Freedom Folks: Individual Jihad?

Source: AJC

Spc. Craig Perkins' uniform made him a target in Baghdad - and, he believes, again in an apartment complex near Clarkston.

Perkins, who returned last summer after almost a year's duty in Iraq, shot a man outside his apartment March 9 in what he says was the culmination of months of insults by some of his neighbors from the Middle East. Spc. Craig Perkins says he shot a Mideastern college student last week in self-defense.

Perkins, 34, said some residents in the ethnically diverse Kristopher Woods Apartments taunted him and made spitting sounds when they saw him in uniform heading to or from National Guard duty.

Now Perkins is moving. He said he did not want more conflicts.

Perkins said he shot 26-year-old Tareq Ali Bualsafared in self-defense after Bualsafared and another man threatened him. He said the two men rushed toward his front door even after he fired a warning shot.

Bualsafared, a college student from the United Arab Emirates, said Perkins was the aggressor. He said Perkins cursed them.

Bualsafared, who was shot in the leg, said neither he nor his friend, Saleh Ali, a 17-year-old refugee from Iraq, knew anything about Perkins before he confronted them as they walked by his apartment.

In interviews Friday, the accounts of Perkins and Bualsafared agreed on one detail: There were angry words about Iraq before shots were fired.

Perkins moved in with his girlfriend and her son in the apartment complex south of Clarkston in the summer of 2006. He had just spent almost a year in Baghdad with the Georgia-based 48th Infantry Brigade.

He served most of his time as a "ground pounder" - a soldier who traveled in Bradley armored vehicles, conducting patrols and manning observation posts in Baghdad.

His Bradley once hit an improvised explosive device, he said, filling the vehicle with smoke. His company was spared combat deaths during his tour, he said, but after his return he was horrified to learn from CNN that an Army friend had been kidnapped and beheaded.

In the Clarkston area, Perkins joined a community heavily populated by refugees of violent conflicts around the world. He quickly noticed attire and customs he had seen in Baghdad.

He said he had no animosity for his Middle Eastern neighbors in Clarkston. "I've never been a prejudiced person," he said.

He noted he is a black man with a white girlfriend. He said he has white and American Indian ancestors.

But he said he could feel the animosity when he walked by his Middle Eastern neighbors in his Guard uniform.

Women and older men tended to be polite, but the younger men were hostile, he said.

On many occasions, he said, he received signs of disrespect he knew from Iraq. Men made exaggerated spitting noises, and "they would raise their shoe at me to show me the bottom of their feet, or they would take off their shoe and wave it at me." *snip*

Bualsafared said the men were in the parking lot when Perkins shot him.

DeKalb police spokesman Michael Payne said a detective's report showed blood was found "just outside" Perkins' door.

Police at the scene arrested Perkins and charged him with aggravated assault. But after about 15 hours in jail, he was released when a magistrate's judge declined to sign a criminal warrant. Perkins is not now charged with a crime, Payne said.

On Thursday night, Ali was arrested by DeKalb police for criminal trespass, DeKalb jail records show. The arrest was apparently based on a complaint that he should not have been in Perkins' apartment complex at the time of the incident.

Perkins said he also obtained temporary court orders to keep the men away from him.

Bualsafared had not been charged Friday, he said. He said he spent a night in the hospital but was walking on his wounded leg. He was staying with a friend in Athens and planned to return soon to Penn State.

Yusof Burke, spokesman for the North Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he had been asked to look into the incident on behalf of the Arab men. He said they felt "unjustly accused."

Rusty Shackleford on 'Individual Jihad...'

We are now in the age of individual jihad. How do we know? Al Qaeda sympathizers have recently declared it so. Further, these al Qaeda fellow-travellers have produced a series of 'how-to' videos for the individual jihadist. A kind of step-by-step do-it-yourself guide for would-be jihadists who do not, or cannot, belong to an organized terror cell. The terrorist of the future--and of now--may not belong to a terror group at all, but rather, will carry out acts of terrorism with little or no outside direction or support.

Was this alleged attack on a returned soldier in Georgia an act of individual jihad? It's unclear. It's very possible that this is nothing more than a case of overblown egos clashing. But it's also not wise, in this 'age of individual jihad', to simply write the incident off simply because the two Muslims do not have any known connection to extremist groups.

If it is true that the Arabs were taunting the U.S. veteran, this is not necessarily 'individual jihad', but might be a related problem with even more troubling implications because it is much more widespread--the problem of Muslim nationalism. Muslim nationalists, as I define them, are those who see their primary national identity as 'Muslim'. A problem because they see themselves as 'foreigners' living amongst us. A double problem because these 'foreigners' sympathize with the very enemies we fight. An intrastate 'clash of civilizations'.

My patriotism generally translates into an inclination to believe a returned soldier's word. But I have been known to be wrong in the past. Still, all things being equal, my money is on the soldier. The soldier, by the way, was not arrested--even though he is the one who shot one of the Muslim attackers. But one of the Muslim who accosted him was arrested for criminal tresspass. So I guess that puts the DeKalb County D.A. on my side of the bet. And when CAIR gets involved, I double down.

Investor's Business Daily reminds us how ubiquitous the 'individual jihad' has become...

An 18 year old Bosnian Muslim immigrant enters a mall in Salt Lake City and randomly kills men, women, and children. Armed to the teeth, he would have killed many more, except for an armed off-duty cop who killed him first.
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A 30-year-old Muslim man, Naveed Afzal Haq, goes on a shooting rampage at a Jewish community center in Seattle, announcing "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."
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An Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, shoots two and wounds three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.
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A bearded 21-year-old wannabe Muslim, named Joel Hinrichs, blows himself up by detonating a backpack filled with TATP (A Hezbollah and Hamas explosive of choice) outside a packed Oklahoma University football stadium.
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A 23-year-old student, Mohammed Ali Alayed, slashes the throat of a former Jewish friend in Houston after apparently a religious awakening.
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Two Muslim converts, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, kill or wound 13 people in the DC area. Later, Muhammad describes his acts as part of a "prolonged terror campaign against America" around the first anniversary of an event he praised, 9/11/2001.
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A Muslim named Omeed Aziz Popal of Fremont, Calif., a self described terrorist, uses his SUV to kill a bicyclist and begins to run over pedestrians until police stop him.
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A 22-year-old Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, steals a car in and later a van in Minneapolis and goes on a ramming rampage against drivers and pedestrians. As he does this he repeatedly yells, “Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill," on “orders from Allah."
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A 22-year-old Iranian student, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, deliberately rams his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina to "punish the government of the United States" for invading Iraq and other Muslim nations.