismatic person who is able to gain admirers and friends quickly.” During the 1990 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, he escaped to Saudi Arabia with a group of other Kuwaiti Salafists. Energized by contact with their Saudi counterparts, they returned to Kuwait after The First Gulf War and launched a more politically active form of Salafism. Al-Mutairi eventually started the Umma Party whose goals, again according to the Carnegie Endowment are “to establish an Islamic society, remove foreign troops from the Gulf region, implement Islamic law, and support political pluralism.” Al-Mutairi has also been active in raising funds for jihadist rebel groups in Syria.

[Full disclosure: al-Shamrani’s retweet of al-Mutairi came from here, so unlike the Wayback archive tweets, I cannot verify its origin.]

So what's the bottom line? Was al-Shamrani motivated by anger at US policy, or by a philosophy of Islamic supremacy and jihad? Clearly the evidence of his Twitter feed shows that both were in play.

But there was also one more factor in the mix, one that didn't come from al-Shamrani's Twitter account. From The New York Times:

As the F.B.I. continues to conduct interviews with everyone at the Pensacola Naval Air Station who may have had contact with the gunman, identified as Second Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, a new report emerged that the Saudi trainee filed a formal complaint earlier this year against one of his instructors, who left him “infuriated” in class by tagging him with a derogatory nickname. The complaint, quoted in a communication circulated among people connected to the flight training, said that the instructor referred to Lieutenant Alshamrani as “Porn Stash” in front of about 10 other aviation students, embarrassing and angering him. “I was infuriated as to why he would say that in front of the class,” the Saudi trainee wrote in his complaint, as quoted in the summary… Lieutenant Alshamrani reported that the confrontation came at the end of a meteorology class, when the instructor, James Day, asked whether students had any questions before he dismissed them. The instructor then turned to Lieutenant Alshamrani and asked whether he had any questions, addressing him as “Porn Stash” — spelled that way in the complaint — in an apparent reference to the mustache of a porn actor. “Laughing, he continued to ask, ‘What? Have you not seen a porn star before?’” the lieutenant wrote in his complaint, according to the summary.

That a grown man would be so “infuriated” by a joke about his mustache (and one with some truth in it!), and that he would find himself helpless to stand up for himself, so that he would file a formal complaint, indicates a serious inferiority complex. And this too is a motive for terror. As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim World. Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): New York Times