Customer Reviews

The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in an Age of Terror

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My overall evaluation of this book is stated in the title of this review. The author doesn't develop one theme throughout this book, but jumps around between several different themes. Worse, some of these themes have merit and some don't. Some examples:

Theme 1: The Yemenite community in Lackawanna was typical of an ethnic/immigrant community anywhere in America in the past 100 years until this incident and its fallout. - One wishes this were true, but apparently it isn't, and Temple-Raston herself can't help but note things like this community's general celebration of the attack on the U.S. Cole (p.30), their insularity, the susceptibility of their youth to religious radicals, and their celebration of the escape of one of the "6" [really 9] from Yemenite authorities. Comparing this with the "illegal" Mexican-American community where I live, I don't see any similarity at all. My Mexican-American neighbors are rabidly pro-American [curiously, even when being chased by Homeland Security] and would like nothing better than for the U.S. model to be emulated everywhere.

Theme 2: The 6 [or 9] were just young alienated youth who really weren't at all interested in terrorism, but just wanted "to belong" and reaffirm their ethnic identity. They were misled into going to the Al Queda camps under the guise that they would be training to fight Russians and Serbs, not Americans. It was "an adventure" for the 9, not a serious taking up of arms. - The author adduces some evidence for this theme, but then, again, notes facts like the Lackawanna youth who ended up staying in the Middle East clearly declared to his fellows that he wanted to be a martyr and die for the cause. [One wonders why things were so clear to this young man but purportedly weren't at all clear to the other 8.] By the time that most of these youth had declared that the life of a Jihad warrior wasn't for them, it had been made clear to all 9 [if it wasn't crystal clear before - and it should have been crystal clear before] that the enemy was the U.S. and Israel, not the Russians and the Serbs. But was that their motivation for leaving the camp, or was their motivation that they didn't REALLY want to dedicate their lives and future to a cause, even the cause of "defending" fellow Muslims? The author doesn't seem to really know.

Theme 3: America is turning into a police state and giving up basic civil liberties gained from hundreds of years of struggle against tyranny. - This is the theme the author should have been emphasizing to start with and returning to throughout the book, yet she doesn't really get around to it until Chapter 14. The simple fact of the matter is that, although the 6 [or 9] may not have been, and may not be, very good Americans, they would not have been criminals under our laws of 50 years ago. They didn't actually DO anything to harm other Americans or their property. They would have had the same standing under previous American law as those people who were members of the German American Bund [or Henry Ford] before WWII [disgusting people, but not people we want littering our jails for their stupid views] But somehow the author seems "fuzzy" about this very basic point until nearly the end of her book.

So my evaluation is simple: Buy this book if you want somewhat disjointed sketches of the lives and some of the surroundings of the 6, with little more. Don't buy it if you are looking for a case study of this incident to accompany the many fine more theoretical studies of the loss of our civil liberties. You might borrow it from a friend and read Chapter 14, but if you are a civil libertarian there is not a lot more in the book to interest you.

I was on the 3-4 star borderline with this, and ultimately went down a star for two reasons. One is that enough people will 4- or 5-star it anyway. The other, more importantly, is that given Temple-Raston's background and experience, she could have done more.

One main thing lacking? More conversation with the group's lawyers. T-R never even names the lawyer for Faysal Galab, the first of the Six to plead, despite the Six's lawyers' pledge not to cut separate deals.

Second, the "ideological detonators" chapter was only loosely connected with the rest of the book; and, it was too short to go into enough depth on this issue.

Above all (and there may be government restrictions on this), interviews with the Six themselves are skimpy. But, if T-R couldn't interview them, she could have talked more with the families.

Or, what about Needham? Or somebody off the record out of the Buffalo FBI office? Or a retired agent from that office?

If you're going to write about the "detonators," anyway, you should, I would think, do more analysis of effective or ineffective FBI tactics are.

Part of me feels like reviewer B. Colson, too; continuity was sometimes hard to come by in the book.

The book does do a decent background setting of Lackawanna itself, as well as with Yemen.

In short, this is probably a good starter book about the anomie of second- or third-generation immigrant Muslim-Americans, but only a starter book.

