During college, I took a course with a professor who asked us to come to her house, high above Portland, for Passover. While a few of us climbed the Columbia River Valley in a rickety station wagon, one of my classmates warned the rest of us that her husband was something of a “barbarian”: “you half expect him to be ripping into a mutton chop while he’s talking to you,” he explained.

Like this.

The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that  once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.


We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?

Well, someone just did. But I’m not sure whether it was Mohamed Mohamud or the FBI.

Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American and Oregon State student, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly plotting to set off a car bomb at the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square. (Which brings up the most surprising aspect of this entire story: thousands of people attend a tree lighting ceremony in the heathen Portland?). According to the feds, Mohamud had a stated desire to harm women and children and attempted to remotely detonate a car bomb during the ceremony. He was subsequently taken into custody, kicking and screaming, and shouting “Allahu akbar.” So, violent terrorist thwarted, point to the feds, right?

Well, maybe—but not so fast. Glen Greenwald suggests in Salon, I think rather convincingly, that there is cause for more skepticism regarding the facts of the case and it seems altogether possible that “the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a ‘Terrorist plot’ which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.”

I certainly have no interest in defending Mohamud who, when given the means, legitimately thought he was detonating a bomb that would obliterate two blocks and potentially kill thousands of Portlanders. He is clearly a warped individual and an attempted terrorist. But it does seem worth asking not only whether Mohamud would have posed any kind of legitimate threat without the help and prodding of the feds, but also the extent to which the FBI simply created a terrorist out of a disaffected teenager filled only with delusional fantasies and bluster until he was given the means to carry them out by the government. The circumstances of the case, I think, bring further into question whether the methods the FBI uses are actually protecting the United States from legitimate terror threats or simply concocting them in a self-perpetuating cycle.

From news reports probing Mohamud’s background, it seems clear that he was an impressionable and disaffected—probably mentally unstable—teenager who had become emotionally troubled after the divorce of his parents. The FBI, in fact, only began to monitor Mohamud after his father, an engineer at Intel, contacted them that he was concerned about his son’s growing extremism. Mohamud was, it seems, in many ways just a troubled teen who involved himself not only in fantasies of violence, but also in sex, alcohol, and partying at Oregon State.  But if his father turned to the FBI for some sort of intervention or help, he was obviously mistaken, as it would instead result in a sting operation that further encouraged his son toward terrorism.

According to the FBI affidavit, the sting began in earnest when the feds intercepted a seemingly innocuous email exchange between Mohamud and a man living in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which was suspicious solely because it is a region where “Islamic militants frequently reside.” The December 3 email read: "salamz bro. it's me, i made it 2 OMRA, [praise be to god] if u wanna come, theres a bro that will contact you about the proper paperwork u need 2 come... i cant go online 4 a while,, i hope 2 see u soon"

Although “OMRA” would typically refer to a pilgrimage in Mecca, the agent concluded that they must be speaking “in code to avoid detection,” and that the above email was therefore an invitation for Mohamud to join in terrorist activities. Mohamud then replied to the email that  “yes that would be wonderful, just tell me what I need to do [God willing]. always wanted to see the ka’bah.” But Mohamud hit a dead end when his attempts to contact another party that would help him reach Mecca/Pakistan fell through. So he secured a fishing job in Alaska—but he was prevented from boarding his flight, because he had been placed on the “No Fly List.”

Instead, an undercover FBI agent contacted Mohamud and arranged a meeting where he was asked what he would be willing to do “for the cause.” Thus, at this point the FBI had been tipped off by a concerned father looking to help his unstable son filled with bluster and impotent rage, saw him discussing a visit to either Mecca or Pakistan, found him too incompetent or disengaged to follow through even with that, but now surrounded him with a “friend” who further pushed him toward jihad.

Given a variety of choices on how to help “the cause,” Mohamud expressed interest in becoming “operational” and, after being instructed to think of a target, suggested Pioneer Square in Portland. The undercover officer offered him praise, saying that “he loved his idea.” The agents then helped him plan the attack (saying that they “were impressed” with his work), gave him money to buy materials for bombs and to pay his rent, and actually built a bomb for him. After a test of an actual functioning bomb on November 4, they filmed a written statement in which explained his reasoning, and eventually helped him to detonate a fake bomb on the 26^th. As Greenwald sums: “he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and -- before meeting the FBI -- had never taken a single step toward harming anyone.  Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?”

Yet, the U.S. attorney in Oregon suggested that "this defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people -- even here in Oregon -- who are determined to kill Americans,” while the FBI suggested a statement released by the Department of Justice that even though the bomb was fake “the threat was very real.” But was the threat “very real” until the FBI became involved?

The methods used by the FBI in this case closely mirror those used in numerous others, including the arrest of the “Newburgh Four” in 2009, accused of plotting to bomb New York synagogues. In that case, as Ted Conover explains in Slate, the FBI informant offered congregants of the local mosque $25,000 and other gifts if they would help him pursue jihad. The four unemployed and impoverished ex-cons, one of which was described as a paranoid schizophrenic who collected his urine in jars, were seduced in this case entirely by an offer of $250,000 and a BMW—the informant himself wrote that the men were participating “for the money. … They're not even thinking about the cause.”

