‘Jihad Jane,’ Gadahn: The new Barbie, Ken for self-loathing America

By Chuck Frank / chuck@theklaxon.com / 03.10.2010

Updated on: 03.10.10 at 9:21 pm

On the lookout for acute social trends? Look no further than the current ominous results of 50 years of American social engineering.

Are you a mid-forties Pennsylvania housewife, low on romance? Online dating not netting you Mr. Wonderful? Career options limited? Retirement a fantasy? Hope and change not panning out? What’s a girl to do when even Oprah can’t stop eating with a billion bucks in the bank?

Well, girlfriend, it’s time to grab your mouse and go Jihad. Who says you don’t have options? Do you have an American passport? If you do, you’re the “belle of the ball” in Yemen! (Pronounced, Yeah, men!)

Just ask Colleen LaRose, aka Fatima LaRose, aka Jihad Jane. LaRose found it ALL on the Internet. She told the boys she was up for Jihad, would raise money and kill cartoonists, and the marriage proposals began rolling in.

LaRose got “burqad out,” started raising money and organizing a team of men and women terrorists to plan murder and mayhem. She had an assignment, a raison d’être, to go to Sweden with her new pals and kill Lars Vilks, the hapless cartoonist who published a cartoon of Muhammad and now lives in constant fear for his life.

Through the wonder of the Internet, LaRose began posting on YouTube in June 2008 as Jihad Jane and, by March 2009, received her marching orders and was jetting off to Europe in August for her rendezvous with Lars.

Adam Gadahn grabbed his mouse and changed his life, too. After years of moping around college classrooms and sponging off his grandparents, Gadahn found Jihad. In the blink of an eye, he went from a Death Metal loser with no prospects to Azzam the Amerikan. All it took was an American passport and the promise to harm the homeland that had not met his expectations.

Gadahn now has a promising career in PR with al-Qaeda, has a $1 million price on his head and went from no dates to multiple wives.

Through the power of the Internet and the phenomenon of social networking, it is now possible to create an online persona that is way more exciting than a real life.

Americans of pre-Internet generations were content with the basics: a job, plenty to eat, a place to live, a dinner out on special occasions, three channels, a week of vacation and a movie now and then.

Now, more and more Americans are grabbing the mouse and changing their lives. In fact, so many have found Jihad on the Web that the government has no idea how many of the country’s mal-content neighbors, friends and co-workers currently are being trained to find meaning in their lives by ending others’.

In a time when G.I. Joe has become Jihad Jane and Campus Spirit Barbie is now Azzam the Amerikan, many of our neighbors, due to hopelessness, a popular culture of self-loathing and an economic future of uncontrolled variables, are selling their souls to terrorists.

Those not taking to such extremes, on the other hand, had better embrace the imperfect promise of America, appreciate what we have and remember the words of Aesop who said, “The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.”