I found this book to be a valuable resource on the Lackawanna 6 and homegrown terrorism in general. Temple-Raston went to great lengths to tell this story in a reliable and factual way. I felt that her writing was very objective - she was not overly sympathetic, nor did she make the Lackawanna 6 out to be monsters. Her careful citations of facts were appreciated. With that being said, this was not a dry read like so many books that get bogged down by the facts and citations. The writing and storytelling was immaculate - I could not put this book down and kept wanting to know more. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism.

Dina Temple-Raston is a superb writer. Her books read like novels, tackling some of the most critical issues of our time: racism ("A Death in Texas"), genocide ("Justice on the Grass"), and now with "The Jihad Next Door", the question of whether homeland civil rights and justice can survive in an age of terrorism. With her unique and compelling writing style, Temple-Raston allows a reader to come to his or her own conclusions about the issues she tackles, and perhaps this is her greatest strength: she trusts in the intelligence of her readers. "The Jihad Next Door" is a page turner - and the best book I've read to date on the roots of fundamentalist Islam in America and the dangers our justice system has faced since 9//11.
If you only have time to read a handful of books this year, make this one of them...

I bought this book excited to learn something new about the war on terrorism, particularly through a case involving US citizens. Living in a city where homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building to prove a point, it hits home with me.

Though this book reads quickly, I agree with another reviewer that it does jump around a bit and never really focuses on one thing. People who aren't versed in the history of the case but are interested in learning something, this is not the book for you. To me, it seems like it's more about the injustices that are happening in the post-9/11 days but the author just hints at it, rather that focusing on it. I'd recommend "The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11" for true insight into the motivations behind terrorists intent of destroying America.

Being from Lackawanna, I felt the book was largely on the mark for describing the community and the Arabian populations assimilation, or lack thereof. I am still struck with wonder how the Arab brethren now jailed, 6, could not have realized the import of their adventure in Afghanistan in the months before 9/11. They now have plenty of time to ponder thier treasonous neglect. It is difficult to feel sympathy for them, and the book correctly did not overtly try to extract it. Arabs must learn to become Americans first, and Muslims second.

Having grown up in suburb of Buffalo next door to Lackawanna and being an advocate for peace and justice, a book about the Lackawanna Six jumped off the shelf into my hands. And once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Reading more like a good mystery than the well-researched investigative reporting that it reflected, this book kept me intrigued and reading well past my regular bedtime.

Dina Temple-Raston, National Public Radio's FBI correspondent and critically acclaimed, award-winning author of several books including Justice in the Grass, In Defense of Our America (with Anthony D. Romero) and A Death in Texas, gave this extraordinary accounting of the lives of six American Muslim twenty-somethings who never in their wildest dreams considered where a trip to Pakistan would lead them.

Temple-Raston created suspense as she sketched the characters, showing their immaturity, restlessness, and strong family ties to their Yemeni heritage. She moved the narrative along with short chapters, action, suspense, and intrigue. Her extensive investigations included traveling to Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Knowledge of FBI practices, as well as her ability to gain trust in order to extract information from the most reluctant witness, makes the reader feel like a welcome guest where formerly no one had ever visited.

Temple-Reston painted these alleged terrorists from the perspective of humanity and naiveté. Their travels to Pakistan before 9/11/01 led them to a nightmare during the era after 9/11 when government policies and procedures defied logic and justice. Photos of the six, the neighborhood where they lived, and scenes from Yemen including boys studying at a madrasa added to the interest and authenticity of the book.

The book arrived in a timely fashion. It was just what I expected and wanted. I am pleased :)

Ms Temple-Raston has honed her craft well as she demonstrates with great deftness in not allowing it to get in the way of telling a good story. And this is a good story told well indeed. Instead of being called "The Jihad Next Door," however, it should have been entitled "How the Inmates are still running the American National Security Asylum."

The book weaves together beautifully three inter-related themes about our democratic culture and about how it is being mis-run by the current crop of political authorities.

