If thou hast a Bible in the house right now and readeth it at least once a month, chances are strong it’s the majestic King James Version of the Bible in Elizabethan English, a new survey out today finds.

Lovers of the Truth

“Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.”
—Malachi 3:16

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
Hebrews 4:12

Of the 89% of U.S. adults who own at least one Bible, 67% own a King James, which marks its 400th anniversary this year, according to LifeWay Research, a Nashville-based Christian research agency.
Although there are two dozen English-language Bibles in many contemporary translations, the King James Version reigns even more supreme among those who actually read their Bibles: 82% of those who read the Good Book at least once a month rely on the translation that first brought the Scripture to the English-speaking masses worldwide.
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Age makes a difference. Seventy-six percent of Bible owners 55 and older have a King James, compared with 56% of those under 35, according to the survey of 1,004 adults, conducted March 2-6.
This version’s now-archaic phrasing and vocabulary don’t seem to be a problem of casting “ye your pearls before swine,” as it says in Matthew 7:6.
When LifeWay asked about readers’ experience with the language dating back to 1611, many called it “beautiful” (31%) or “easy to remember” (23%). It is, after all, the book that gave English countless idioms such as “salt of the earth,” “an eye for an eye,” “at our wit’s end” and “oh ye of little faith.”
Some called it hard to understand (27%) or outdated (16%).
About two in 10 of those under age 35 reported trouble understanding it, compared with about three in 10 of their elders.
“Christians believe that God’s Word is truth and that truth is conveyed through language — thus translations have always been integral to the spread of Christianity,” said Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research.
“It is hard to overstate the influence of the KJV,” he said.

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:2-5

Editors note about the words and Gog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Gog is the leader of the Russia alliance in the latter days., Magog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Magog, the descendant of Japheth, is identified as the Russian coalition in the latter days. and Persia•FYI: Persia in concert with Adolf Hitler, changed its name to Iran (Aryan Land) in May of 1935.

That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.

There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.

“The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed,” one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. “Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure.”

So a calling card in the code could be part of a mind game, or sloppiness or whimsy from the coders.

The malicious code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. But there are tantalizing hints that Iran’s nuclear program was the primary target. Officials in both the United States and Israel have made no secret of the fact that undermining the computer systems that control Iran’s huge enrichment plant at Natanz is a high priority. (The Iranians know it, too: They have never let international inspectors into the control room of the plant, the inspectors report, presumably to keep secret what kind of equipment they are using.)

The fact that Stuxnet appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants, may be telling. Just last year officials in Dubai seized a large shipment of those controllers — known as the Simatic S-7 — after Western intelligence agencies warned that the shipment was bound for Iran and would likely be used in its nuclear program.

“What we were told by many sources,” said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, “was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment.”

Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium — and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.

Yet something — perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians — is indeed slowing Iran’s advance.

The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)

Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.

These events add up to a mass of suspicions, not proof. Moreover, the difficulty experts have had in figuring out the origin of Stuxnet points to both the appeal and the danger of computer attacks in a new age of cyberwar.

For intelligence agencies they are an almost irresistible weapon, free of fingerprints. Israel has poured huge resources into Unit 8200, its secretive cyberwar operation, and the United States has built its capacity inside the National Security Agency and inside the military, which just opened a Cyber Command.

But the near impossibility of figuring out where they came from makes deterrence a huge problem — and explains why many have warned against the use of cyberweapons. No country, President Obama was warned even before he took office, is more vulnerable to cyberattack than the United States.

For now, it is hard to determine if the worm has infected centrifuge controllers at Natanz. While the S-7 industrial controller is used widely in Iran, and many other countries, even Siemens says it does not know where it is being used. Alexander Machowetz, a spokesman in Germany for Siemens, said the company did no business with Iran’s nuclear program. “It could be that there is equipment,” he said in a telephone interview. “But we never delivered it to Natanz.”

But Siemens industrial controllers are unregulated commodities that are sold and resold all over the world — the controllers intercepted in Dubai traveled through China, according to officials familiar with the seizure.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been “weaponized” and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.

“It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys,” he said, “and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer.”

There are many reasons to suspect Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.

He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.

“They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,” he said.

Then there is the allusion to myrtus — which may be telling, or may be a red herring.

Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.

It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.

“If you read the Bible you can make a guess,” said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.

