Adam Gadahn
Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News

Al-Qaida released a video of a local American, Adam Gadahn, inviting us all to ‘convert or die‘ to bin Laden’s perversion of Islam, following an introduction by al-Qaida monster, Dr. Zawahiri, who’s bin Laden’s Number Two.

It’s not his first time in a bin-Laden video. He’s recognizable as the U.S. citizen who made a threat to blow up Los Angeles a couple years before.

Now he’s hit the big time, a spot on a Zawahiri Internet broadcast. Since he’s a former heavy-metal dude turned Islamofascistist fanatic, his new identity must make him feel like a rock star in a way death-metal just couldn’t.

It’s hard to not be horrified about this doughy-faced 28-year-old. The Islamofascist convert from Orange County, California, and maybe ex-USC student, sees himself as a sort of “revolutionary.” Unable to sell his ideas to Americans, he would bring his “revolution” of mass murder to America’s shores. Check out the exact use of the word ‘revolution’ in this other Islamofascist propaganda film here. Yes, they consider it ‘revolution.’

But first, he menacingly warns Americans to convert to the moral void that he considers “faith” before he carries out his slaughter. That’s why we have this video, something that does bin Laden’s rotten cause immense good and the rest of us immense harm. He also recognizes that the terror war is an intellectual war about ideas, and names many prominent anti-Islamofascist writers, as well as Televangelists, in his diatribe.

No, nobody’s going to convert to his distorted low-grade version of Islam, nobody except misfits, whose numbers are few in the U.S. And he knows this. But one by one, these misfits – some of them from the deranged anti-Bush and anti-Blair left, may be just the moral mud he needs. By themselves, they can by do harm, the kind of harm anti-revolutionaries do as they claim to be on the cutting edge.

Democratic-revolution crowds they attract not. Lone losers, they do. In a world longing for democratic revolution, this creep is a nasty imposter and countercurrent – and way too close to us.

His new appearance in the Zawahiri video is kind of shocking. He’s so local, and such a loser. Like Johnny Taliban, he was raised a hippie by leftist parents who wanted him to be “free.” Licentious freedom of the kind he got seems to have done something to his mind. Not every hippie-kid turns out this way – some are very cool – but he did because something was missing. The permissiveness under which he was raised may have been based on indifference instead of love and he became a misfit.

Maybe, like John Walker Lindh, he was picked up by some radical Islamofascist missionaries tramping around the U.S. called Tablighi Jamaat. Or maybe just his own overwhelming ego against the reality of his own mediocrity did it.

Adam Gadahn, terrorist in incubation, in his wannabe rock-star salad days
Source: Los Angeles City Beat

From the people who knew him, as quoted in this LA City Beat profile, he was a searcher who didn’t quite fit in even with the death-metal scene he was first attracted to.

So the next they heard of him, he turned up Islamofascist, complete with comic-book costume. He must have had such grandiose dreams. He must have wanted to do something so different, so shocking, so mind-blowing, that nothing in his rock-star-fantasies could satisfy him.

He had all the opportunities of a good society, but it just wasn’t good enough. So he turned Islamofascist.

Orange County, land of ice skater Sasha Cohen and actor John Wayne, home of bond king Bill Gross and redoubt in exile of Richard Nixon, is not only affluent and beautiful, it’s one of the closest places to paradise on earth. It’s what everyone secretly wants. It’s mind-blowingly beautiful – its bougainvillea-sided highways brim with new-model cars carrying surfboards and its cliffside houses’ coastal views of the pale chrome-blue and baking-soda-white surf on the shoreline, its lush winding promenades with teakwood benches on the beach at Dana Point and a zillion flowers of every local kind (Californian, Italian and Australian) are just so gorgeous.

Based on the Cold War heritage, the O.C. is famously rightwing but it’s also super multicultural – full of Cambodians, Mexicans, Colombians, Filipinos, Germans, Japanese, French, Russians, Salvadorans, Chinese – no major underclasses (except for the illegals), with everyone rich and beautiful and free. You know you live in a land of miracles when you see a Cambodian tribeswoman in a sarong bound out of a shiny SUV the size of a battleship in an Orange County strip mall parking lot near Capistrano, with her little toddler in tow, and head for the latest special at Trader Joe’s with the alacrity of the other locals. If she can do it, there is hope for every other person on earth. Homeownership is big in O.C. and home values there have risen to make everyone a millionaire. You can have fast-food or gourmet culture there, real art or In-N-Out Burger, it’s all there, whatever you want – and it’s all shiny and new. It’s like a civilization nowhere on earth, it fascinates me and everyone else who goes there.

It’s hard to think of anyone more meritless than this dirtbag emerging out of it. All of those choices, all of those showered opportunities to make something of himself and he threw them all away. Steeped in affluence and quality of life that most poor and deprived people of the world could only dream of, he chose destruction. Was it because he felt too ugly among beautiful people? Did he feel lost in his choices? Or was it just his ego? Shunning all that freedom could give him, he went for the Islamofascists out there in the cave-desert badlands and joined the morally primitive bin Laden.

What a miserable character. But unlike Orange County people, who believe in living and let living, this guy DOESN’T want them to live at all. He wants to kill them. Some revolution. And too close for comfort.

Michelle Malkin has a very valuable roundup of this guy from a couple of years back whose every link is well worth reading here.