The first theme is about how easily and quickly the "democratic aspect" of our culture dissolves and gives way to a kind of soft right-wing tyranny under the least amount of pressure or stress. The second is, how after all of the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on law enforcement and intelligence to "protect our homeland," it still boils down to an anonymous tip here, and extra-legal practice there, just to get us to first base. But as the author notes, hope is not a good plan for defending our homeland, nor is luck a good strategy.

The final theme, which is really the most important subtext of the entire story, is how our twisted and racist social system is producing, in our dying inner cites, from Detroit and Buffalo to Los Angeles and Atlanta, a constant stream of "low-hanging" fruit for Osama bin Laden's sophisticated recruiting machinery.

Apparently bin Laden knows much better than our political authorities do that a society with large groups of alienated young men feeling left out of society is the most fertile soil for turning their lives into something larger than themselves through fundamentalist religious appeals, and of course on to becoming God's foot soldiers, full-fledged terrorists. There is no nation richer in such lost souls waiting to become converts than America. And Buffalo, New York has already proven that it can produce "real" rather than `fake" terrorists in its own homegrown, Timonthy McVeigh of the Okalahoma City bombing fame. And just as a note in passing, when McVeigh was discovered in their midst, Buffalo did not rise up to become a powder keg about to explode into riots and self-righteous indignation over having a terrorist next door as it did when it discovered that the Lackawanna Six were of color, and of Arab (Yemeni) descent.

Quite simply, Ms Temple-Raston's understated message is exactly the right medicine in the right dose and at exactly the right time to shake us back to our senses in this much distorted "post nine eleven world." The author does not go on the attack, nor point fingers, she simply lays out the facts in a clearly and cleanly told story, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions. And what we see from all angles is not a pretty picture. The Lackawanna Six (which actually turns out to be nine) becomes a footnote in a much larger and much more grotesquely interesting tableau.

These guys were lost, alienated, mindless idiots, who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. But they were recruited under a very sophisticated "false flag" run out of "bin Laden Recruiting Inc." When they woke up, they were already checkmated with their dicks in their hands and without their passports, somewhere on the edge of the Afghan desert. From that point on all they ever wanted to do was to get back home to their ipods and to Mommie. Quite simply they were not good terrorists material.

If we really wanted to protect the homeland, the focus should have been on the fisherman and not on the bait. That is, it should have been focused on how bin Laden's sophisticated recruiting apparatus works, or on how our inner city social system consistently produces annual crops of alienated lost souls, of the Moe, Larry and Curly variety. But no matter what, the focus of all our expensive resources should not have been exhausted exclusively on these six stooges themselves.

In short, the question this book begs beautifully is: How could a sophisticated democracy such as ours allow a handful of idiots turn its whole political system on its head so easily? From the President on down, Washington was running around like "jitterbugs," not knowing what to do.

And the answer is: that the inmates are running our national security apparatus. Our political authorities haven't a clue as to how to protect our democracy because they do not yet fully understand what a democracy is, nor how it works, and thus on that basis alone, they cannot possibly know how to protect us from terrorists. Moe, Larry and Curly are also running our national security establishment.

If they did understand how a real democracy works, they would not have staged the arrest of these young men on the eve of the 911 anniversary, as if it were a "political show trial in a Communist run country;" nor would they have polluted the potential jury pool by leaking negative stories and lies about the suspects, ( as was also done in the Valary Plame case) or used other heavy-handed and heavy-footed tactics just to try to insure long sentences for these suspects. They would have understood that for the very sake of the honor of our way of life, a true democrat would not be caught dead engaging in extra-legal activities such as torture, assassinations, and other despotic tactics just to seal a conviction against suspected terrorists. When we cut corners in this way for any reasons, but especially for political reasons, it does not take a rocket scientist to see that we diminish and undercut our democracy in a very serious and fundamental way. We literally toss out the baby with the bath water.

Boy, let us hope that American democracy has reached its nadir, and cannot get any worse than this. Shame on this crop of leaders. How painful it is and what an international embarrassment when their undemocratic tactics makes good citizen have to feel sorry for the potential terrorists!

Osama bin Laden must be wallowing in laughter his cave.

Five stars