Carol Newsom, an Old Testament scholar at Emory University, confirmed the linguistic connection between the plant family and the Old Testament figure, noting that Queen Esther’s original name in Hebrew was Hadassah, which is similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle. Perhaps, she said, “someone was making a learned cross-linguistic wordplay.”

But other Israeli experts said they doubted Israel’s involvement. Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”

“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”

Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work.

—Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Israel, and William J. Broad from New York.

Former Revolutionary Guard member who relayed its secret operations to CIA for 10 years says Iran will commit ‘most horrendous suicide bombing in human history’ if not stopped

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:2-5

Editors note about the words and Gog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Gog is the leader of the Russia alliance in the latter days., Magog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Magog, the descendant of Japheth, is identified as the Russian coalition in the latter days. and Persia•FYI: Persia in concert with Adolf Hitler, changed its name to Iran (Aryan Land) in May of 1935.

A former fighter in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) turned US spy offered a rare glance into one of the most complex countries in the Middle East.

During a conference held at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Friday, Reza Kahlili (pseudonym) estimated that Iran will eventually attack Israel, Europe and the Persian Gulf states. He called for a preemptive strike on the regime in Tehran, but not on the Iranian people or the country’s infrastructure.

Kahlili accused the Obama Administration of being naïve. According to him, the American overtures are viewed by the Iranian regime as a sign of weakness, while the Iranian people consider the efforts to engage the regime an act of betrayal against their struggle for freedom.

Click here to listen to Kahlili speak at conference

“This is a messianic regime. There should be no doubt – they are going to commit the most horrendous suicide bombing in human history. They will attack Israel, European capitals, and (the) Persian Gulf region at the same time,” said Kahlili in one of his first public appearances to promote his new book “A Time To Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran”.

Kahlili said he joined the Revolutionary Guard following the Islamic revolution of 1979, but volunteered to work for the CIA when he became disillusioned with the Khomeini regime after witnessing acts of rape, torture and murder.

Kahlili, arrived at the conference wearing a surgical mask, sunglasses and a baseball cap to conceal his identity. Out of concern for his safety, as well as that of his family inside Iran, his voice was also disguised.

For 10 years, under the code name “Wally,” he relayed the secret operations of the IRGC back to American intelligence, eventually fleeing to the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, Kahlili reestablished contact with his sources in Iran and began once again providing information to the CIA, according to the Washington Institute.

On February 26, Syrian president Bashar al-Asad hosted Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah for a dinner in Damascus. Nasrallah is a routine guest in the capital, but the timing of this high-profile trip — just a week after the United States dispatched Undersecretary of State William Burns to Damascus and nominated its first new ambassador in five years — seemed calculated not only to irritate Washington, but also to highlight the central role Hizballah plays in Iran and Syria’s strategic planning. Apart from serving as a pivot between Tehran and Damascus, however, the group also holds the power to engulf Lebanon and perhaps the entire region into another war through actions of its own.

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:5

Editors note about Persia and Hezblooah•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe Persia is the area of present day Iran.
It certainly appears that, Hezblooah, is a surrogate army for Iran.

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Syria and Damascus

“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous•Strongs 4654: mappalah, map-paw-law´; or mappelah, map-pay-law´; from 5307; something fallen, i.e. a ruin:—ruin( ous). heap.”
—Isaiah 17:1

“Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars.”
—Zechariah 11:1

Unfulfilled Promise of Retaliation

Two years after Hizballah military commander Imad Mughniyah was assassinated in Damascus — prompting Nasrallah to declare an “open war” on Israel, the presumed perpetrator — the group has yet to successfully retaliate. But it is not for lack of trying: in 2008, two Hizballah operatives and several Azerbaijani nationals were convicted of plotting attacks against the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Baku and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The same year, Turkish authorities foiled as many as six possible Hizballah terrorist plots targeting Israelis and possibly the local Jewish community. Iranian intelligence agents were reportedly helping the group establish a network of operatives posing as tourists.

During his February 16, 2010 speech marking the martyrdom of Mughniyah and other Hizballah heroes, Nasrallah rationalized the conspicuous lack of significant retaliation: “Our options are open and we have all the time in the world….[W]e are the ones to choose the time and place and target.” He also suggested that Hizballah had not yet found a target that “rises to the level” of Mughniyah.

