The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in an Age of Terror

The book arrived in a timely fashion. It was just what I expected and wanted. I am pleased :)

Having grown up in suburb of Buffalo next door to Lackawanna and being an advocate for peace and justice, a book about the Lackawanna Six jumped off the shelf into my hands. And once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Reading more like a good mystery than the well-researched investigative reporting that it reflected, this book kept me intrigued and reading well past my regular bedtime. Dina Temple-Raston, National Public Radio's FBI correspondent and critically acclaimed, award-winning author of several books including Justice in the Grass, In Defense of Our America (with Anthony D. Romero) and A Death in Texas, gave this extraordinary accounting of the lives of six American Muslim twenty-somethings who never in their wildest dreams considered where a trip to Pakistan would lead them. Temple-Raston created suspense as she sketched the characters, showing their immaturity, restlessness, and strong family ties to their Yemeni heritage. She moved the narrative along with short chapters, action, suspense, and intrigue. Her extensive investigations included traveling to Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Knowledge of FBI practices, as well as her ability to gain trust in order to extract information from the most reluctant witness, makes the reader feel like a welcome guest where formerly no one had ever visited. Temple-Reston painted these alleged terrorists from the perspective of humanity and naiveté. Their travels to Pakistan before 9/11/01 led them to a nightmare during the era after 9/11 when government policies and procedures defied logic and justice. Photos of the six, the neighborhood where they lived, and scenes from Yemen including boys studying at a madrasa added to the interest and authenticity of the book.

The author approaches a difficult topic with the eyes of a reporter, cautiously, but clearly, presenting the characters, the context, and their choices. Without pretending to know exactly the inner thoughts of a young Muslim from Lackawanna tempted by the urgings of a more radical islamist, the author shows the thread that leads to the choices made (and the doubts that later emerge.) This makes all the more meaningful and central the question of how the justice system should handle such cases. In the process of examining this question, the author tackles with great insight and balance the issue of the post 9/11 political context and the application of justice. In the urge to satisfy the public thirst, to justify the machinery put in place to combat terrorism, are we creating a justice system and an administration consistent with our values, our beliefs, our concern for due process? An easy read, and a highly recommend one.

Ms Temple-Raston has honed her craft well as she demonstrates with great deftness in not allowing it to get in the way of telling a good story. And this is a good story told well indeed. Instead of being called "The Jihad Next Door," however, it should have been entitled "How the Inmates are still running the American National Security Asylum." The book weaves together beautifully three inter-related themes about our democratic culture and about how it is being mis-run by the current crop of political authorities. The first theme is about how easily and quickly the "democratic aspect" of our culture dissolves and gives way to a kind of soft right-wing tyranny under the least amount of pressure or stress. The second is, how after all of the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on law enforcement and intelligence to "protect our homeland," it still boils down to an anonymous tip here, and extra-legal practice there, just to get us to first base. But as the author notes, hope is not a good plan for defending our homeland, nor is luck a good strategy. The final theme, which is really the most important subtext of the entire story, is how our twisted and racist social system is producing, in our dying inner cites, from Detroit and Buffalo to Los Angeles and Atlanta, a constant stream of "low-hanging" fruit for Osama bin Laden's sophisticated recruiting machinery. Apparently bin Laden knows much better than our political authorities do that a society with large groups of alienated young men feeling left out of society is the most fertile soil for turning their lives into something larger than themselves through fundamentalist religious appeals, and of course on to becoming God's foot soldiers, full-fledged terrorists. There is no nation richer in such lost souls waiting to become converts than America. And Buffalo, New York has already proven that it can produce "real" rather than `fake" terrorists in its own homegrown, Timonthy McVeigh of the Okalahoma City bombing fame. And just as a note in passing, when McVeigh was discovered in their midst, Buffalo did not rise up to become a powder keg about to explode into riots and self-righteous indignation over having a terrorist next door as it did when it discovered that the Lackawanna Six were of color, and of Arab (Yemeni) descent. Quite simply, Ms Temple-Raston's understated message is exactly the right medicine in the right dose and at exactly the right time to shake us back to our senses in this much distorted "post nine eleven world." The author does not go on the attack, nor point fingers, she simply lays out the facts in a clearly and cleanly told story, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions. And what we see from all angles is not a pretty picture. The Lackawanna Six (which actually turns out to be nine) becomes a footnote in a much larger and much more grotesquely interesting tableau. These guys were lost, alienated, mindless idiots, who couldn't fight their way out of a p

Dina Temple-Raston is a superb writer. Her books read like novels, tackling some of the most critical issues of our time: racism ("A Death in Texas"), genocide ("Justice on the Grass"), and now with "The Jihad Next Door", the question of whether homeland civil rights and justice can survive in an age of terrorism. With her unique and compelling writing style, Temple-Raston allows a reader to come to his or her own conclusions about the issues she tackles, and perhaps this is her greatest strength: she trusts in the intelligence of her readers. "The Jihad Next Door" is a page turner - and the best book I've read to date on the roots of fundamentalist Islam in America and the dangers our justice system has faced since 9//11. If you only have time to read a handful of books this year, make this one of them...