Beyond legal questions of entrapment, the actual utility of invading often impoverished ethnic communities with promises of money in exchange for committing acts of terrorism seems, at best questionable. One ex-FBI agent and terrorism expert complained to Businessweek: “We’re interested in catching terrorists, not people who have mental problems and wonder what it would be like to blow up the Sears tower but they can’t get out of bed in the morning.”

In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Mohamud case immediately reminded me of the Indian-born British salesman Hemant Lakhani, who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists when he sold a stinger missile to the FBI. As Petra Bartosiewicz explained on This American Life, however, Lakhani was an “amazingly incompetent illegal arms dealer” and a “lair, shameless braggart, and a snob” who not only claimed to the FBI that he could obtain a missile, but equally improbably that he could secure a submarine and plutonium. When Lakhani proved unable to supply the FBI informant with the missile he guaranteed, the government actually provided the missile to him so that he could sell it back to the FBI. Lakhani was not so much a terrorist-in-waiting as he was an immoral liar with a pathological need to be liked who was provided by the FBI with both the means and motive to commit an act he had no philosophical commitment to.

Conover suggests this strategy is like “sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people's shoulders and whisper in their ears” and points out that there is no shortage of disturbed (or even seemingly normal) Americans who could be convinced to commit violent crimes given enough enticement. The government would certainly have its hands full if it conducted a sting operation of every teenage boy with violent fantasies and a willingness to act upon them if given encouragement, rewards, and means.  So it is worth asking whether the government’s tactics actually do anything to prevent actual terrorism or whether it simply allows them first to create, and then to chase, ghosts—thereby inflating the perceived risk of terror.

Meanwhile, the Corvallis mosque attended by Mohamud was firebombed by an arsonist. Greenwald concludes: "So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."

For those who know me, it may seem rather odd to read me continually defending religious believers since I am myself openly irreligious. Like most people who define themselves as atheists, I have never found any convincing evidence for any sort of “god” at all, and I am all but certain that there is no anthropomorphized god-figure acting in the world. But I also recognize the possibility that my own way of understanding the world around me is so strongly conditioned by the modern, secular, rational world that I simply cannot perceive the divine acting upon us.

This, I believe, is what true skepticism looks like. Skepticism cannot be simply holding militantly to your own beliefs and forcing others to provide a burden of proof. It is also constantly questioning your own beliefs and worldview as well. And this holds equally to religious and non-religious people.

Christopher Hitchens has long been one of my favorite journalists. Not only is he an engrossing writer willing to criticize sacred cows, but he is a drunken curmudgeon from a bygone era of drunken public intellectuals—he is a gin-soaked, high-brow Andy Rooney with actual wit but without the unseemly dementia and eyebrows. And like any good public intellectual, his best quality is the ability to piss everyone off, myself included. His support for the Iraq War has been problematic at best, his tendency toward misogyny is distasteful and, most importantly for this discussion, his association with the so-called “New Atheists” is unfortunate.

To be fair, it should be noted that Hitchens has been far less shrill in his criticism of religion than the insufferably smug certitude of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—elite snobs so obnoxious they thought to label themselves “Brights” (a label even Hitchens finds distasteful). While Dawkins spends the majority of The God Delusion essentially arguing that religious people are inherently dumb people, Hitchens’ book god is not Great (while not entirely eschewing this tendency) tends to focus more on certain religious practices that are clearly abhorrent to modern liberal sensibilities. So I was disappointed to see him pen a recent article on Slate arguing that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” I have two brief points to make.

First, what does it mean to “tame and domesticate” religion?

Talal Asad has suggested that defining anything as “religious” is really a way of marking it distinct, and therefore necessarily separate, from other forms of public life. Many Americans, even religious Americans, easily keep their private religious lives largely separate from their public life. But others may not so easily draw a clear distinction between private religious beliefs and the rest of their everyday lives. Many religious people both in the United States and outside it inhabit a world in which the sacred is omnipresent and omniscient; they interpret the events of their lives through the lens of religious texts; and they may hold values and desires that differ dramatically from secularists.

So, from a rational viewpoint it might be easy to mock someone who sees the Virgin Mary in a sunspot on the window of a tacqueria. But for someone with a particular way of understanding the world around them, this is perfectly reasonable and expected. And while American culture is obsessed with the prevention of suffering, many religious people believe that enduring pain is a necessary element of redemption (Catholics, for instance). And as Saba Mahmood explains, Western critics may understand veiled Muslim women as victims of patriarchal religious authority, but many of these women actually choose to veil themselves—not because they “don’t know any better,” but because they live in a world in which piety is more important than liberal notions of “freedom” or “choice.”