Meanwhile, the group has been preparing for a conventional fight against Israel by stockpiling weapons in the south in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. In July 2009, for example, a large arms depot believed to contain bullets, rockets, and artillery shells exploded in Khirbet Silim village, nine miles north of the Israeli border. Three months later, another Hizballah cache detonated near Tayr Filsay village just south of the Litani River. It is unclear whether these explosions were coincidental or acts of (presumably) Israeli sabotage. In addition, a month after the second explosion, the Israeli navy interdicted a ship carrying fifty-five tons of Iranian weapons to Hizballah. Then, in January 2010, UN peacekeepers uncovered 660 pounds of explosives buried along the Israel border, reportedly pre-positioned by the Shiite militia.

These discoveries represent only a fraction of the weapons Hizballah has procured during its most recent massive military buildup. Since the 2006 war with Israel, the group has acquired an estimated 40,000 rockets and — with Syria’s help — reportedly improved the quality of its arsenal. In addition to boosting the range of this stockpile, Syria may have provided the organization with the Russian-made shoulder-fired Igla-S antiaircraft system, which is capable of downing Israeli F-16s. Nasrallah hinted at this possibility in February 2009, stating, “Every few days, reports appear that the resistance has acquired…sophisticated air defense missiles,” adding coyly, “Of course, I neither deny nor confirm this.” U.S. officials have already confirmed in the Arab press that Hizballah is training with Syria on the antiquated SA-2 antiaircraft system.

New Strategy against Israel

To complement its upgraded arsenal, Hizballah recently spelled out a new, more aggressive military posture toward Israel. Since the 2006 war, rumors have persisted that the group would cross the border and “take the fighting to Israel” in the next conflict. During his February 16, speech, Nasrallah offered a new vision of strategic parity with Israel, if not an advanced conception of the organization’s longstanding “balance of terror” strategy.

Deriding Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system as a “science fiction movie,” Nasrallah upped the ante by pledging to go toe to toe with Israel in the next campaign. In 2009, he had warned that if Israel bombed the Hizballah stronghold in Beirut’s southern Dahiya suburb,, then the group would “bomb Tel Aviv.” This time he went one step further, stating that if Israel bombed Beirut airport, “We will bomb Ben Gurion airport,” and then adding ports, oil refineries, factories, and power plants to the list. He also boasted that Hizballah would confront Israeli threats “not with withdrawal, hiding, or fear, but with clarity, steadfastness, preparedness, and with threats, too.”

Repairing Hizballah’s Image in Lebanon

Despite considerable success in rebuilding an impressive military infrastructure under the nose of UN observers, Hizballah’s image has suffered at home. In May 2008, the group invaded and occupied Beirut. In June 2009, it failed to win a majority in Lebanese parliamentary elections. That same month, the fraudulent presidential election in Iran undermined the legitimacy of Hizballah’s chief patron and its controversial doctrine of velayat-e faqih (Islamic governance), to which the group adheres.

Even more detrimental to Hizballah’s domestic standing is evidence implicating the group in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri, as reported by Der Spiegel in May 2009 and underscored by Le Monde last month. Nasrallah has repeatedly denied these stories, but the public perception that the Shiite militia was involved in the killing of the Lebanese Sunni leader persists. Worse, in September 2009, one of Hizballah’s chief local financiers went bankrupt in a Ponzi scheme — a particularly damaging scandal given that it involved the same kind of corruption that the group routinely accuses the Sunni government in Beirut of perpetrating.

Nasrallah has attempted to mitigate the impact of these accusations and soften public attitudes toward the group. In his February 16 speech, for example, he offered condolences to the Hariris on the anniversary of Rafiq’s martyrdom. And in December 2009, he delivered a surreal speech promoting the novel idea that his constituents should adhere to Lebanese laws, such as respecting traffic signals, paying for (as opposed to stealing) government water and electricity, abiding by building laws and civil codes, and putting an end to smuggling that undercuts Lebanese businesses. In addition, he emphasized the importance of civil servants showing up for their jobs and actually performing their duties.

Hizballah’s efforts to improve its image also included the publication of a new “manifesto” in November 2009, updating its 1985 charter. Although the new document reiterated the group’s longstanding enmity toward the United States and its commitment to “resistance,” it differed from the 1985 version in ways seemingly designed to reingratiate the organization to a broad Lebanese audience. For example, the new version downplayed Hizballah’s allegiance to the clerical leadership in Tehran and instead focused on its participation in the Lebanese political system. Likewise, rather than urging Lebanese Christians to convert — as the 1985 manifesto put it, “We call upon you to embrace Islam” — the group adopted the more palatable conciliatory language of consensus politics.

