Samir Khan, Killed by Drone, Spun Out of the American Middle Class
At LGF Lizards have known about the Jihadi from North Carolina for awhile, but here’s a piece from the NYT now, compare it with the old.
From his parents’ basement in a part of town where homes have lots of bedrooms and most children go to college, Samir Khan blogged his way into the highest circles of Al Qaeda, waging a media war he believed was as important as the battles with guns on the ground.
His parents — by all accounts a low-key, respected couple who had moved south from Queens in 2004 — were worried about the increasingly radical nature of their son’s philosophy and the increasing media reports that exposed it.
They turned more than once to members of their religious communities to impress upon their college-aged son the perils of such thinking and behavior.
It did not work. In 2009, he left his comfortable life in Charlotte for Yemen, started a slick magazine for jihadists called Inspire that featured political and how-to articles written in a comfortable American vernacular and continued to digitally dodge government and civilian efforts to stop his self-described “media jihad.”