33 – Framingham, Massachusetts
Their parents’ teased Sam Abdullah and Alfred Farouk that they’d been bonded at the hips since they’d met at the Boston Islamic Society day care center some fifteen years earlier. Their parents had made similar decisions to make the drive into Boston to enroll their children in the childcare program at the recently built mosque, the largest mosque on the East Coast, in order to preserve some remnants in their children of their Muslim culture. The boys were born in Massachusetts and raised in comfortable suburbs just west of Boston, where both their fathers hopped from one high tech corporation to another as the waves of prosperity in that industry rose and ebbed. As small children, they’d resisted spending time at the Islamic Center, tired of stories from old men about how things were so much better “over there” and criticism about the evil of the Americans here. Nonetheless, the boys went from daycare to a few years at Islamic School, before their parents finally relented and sent them to public schools, Sam in Framingham and Alfred in nearby Natick.
By the time they were teenagers, the boys struggled to avoid giving any hints of their Muslim heritage, coming of age in the years after September 11, of Bin Ladin, the Iraq war and the later terror bombings that following America’s humiliating exit from Iraq. Growing through their junior high school years and entering high school, they both consciously avoided any mention of their ethnic backgrounds in talking with their friends, even adopting and accepting the anti-Muslim slurs and the pre-enlistment swaggers of their friends, especially those who boasted about having no intention of going to college but, instead, argued about whether to enlist in the Army or the Marines on high school graduation day.
Sam was the first of the pair to begin, ever so gradually, to swing back toward his time in Islamic School. It started, as with so much else in the life of teenagers, with the Internet. Surfing at random, following link to link to link to link killing time waiting for 9:00 p.m., when the season finale of “Last One Alive,” Sam’s current favorite reality TV show, would air, he’d found himself at a website called www.American-Mujahadin.com, which billed itself as a youth organization for Muslim and Arab teenagers in the United States. Clicking on buttons on the web site to see what would happen, a Windows Media file downloaded and the player appeared in a window in the upper left quarter of his computer’s screen. The file downloaded, the buffer filled and an image of a fit young man, obviously Arab, appeared, dressed in a flowing robe, his head and face well wrapped, hiding his identity. He held a rifle – Sam recognized the familiar curved magazine of an AK47 – in his hands. He spoke in an accent as American as a television news announcer.
“My name for the struggle is Ali bin Amerika. I am a senior at Edsel Ford High School in Dearborn, Michigan,” the young man said, speaking in a soft, conversational tone. “I am on the student council and I write for the school newspaper. I was on the football team until I broke an ankle last year. When I was a kid, I was a Boy Scout, although I never made Eagle. I played on Little League during the summer. I have a 3.85 grade point average and my SAT score was 727 out of 800.
“Dearborn, where I live, has 100,000 people, 40,000 of us are Muslims.
“Yet, when it came time to award college scholarships, out of $100,000 in scholarship money given to students in my graduating class, more than $80,000 of that went to four kids. And you know what, each of those four kids was a Jew. What does that tell you about who controls the money around here?
“Has anything like that happened to you? I’ll bet it has. And if it has, you need to pay more attention to this web site. I visit this site every day and it changed my life. Keep in touch, my brothers and sisters.”
That was the beginning for Abdullah. He found himself drawn to the American Mujahadin site as if it were pornography. He checked it daily, sometimes first thing in the morning before he went to school, reading commentaries on the day’s news or inside information telling him which TV shows were controlled by Jews, which clothing designers were Jews, which store chains were owned by Jews. The web site portrayed America as a nation owned and operated by wealthy Jews who controlled the way Americans dressed and thought and entertained themselves.
Sam introduced his best and oldest friend to the web site. The two of them spent much of their weekend time, especially through the long, cold Massachusetts winter, surfing the Mujahadin site and others to which it was linked, joining chat groups connected with the site and IM-ing, instant messaging, with Muslim teenagers across the country.
One snowy Sunday afternoon, the two teens spent three hours sitting on the floor in Sam’s bedroom, each with his own laptop computer in front of him, connected to the Internet through the Abdullah family’s home wireless network. Suddenly, Al lifted his computer over his head and slammed it down, slowing only inches from the floor, putting it down with enough force nonetheless that the cover banged shut.
“That fucking cocksucking Kike,” Farouk shouted. “I can’t believe what just happened. I could kill that asshole.”
He stood and began pacing the room, faster and more furiously, stopping to kick at his laptop, but not too hard, not intending to actually damage the computer.
“Al, what happened,” Abdullah asked. “What’s the matter Al?”
“What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter,” Farouk answered, his voice gradually becoming at least halfway calm. “So I was IM-ing for the last hour, on and off, with this Mariam babe and she is doing all this ‘peace be with you’ and ‘inshallah’ stuff and going on about the Jews and the Crusaders and I’m thinking this is a pretty neat sounding babe, finally a Muslim babe with some balls.
“Then she starts talking hotter, about how she’s been with a few Christian boys but their cocks are so tiny but there aren’t any Muslim guys where she lives so she has to get it how she can because she gets so hot sometimes.
“So I start sending her messages about how I’d like to get together with her and she asks me about my cock and, man oh man, it gets really, like you know, like almost like we are there together and I’m getting hot and my cock is getting on like a rock.”
“I can’t believe this was all going on while I’ve been right here in the room with you,” Abdullah said. “Hey, is that why you moved around to the other side of the room and got so quiet?”
“Well, yeah, like my cock was getting hard from all this and I didn’t want you to see, man, OK? Is that OK with you?”
“Yeah, yeah, I understand. But what happened? Why the big anger scene, man?”
“Well, it started getting really like, you know, explicit, man. She told me her hand was down between her legs and she was stroking her pussy and her fingers were getting all wet for me. She said she was moaning as she was typing.
“Then she asked me to put my hand down my pants and play with myself and tell her about it. So, I was going to fake it, you know, and tell her I was stroking my big, hard cock and stuff like that, but my hand went down my pants and I was really doing it and next thing I know I, well, you know, like I, well. Shit, man, I came in my pants. That’s what happened, I came in my pants.”
“Cool, dude,” Abdullah exclaimed. “You had cyber sex with a hot Muslim chick. Wow, dude. So give me her IM handle. I want some of that.”
“No you don’t, brother. Believe me, you don’t want that,” Farouk answered. “So I wiped my hand on the carpet and I started typing. I told her she’d made me come in my pants and how hot she was and where was she and when could we get together and you know what she wrote back, you know what she wrote?”
“What, what?”
“She wrote, I don’t think my rabbi would let me go out with a raghead, asshole, and she signed it Hyman Rothstein. She was some Jewish guy ragging on me, dude. He made me come in my pants over some Jewish guy. I could kill that asshole.”