Conclusion

If Hizballah succeeds in avenging Mughniyah by striking an Israeli target — whether on the border or abroad — it could set off another round of fighting similar to that of 2006. This time, however, other actors could well enter the fray. If one takes Damascus at its word, Syria may decide to participate in the next Israeli-Hizballah war, a development that could spark a region-wide conflagration. At the moment, Hizballah may be keeping its powder dry on orders from Tehran, in anticipation of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Still, avenging Mughniyah is a key priority for the group, and its success or failure in meeting this goal could be the difference between the current status quo and a regional war.

David Schenker is the Aufzien fellow and director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Matthew Levitt is a senior fellow and director of the Institute’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.

ON A WARM, cloudy day in the fall of 1999, the town of Daphne, Ala., stirred to life. The high-school band came pounding down Main Street, past the post office and the library and Christ the King Church. Trumpeters in gold-tasseled coats tipped their horns to the sky, heralding the arrival of teenage demigods. The star quarterback and his teammates came first in the parade, followed by the homecoming queen and her court. Behind them, on a float bearing leaders of the student government, a giddy mop-haired kid tossed candy to the crowd.

To view dictionary popup window put your cursor on the blue scripture words.

Perilous Times

“This know also, that in the last days perilous•Strongs 5467: chalepos, khal-ep-os´; perhaps from 5465 through the idea of reducing the strength; difficult, i.e. dangerous, or (by implication) furious:—fierce, perilous. times shall come.”
—2 Timothy 3:1-2a

”But evil•Strongs 4190: poneros, pon-ay-ros´; from a derivative of 4192; hurtful, i.e. evil (properly, in effect or influence, and thus differing from 2556, which refers rather to essential character, as well as from 4550, which indicates degeneracy from original virtue); figuratively, calamitous; also (passively) ill, i.e. diseased; but especially (morally) culpable, i.e. derelict, vicious, facinorous; neuter (singular) mischief, malice, or (plural) guilt; masculine (singular) the devil, or (plural) sinners:—bad, evil, grievous, harm, lewd, malicious, wicked(-ness). See also 4191.
•Strongs 4192: ponos, pon´-os; from the base of 3993; toil, i.e. (by implication) anguish:—pain. men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
—2 Timothy 3:13

Editors note about the word perilous•FYI: The Greek word (chalepos) (perilous) is only used one other time in the New Testament, Matthew 8:28. There it is translated as (fierce) when describing the nature of the devils that possess Legion and his cohort.

Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

More than 20 of those fighters have come from the United States, many of them young Somali-Americans from a gritty part of Minneapolis. But it is Hammami who has put a contemporary face on the Shabab’s medieval tactics. In a recent propaganda video viewed by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a soundtrack of jihadi rap plays in the background.

He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, “the American,” and speaks to the camera with a cool, almost eerie confidence. “We’re waiting for the enemy to come,” Hammami whispers, a smile crossing his face. Later he vows, “We’re going to kill all of them.”

In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab’s leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. “To have an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization — we have not seen that before,” a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

Not long ago, the threat of American-bred terrorists seemed a distant one. Law-enforcement officials theorized that Muslims in the United States — by comparison with many of their European counterparts — were upwardly mobile, socially integrated and therefore less susceptible to radicalization. Perhaps the greatest proof of this came with the absence of domestic terrorist attacks following 9/11, a period that has brought Europe devastating homegrown hits in Madrid and London.

America is now at a watershed. In the last year, at least two dozen men in the United States have been charged with terrorism-related offenses. They include Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant driver in Denver who authorities say was conspiring to carry out a domestic attack; David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American from Chicago who is suspected of helping plan the 2008 attacks in Mumbai; and the five young men from Virginia who, authorities say, sought training in Pakistan to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.

These cases have sent intelligence analysts scurrying for answers. The American suspects come from different backgrounds and socioeconomic strata, but they share much in common with Europe’s militants: they tend to be highly motivated, even gifted people who were reared in the West with one foot in the Muslim world. Others may see them as rigid or zealous, but they envision themselves as deeply principled, possessing what Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, calls “an altruism gone wildly wrong.” While their religious piety varies, they are most often bonded by a politically driven anger that has deepened as America’s war against terrorism endures its ninth year.

The presence of Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has brought those conflicts closer for many Muslims in America. Through satellite television and the Internet, the distance between here and there — between Fort Hood, Tex., and Yemen, between Daphne, Ala., and Somalia — has narrowed. For Omar Hammami, the war in Iraq provided a critical spark as he turned toward militancy.

