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Overnight Open Thread

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iceweasel6/25/2010 8:42:37 am PDT

re: #295 lawhawk

Parents of alleged NJ terrorist Mohammed Alessa blame the FBI for their kid turning to jihad.

Gotcha. Alessa’s parents are in denial that their kid was a ticking time bomb and the FBI caught him before he did something really bad.

Yes, they are.
What they’re saying now in your link is wholly unlike their initial statements to the NYT and others, as I posted here at the time:
From Wayward Teenagers to Terror Suspects

One was a spoiled child so prone to fits of rage — fights, screamed insults, threats — that his parents began taking him to psychiatrists at age 6 and medicating him in a vain struggle to control his moods. By their count, his short fuse and incendiary tongue forced him to change schools no fewer than 10 times.[…]“Of course we tried everything we could,” said Nadia Alessa, mother of Mohamed M. Alessa, the one so given to angry outbursts. “We couldn’t just keep him at home.”[…]“He was a spoiled kid,” Ms. Alessa conceded. “He acted like a teenager. He thought he was a king.”

She said Mohamed attended the local public elementary school, two Catholic grade schools, a boarding school in Connecticut, a school for troubled youth, three Muslim schools and two public high schools, repeatedly getting into trouble for fighting or mouthing off.

At the two public high schools, North Bergen and KAS Prep, Mr. Alessa made an escalating series of threats against students and staff members through 2005 and 2006, saying that he would blow up the school, mutilate gays and punish women who were not subordinate to men, according to officials granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Both schools alerted the Department of Homeland Security.

As a 10th grader at North Bergen High, he had to receive his lessons at a local public library under the eye of a security guard, said Paul Swibinski, a school spokesman, because “administrators felt that his presence in school posed a safety threat to other students and staff.”

Alessa was on a DHS watch list since he was 15.

The remind me of the Columbine killers. Alessa is like Eric Harris— the psychopath who was dangerous and would have killed people someday in some fashion no matter what. And like Harris, Alessa appears to have parents who alternately had no idea what to do but would reflexively defend him. (In contrast to Klebold and his parents).

I have some sympathy for the parents because the desire to protect your child is so strong, and this kid (sorry to say) appears to have been a monster since birth.

In contrast,

In October 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a tip that Mr. Alessa and Mr. Almonte talked about holy war and killing non-Muslims, and law enforcement agencies began keeping a watch on them. From the start, the authorities were in touch with Mr. Almonte’s family


Almonte’s family tipped off the FBI about him and immediately cooperated with the authorities for years before this 2010 arrest.