My point is that religious people often inhabit dramatically different worlds than Hitchens or I do. What he is really promoting, I think, is the elimination of religious ways of living in the world that don’t conform easily to secular, liberal values. “Taming and domesticating” religion really means privatizing religion and making certain practices and beliefs more palatable to secular observers. Hitchens and his ilk are essentially arguing to forcefully integrate religious people into a secular, rational, scientific, nationalistic, democratic, capitalist world. And this is, in reality, a form of colonialism.

Such an argument is premised on the uncritical belief in the superiority of what Hitchens terms “civilization.” While he is absolutely correct that many religious practices and beliefs are utterly abhorrent to any reasonable liberal observer, can we honestly say that science, nationalism, or capitalism have proven themselves any less prone to violence or any more democratic than religions have? 

Mainstream science has long been central to racism and colonialism; homosexuality used to be defined as a mental illness “cured” with electroshock; transorbital lobotomies were once considered a solution to even minor problems. What contemporary scientific practices will seem utterly barbaric in fifty years? Capitalism is responsible for millions of deaths through conquest and war, it has created unbelievable social inequality and suffering, and has increasingly deracinated the world of any meaning beyond the accumulation of consumer goods and personal wealth. And the modern-nation state has proven itself time and time again to be the most efficient vehicle for the wholesale slaughter of humanity ever conceived.

As Asad questions in On Suicide Bombing, why are we so repulsed by individual acts of religious terrorism, but completely accepting of even more destructive forms of state terrorism? Americans continue to believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow justifiable, but would be utterly horrified if the same action was perpetrated by a non-state actor. Why? This is not to defend religious terrorism by any means, but simply to ask why we are increasingly so quick to criticize abhorrent religious practices but so accepting of the equally (if not more) destructive practices of “civilization”?

I’ve heard that the best way to make a successful blog is to repeatedly post on the same topic over and over until the four (maybe) people who read it get bored. And then also intersperse it with smug, pedantic commentary on trivial issues. So, anyway, about this thing in New York…

At this point, there is probably little left to be said--when Ron Paul is the voice of reason, you know things have lost any semblance of sanity--but it might be interesting nonetheless to think about one controversy with an eye toward another. No doubt you will remember the outrage expressed by many Muslims across the world when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons in 2005 that depicted Muhammad (thus violating Islamic law), including one in which he wore a turban made of a lit bomb emblazoned with the shahada.

The reaction in Europe and America ranged from a didactic South Park episode (redundant, I know) that taught us all a valuable lesson about the evils of censorship to alarmist outrage about the threat of “Islamofacism”: “Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.” Fuck, I wish. The general gist  these reactions shared was reaffirmation of the secular liberal values of freedom of speech and press. As conservative commentator Daniel Pipes wrote at the time:

Pipes, like many other Americans, argued that the defining characteristic of “Western civilization” was its reverence for free speech, including the right to insult and blaspheme, and therefore, censoring any speech that was intentionally insensitive, offensive, and blasphemous to a group of people would be a violation of basic liberal principles.

Yet on August 16, Pipes wrote that the Islamic Center in Manhattan should “be barred from opening” because it “carries the unmistakable odor of Islamic triumphalism” and might “give reason to worry that this center will spread Islamist ideology.” But even if concerns about the Imam at the center were not preposterously overblown, and even if it were a meeting place for ultra-conservative Muslims, would it not still fall under the very principles Pipes believes are the crux of Western civilization itself?

What is particularly fascinating is how many activists and commentators have consistently used words like blasphemous, sacred, and insensitive to describe their objections to the Islamic center. Journalist Charles Krauthammer, in a widely-published editorial entitled “Sacrilege at Ground Zero,” rather frighteningly criticizes Mayor Bloomberg for his “expansive view of religious freedom” before going on to argue that “although America is a free country” it is acceptable to prevent buildings that “offend local sensibilities”—particularly for reasons of “common decency and respect for the sacred.” Thus, one would assume here that Krauthammer believes that when a speech act or a public assembly offends sensibilities toward the sacred, it can and should be restricted.

So what did Krauthammer have to say about the Danish cartoon controversy? He criticized any Muslim felt outrage at the blasphemy, of course. Moderate Muslims who condemned violence while expressing disapproval with the cartoons were, for Krauthammer, endorsing “the goals of the mob without endorsing the means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.” Indeed.

In the book Is Critique Secular? anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues that, for many Muslims, the Danish cartoons were offensive less because they were blasphemous than because they insulted a person who was, for them, very tangibly real, with whom they had established a personal and loving relationship. (It is, one would suspect, the same reason that Christians tend to be upset when you drop a crucifix into a steaming bucket of piss). Even as they condemned the violence, she suggested, such Muslims nonetheless felt the sense of grief, sorrow, and anger that comes after a personal affront on a close friend or family member.

Now, to think that allowing Muslims to congregate in the general vicinity of where 9/11 victims died is an insult "to the victims and their families" is, of course, the result of incredibly ignorant Islamophobia. But perhaps this whole controversy suggests a much greater similarity between the sensibilities of “the West” and the Islamic world than the former wants to admit.