In an e-mail message in December, Hammami responded to questions, submitted to him through an intermediary, about his personal evolution and political views. “We espouse the same creed and methodology of Al Qaeda,” he wrote. Of Osama bin Laden, he said, “All of us are ready and willing to obey his commands.” Did Hammami, like bin Laden, consider America a legitimate target for attack? “It’s quite obvious that I believe America is a target,” he wrote.

OMAR HAMMAMI’S SISTER, Dena, is a petite 28-year-old woman with silky brown hair and a graceful manner. She lives with her husband and their baby daughter in an airy house overlooking a small American city, which she asked that I not identify for their protection. The walls are decorated with Dena’s whimsical paintings, which draw inspiration from Kandinsky. Wind chimes dangle over the front porch, by a sign that reads, “Hippies use side door.”

One morning in September, she was sitting in her kitchen when she opened her laptop, logged on to Facebook and saw a message that read, “Rolling farting leotard.” Her heart began to race.

Years earlier, Dena had put a note in her little brother’s school binder, trying to crack him up. She told him to picture a fat girl in a leotard, rolling across the floor and passing gas. It had become one of their many inside jokes. Now, she realized, it was her brother’s way of reaching out from Somalia, of saying, “It’s really me.” He had created a fictitious Facebook profile, listing his alma maters as Stanford and Harvard.

“Things are pretty good,” he wrote. He and his new Somali wife (“the wifey,” he called her) had a baby girl. “Sometimes marriage is up,” he wrote. “Sometimes it’s down. The lifestyle is not exactly normal for most.”

Hammami wouldn’t say where he was, but he urged Dena not to worry about him. He was prepared to meet death, he said. “I don’t do anything too dangerous except once every month or so,” he added. “It’s all in God’s hands.”

Hammami’s life in Somalia appears to be more precarious than he let on. He spends much of his time shuttling between villages in southern Somalia, where many of the Shabab’s camps are based, according to Somali intelligence officials. In addition to his role as a military tactician, they said, Hammami helps guide the Shabab’s recruitment strategy and management of money — exercising surprising power after landing in Somalia as a 22-year-old rookie. The Somali government is seeking increased American aid to fight the Shabab and may have reason to play up the threat of foreigners like Hammami. But they were adamant about his role. “This guy is dangerous,” says Abdullahi Mohamed Ali, the Somali minister of national security. “He’s a threat to the region. I want him to be eliminated.”

When Hammami engages in combat, he makes an impression on other militants, said a former Shabab commander, Sheikh Mohamed Sheikh Abdullahi Sheikh Mohamed. “He doesn’t blink in the face of the enemy,” said Mohamed, who recalled four battles in 2008 and 2009 in which he and Hammami took part. In combat, Hammami used a sharpshooter’s rifle, firing calmly and with precision, said Mohamed, who spoke to me by telephone this month from a government compound in Mogadishu after defecting to the government’s side. Somali officials said they were keeping him there for his protection.

Until recently, the few visible images of American jihadis were of young men on the margins: John Walker Lindh, a Californian loner who wandered into Afghanistan to join the Taliban; or Adam Gadahn, now a Qaeda spokesman, who grew up home-schooled on a goat farm and channeled his teenage energies into death-metal music. If Omar Hammami followed his own compass, others followed him. Years later, more than one of his classmates compared him to the incongruous high-school hero of the 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Hammami’s journey from a Bible Belt town in America to terrorist training camps in Somalia was pieced together from interviews with his parents, sister, best friends and law-enforcement officials, as well as hours of home videos and passages from his e-mail messages, journal entries and hundreds of his postings on an Internet forum. If anything has remained a constant in Hammami’s life, it is his striving for another place and purpose, which flickered in a poem he wrote when he was 12:

“My reality is a bore. I wish, I want, I need the wall to fall and the monster to let me pass, the leash to snap, the chains to break. . . .

“I’ve got a taste of glory, the ticket, but where is my train?”

DAPHNE SITS ALONG Alabama’s serene Mobile Bay, just north of the Gulf of Mexico. The town seems stopped in time. Colonial-style cottages and gazebos dot the bluffs. The wide, blacktopped streets are shaded by pecan trees and Southern maples. At dusk, the tide slaps the docks as fishermen loll, casting silhouettes against a golden sky.

