There is a poignant sadness in the recent story of the 19-year-old Somali immigrant fingered as an aspiring bomber in an FBI sting in Oregon. I don’t dispute the FBI’s method or purpose in running the sting; its agents appear to have caught someone with a genuine intention to commit an act of terrorism. Catching such aspiring perpetrators before anything blows up is always to be preferred.
But this son of Somali immigrants, a naturalized American who came to the U.S. at the age of five, makes an informative case. In press interviews, one or two of his high-school classmates mentioned an episode of unusual behavior, but to most of them, he came across as a thoroughly American kid: a class clown, a dabbler in music, a big fan of the Portland Trailblazers. His attendance at a local mosque was not particularly devout or regular, which would distinguish his religious observance very little from that of most Christians and Jews. An off-and-on college student, he has been living the life of an American teenager.
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