MemeMachineGo!

One Jordanian Loves Microsoft, Hates America:

He explained to me in careful detail why he wants to be a shaheed, a suicide bomber against the United States, quoting at length from the Koran. But when he’s not talking about blowing himself up and killing American troops, Fadi talks about his other great dream. ”I want to be a programmer at Microsoft,” he says. ”Not just a programmer. I want to be well known, famous.”

[…he shows] a few boxes of audiotapes that he listens to every day. ”This is NLP,” he explains. ”It’s very good. Neuro-Linguistic Programming.” NLP, which originated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a sort of modern ”The Power of Positive Thinking,” and Fadi says it has helped him overcome the barriers to his dreams. ”Six months ago, I was much more negative,” he says. ”I would get frustrated.” For example, Fadi says he finds it frustrating that it is so difficult to get a visa to the United States, so he can’t train for a job at Microsoft. But the tapes teach him to remain positive about reaching his dreams.

Fadi doesn’t see anything strange about using American self-help tapes to get a job at an American company, while at the same time harboring hatred of the American government to the point of self-annihilation. Self-help, computer programming, the Koran and jihad are all aspects of the same thing, he says: a search for a way for a good Muslim to live in the modern world.

[…] Oddly, the place Fadi feels the most free to express his anti-American views is a pizza restaurant near his house that is modeled after one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It’s small: only room for two round tables, the pizza oven and a counter. It has red and white tiles like any American pizza place. It is run by two brothers, friends of Fadi’s who both lived in the United States for a long time. Y., the younger brother, is chubby and short. He was the first Arab barber in Brooklyn, he says, pulling out a contact sheet of photos of his customers, all with variants of a stylized buzz cut. ”Bay Ridge is beautiful,” he says. The older brother, O., says his pizzas are as good as any in New York. ”It’s very good,” Fadi says and orders the special: a large pie with mushrooms, olives, sausage and tomatoes. Fadi comes here about once a week and sits with Y. and O. to discuss jihad and America.

[…] America, Fadi says, is just too powerfully present in the lives of his generation of Arabs. America decides what young people will wear and what music they’ll listen to. America decides whether there will be war or peace. It’s so hard for a young man to feel proud of being an Arab, he says, when it is America that determines his chances for happiness and success.

Every now and then as we talk, a woman or a group of women walk by looking completely Western: no hijab, heavy makeup, a T-shirt, sometimes with several earrings or sexy boots.

”Do you look at the pretty girls here, or just ignore them?” I ask.

”Of course I look,” he says. ”I’m a human being.”

”Do you prefer the girls with hijabs or the Western-looking girls?”

”I prefer the hijab, of course.”

”You think the girls with hijabs are prettier?”

”Let’s be realistic,” he says, laughing. ”Maybe they’re not prettier. Maybe I prefer the Western-looking girls. But I wish they would wear the hijab.”

A bit of advice, gleaned from my long experience in the programming field: just one suicide bombing can really fuck up your career.

(Thanks, Dominic!)