Shafik Hammami was searching for a quiet American town when he left Syria in 1972. He was reared in Damascus, the oldest of nine children whose father ran an import-export business. Shafik wanted to study medicine and heard that small colleges in less-populated parts of the United States were best suited for immigrants, “so you don’t get lost in the shuffle,” he told me recently. By chance, a translator working in Damascus handed him a brochure for Faulkner State Community College in Bay Minette, not far from Daphne. He looked no farther.

At Faulkner, Shafik, then 20, stuck close to the handful of other Middle Eastern students, part of a wave of Arab immigrants who were ushered into the United States by looser immigration laws. With wavy black hair and halting English, he stood out in a place that was historically suspicious of outsiders. One evening, while driving through nearby Mobile, he came upon a group of men wearing white cones on their heads and asking for money, his first brush with the Ku Klux Klan.

But Alabama’s conservative Christian culture agreed with him. Most of the women he encountered didn’t drink or smoke. Those were the first things he liked about Debra Hadley, a perky high-school senior he met through friends. The daughter of a butcher, she had rosy cheeks and a fluttering laugh and rarely missed a Sunday service. Soon Debra and Shafik were engaged.

It did not violate Shafik’s Muslim faith to marry a Christian. Debra got her mother’s blessing after promising never to convert to Islam. They had a church wedding, followed by a Muslim ceremony in the reception hall. They each wondered if, eventually, the other might cede ground.

By the time Omar was born eight years later, his parents and sister had moved into a ranch house in Daphne, a town of 19,000 where cotton fields have given way to subdivisions with names like Plantation Hills. Shafik had become a civil engineer and was working at the Department of Transportation. Debra taught elementary school.

The first years of Omar’s life followed the cues of his mother’s Southern upbringing. Freckled and blond, he answered to Omie. He spent summer afternoons on his grandparents’ farm in nearby Perdido, shelling peas and eating watermelon on the porch. He lost himself in “Tom Sawyer.” His uncles taught him to hunt deer.

On Sundays, Omar, Dena and their mother settled into the wooden pews of Perdido Baptist Church, a tiny congregation whose preacher warned of hellfire and damnation. At first, Shafik had no idea. Debra told the kids to keep their churchgoing a secret. They also attended Bible camp in the summers (Omar won $10 for rattling off the names of all the books of the Old Testament). When he was 6, he voluntarily walked to the front of the church to be baptized. “I believed it; I wanted it,” he later told his friend Trey Gunter.

Shafik tried to teach his children Arabic and later Islam, but the lessons held little resonance. Syria remained a distant backdrop amid the Fourth of July fireworks, Halloween costumes and shrimp gumbo of their American youth. Omar had gone from calling his father Babba — Arabic for “father” — to Bubba. Still, the Hammami home remained culturally Muslim. They left their shoes at the door. Koranic inscriptions decorated the walls. Pork was forbidden. “It was like two different schools of thought under one roof,” Dena says. “Thunder and lightning.”

The children learned to adapt. So did their parents. In one of the family’s home videos, shot on Oct. 8, 1992, Shafik points the camera at a cake. “Today is Debra’s birthday,” he says in a Syrian accent that has acquired an Alabaman lilt. “We’re fixin’ to celebrate her birthday in a few minutes.” In the next shot, Debra stands by the cake, smiling brightly, as a Lebanese love ballad echoes through the house. Eight-year-old Omar licks frosting off the candles as his mother opens presents. She lifts a bottle of perfume to her nose.

“That’s worth getting old for, ain’t it?” Debra says with a laugh.

“I reckon,” Shafik answers from behind the camera.

A smirk crosses Omar’s face as he repeats, mockingly, “Ah reckin.”

That trademark smirk — the same one that would later appear in the Shabab’s propaganda — hinted early at Hammami’s delight in causing trouble. He was exceedingly smart but easily bored and short-tempered, once turning over his desk in second grade. His teachers tired of his endless questions. “He had a big mind in a small-minded place,” Dena says.

Hammami finally found a kindred soul in middle school. Kathleen Hirsch, his teacher in the gifted-student program, was a quirky Jewish woman who wore Ugg boots before they became popular and drove a bottle green Jaguar convertible. She turned her classroom into a salon, replacing the desks with sofas, brewing coffee and filling the shelves with Dylan Thomas and Gertrude Stein. She taught Hammami to “think outside of the box,” he later wrote.

