Turkey Shoot: He might not be the terrorist you expected
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Synopsis
Release date: September 11, 2018
Publisher: Perfidy Press
Print pages: 384
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Behind the book
From the Foreword:
You probably remember seeing them on nightly news clips. Rickety boats crammed with displaced people desperately floating to southern Europe, a flood of dispossessed humanity that has yet to abate. Seeking safety and succor, they keep coming, hundreds of thousands of them. Many hand over their life’s savings to human traffickers to escape from war-torn Eritrea, Southern Sudan, Niger, Libya, and of course Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Extreme poverty and drought force some to abandon their homelands, but most flee tyrants, sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing, or unending war. Thousands have perished at sea, and many of those who made landfall huddle in makeshift camps in Greece and Italy with or without travel documents. Some receive sanctuary as political exiles but most not. Those that are able just keep walking, bicycling, hitchhiking, or pack into buses and trains, traversing arteries into the heart of Europe.
Lightly sprinkled and folded into these hordes are unknown numbers of committed extremists on the move, intent on infiltrating the nations of Europe. They and groups that sponsored them, such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, held the decadent and hegemonic West responsible for the subjugation of Muslim lands and the debasing of all that is holy to them. Seeking Sharia and a Caliphate at home and revenge abroad, they establish themselves in Europe to recruit aimless and disaffected Muslim youths and radicalize their consciousness. Some they route into conflict zones to take up arms against infidels and apostates. Others form terror cells to target mayhem, such as London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and Munich have suffered. The jihadists’ logic is that slaughtering infidels will provoke overreactions from the West that in turn will radicalize more Muslims, or at least that’s what “national security experts” tend to say before Islamophobia politicians go on to overreact. It seems to be working for all of them: The experts get paid, politicians get votes, militaries and spy agencies get more money to meddle, and terrorist groups get recruits. Only the people and the martyrs lose.
As a whole, the public in the West seems to accept the narrative that Islamic radicals are the product of fanatical civilization-hating mullahs who preach death to infidels and urge young men to martyr themselves to seek salvation and purify the world according to Allah’s will. Little is said or known of the life experiences that drive individuals to become jihadists, but it has to take more than a preacher’s exhortations to motivate someone to follow a path of destruction to eternity. Happy people don’t blow up random strangers, themselves along with them. So what accounts for salafists’ agendas? Hatred of secular institutions and lifestyles? A need to submit to a greater cause? Commitment to political liberation? Personal revenge? Western news media rarely bother to uncover backstories or untangle motivations, instead fixating on consequences and suppression of terrorism rather than its causes and dynamics, helping no one understand how terrorists are manufactured not just by mullahs, but by actions of countries like the US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey.
This book tells the story of one such jihadi, a twenty-something Sunni Muslim, devout but no fundamentalist fanatic. What radicalized him was not the secular stench of Western civilization, even though he had strong doses of it as a youngster in Iraq. His own path to salvation is personal, as jihad is supposed to be, and motivated by revenge, as not all are. What put him on it was the unnecessary and inept invasion of his country by the US that turned his family into internal refugees, ultimately leading to the slaughter of his parents at the hands of an ISIS militia. Mahmoud is on the warpath not because some Imam brainwashed him but because his life was ruined. Secure in his own faith, he despises those who twist Islam to justify despotic atrocities and is willing to find common cause with anyone with the courage to stop them.
