Report: How A California Death Metal Fan Turned Up On FBI Terror List

Annette Stark of LA CityBEAT reports: If the radical right wanted to paint a portrait of a terrorist, they couldn't do much better than Yahiye Adam Gadahn. In fact, the FBI's announcement last May that it was actively seeking Gadahn for questioning regarding his possible ties to Al Qaeda energized conservatives in ways they could not have imagined — helping to not only whip up fears of Islamic radicalism but also to fuel the deepening "culture war." The 25-year-old former Orange County resident had a hippie upbringing, a short-but-fanatical devotion to death metal, converted to Islam, and spent two days in jail for attacking a member of his mosque. This story had it all.

Following the FBI's revelation, Gadahn's mosque, the Islamic Society of Orange County, and its religious director Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, issued a statement saying how "deeply shocked" they were that one of their members had shown up on an FBI terror list. Clearly concerned about retaliation, the mosque begged for restraint. "We certainly hope and pray that … this most recent rise in threat level will pass without incident."

Within a day, an essay titled "Becoming Muslim," apparently written by Gadahn in 1995 and originally posted to a USC website, was circulating on the Internet. In it, Gadahn details a preposterous journey, from an unconventional childhood as the son of hippie parents who raised him on a goat farm without electricity or indoor plumbing, to a short (it appears only one year) but fitful fascination with death metal music, to his subsequent conversion to Islam. "Having been around Muslims in my formative years," he writes, "I knew well that they were not the bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists that the news media and the televangelists paint them to be."

With its Satanic, anti-Christian overtones and penchant for referencing gore and nihilism, the death metal connection proved irresistible to the media across the spectrum from conservative to progressive. A spoof on PittsburghLive.com by Tribune Review columnist Eric Heyl poked fun at the right-wing notion that kids who are into death metal are on a short track to Al Qaeda. The first line of his piece read: "If only he hadn't cranked up the Ozzy Osbourne."

A lot of hypersensitive metal fans didn’t get the joke. "The column thus far has inspired nearly 700 vitriolic e-mails," Heyl wrote in a subsequent article titled, "Listen, all you metalheads: It was just a joke!" Read more.