He began to read voraciously, losing himself in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “1984” and even the dictionary. A natural debater, he was fiercely competitive, chiding himself for finishing second in a countywide speech contest. “He went over and over every minute detail, continually asking me what he had done wrong: How was his posture? Eye contact?” Hirsch, who taught Hammami for six years, recalled in a recent e-mail message. “He hated to lose.”

She found him introspective for his age; a seeker of weighty subjects. In a journal he kept at school, Hammami wrote: “I don’t believe war should exist. It doesn’t have a point.” In a later entry, on April 13, 1996, he described the Oklahoma bombing as “stupid,” adding, “I wish violence would vanish clear from the earth.”

LOOKING BACK ON their childhood, Dena remembers a pestering little brother who followed her like a shadow. She wore hemp necklaces and Birkenstocks and thought nothing of cutting class. Hammami, who idolized her, soon followed her lead, getting high on marijuana and mushrooms by eighth grade, friends recalled.

Shafik was always a strict father (he once washed out his son’s mouth with detergent, causing him to throw up). But as the kids entered adolescence, Shafik became consumed with trying to keep his daughter on what he saw as a respectable path. He forbade her from talking on the phone unsupervised. He ruled out prom and even insisted that she wear leggings during soccer practice to avoid exposing her legs.

Dena did her best to flout the rules, with her brother as her ready accomplice. He helped her trade phone calls with boys and sneak out of the house. She and Omar shared the intimacy of twins; each was the other’s witness to an upbringing that only they could understand.

Finally, when she turned 16, Dena decided she could no longer bear her father’s rules. She hugged her brother tightly as she left.

“Sorry I can’t take you with me,” she told him.

She moved in with a friend’s family and returned only years later, to visit. The episode forced Hammami, he later wrote, “to think for myself and make my own way.”

That fall, Hammami claimed his place as one of the more popular kids at Daphne High School. The jocks found him funny; the nerds, literary; the skateboarders, alluringly rebellious. Though he was short and rail thin, girls were drawn by his cocky bravado. He soon won over Lauren Stevenson, one of the most beautiful girls in school. “He could just command people with his energy,” she says.

Yet for all of his social triumph, Hammami was consumed with a profound internal conflict. He didn’t know whether to be Muslim or Christian. On rare trips to Damascus when they were little, Omar and Dena were warned by relatives that they would go to hell if they weren’t Muslim, Dena recalled. In Perdido, their mother’s family insisted that hell was reserved for non-Christians.

When he was 12, Hammami wrote in his journal, “Sometimes I get confused because the Bible says one thing and our textbooks and Darwin say another.” He had a hard time understanding how God could have a son. That same year, his father began urging him to study Islam.

Shafik had experienced his own religious renewal after drifting from his practice during college. There were no mosques in Daphne (the Chamber of Commerce lists 43 churches). But in nearby Mobile, the University of South Alabama had given rise to a small Muslim community of Palestinian, Pakistani and Egyptian professionals. By the time Omar was in high school, his father had become an active member of a growing mosque, the Islamic Society of Mobile, and helped found the area’s first Islamic school.

A trip to Damascus the summer before Hammami’s sophomore year would make a lasting impression on him. He loved the order of things: how his aunts waited on him, how his male cousins shared a “cohesiveness of brotherhood,” Stevenson, his high-school girlfriend, recalled. In photos of the trip, Hammami had traded in his khakis and polo shirts for a long cotton tunic and a prayer cap. A family video shows him bowing to Mecca in prayer one evening.

When he got back to Daphne, Hammami remained conflicted. One night before he went to sleep, he turned to God for guidance. “Slowly I started to incline toward Islam,” he later wrote to his sister, “and my heart became tranquil.”

But Hammami’s conversion was neither smooth nor straightforward. He was the president of his sophomore class. He treasured his Friday-night routine — the football game, the meal at Waffle House and the marathon session of GoldenEye on Nintendo. He would smoke a cigarette and then feel guilty. He was smitten with Stevenson yet stopped holding her hand. Soon Hammami began taking off on Fridays to attend his father’s mosque. He finally got permission to pray at school, kneeling opposite a cinder-block wall in the library as students stole wide-eyed glances.

NO ONE WAS more struck by Hammami’s transformation than his mother.

On a recent morning, Debra skipped about her sun-filled kitchen fixing a plate of grits. A chatty woman with lively brown eyes, she was well into her third cup of coffee. In the next room, an oak table was permanently set for dinner, a nod to her Southern upbringing. The cranberry walls of her tidy neo-Colonial were free of Christian relics and family photographs, in keeping with Muslim tradition.

Debra learned to walk a fine line when it came to religion. But Christianity remained the compass of her life. She called Shafik’s mosque “his church” and the Koran “his bible.” She wasn’t going to let her son defect without a fight. “Where are the verses about love in your bible?” she prodded him. They “argued and argued and argued,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

Like his mother, Hammami was stubborn. When he became convinced of something, he turned to convincing others. At Daphne High, he managed to persuade a handful of students, including his girlfriend, to explore Islam — a striking development at a school where Christian teenagers routinely gathered at the flagpole for prayer.

“He would say, ‘So if Jesus is God, who does he pray to?’ ” recalled his friend Bernie Culveyhouse. “And if you said, ‘God,’ he’d say, ‘Doesn’t that make Jesus a narcissist?’ ”

Culveyhouse soon converted. Stevenson decided it was not for her, and Hammami broke it off. His other friendships were already strained when, one afternoon in 2000, the subject in class turned to Osama bin Laden. Then a relatively obscure terrorist, bin Laden had claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One boy in the class suggested that bin Laden should be shot dead.

“What if I said that about Billy Graham?” Hammami demanded.

“Billy Graham is a peaceable preacher,” the boy, a Christian, recalled saying. “Osama bin Laden is a terrorist.”

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Hammami replied.

By his junior year, Hammami had become a spectacle. He made a point of praying by the flagpole outside school yet refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, friends recalled. In class, he swore at Hirsch, his longtime teacher, assailing her for being Jewish. That spring, in another class, Hammami tried to choke a student who interrupted him as he was reciting the Koran, students recalled. Hammami was promptly suspended. With high grades and an A.C.T. score in the 93rd percentile, he skipped his senior year and enrolled at the University of South Alabama. There, he no longer prayed alone. He could walk to the mosque from campus, and he soon took over as president of the fledgling Muslim Student Association.

Soon after, the hijackers struck on 9/11, and local reporters began calling Hammami for comment. Publicly, he struck a measured tone, telling the school paper, “It’s difficult to believe a Muslim could have done this.” But he was caught off guard by the attacks and felt insufficiently knowledgeable about Islam, friends recalled. He set out to deepen his study and soon fell under the influence of Tony Salvatore Sylvester, a 35-year-old convert and preacher who was new in town.

Sylvester wore a thin blond beard and was missing his two front teeth. Brought up Catholic in the rural town of Doylestown, Pa., he found Islam in his early 20s while working as a jazz-fusion guitarist in Philadelphia. He had come to Mobile with his wife and six children, hoping to land a job at the Islamic school. By then, he was considered a prominent voice in the American Salafi movement.

SALAF, IN ARABIC, means “ancestors.” Followers of the movement, who are sometimes likened to Calvinist Protestants, advocate a strict return to the fundamentals of Islam. To purge their practice of modern influences, they try to emulate the founders of the faith — the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and the two generations that came after his death in A.D. 632. Young Salafis, for example, often dress in sandals and robes like those thought to have been worn in seventh-century Arabia.

The Salafist interpretation of Islamic doctrine tends to be literal and originalist. “They remind me a lot of Scalia in their approach to texts,” says Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University. The movement is most prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and Jordan but has also won adherents in the West among second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants who are seeking a more authentic Islam than that of their assimilative parents.

In the United States, the trend can be traced to a handful of Middle Eastern scholars who began preaching in the 1980s, gaining a small but vocal following in places like Arlington, Tex., and Syracuse, N.Y. Their teachings spread among prison converts and found footholds in Philadelphia and Detroit, where in the 1990s Tony Sylvester managed what was then the headquarters of a leading Salafi organization, the Quran and Sunnah Society.

Several of Sylvester’s students said in interviews that he subscribed to a nonviolent school, one that represented the majority of American Salafis. They tend to believe that Muslims should remain politically disengaged and take up arms only when called to duty in a Muslim-governed country; anything else represents rebellion against the government, which violates Islamic law.

But the Salafi movement also has its share of revolutionaries — the so-called Salafi jihadis (including Osama bin Laden), who argue that rebellion is permissible. Some members of Sylvester’s original circle broke with the group over the issue of rebellion, including Ali Al-Timimi, who was convicted in 2005 on terrorism-related charges in what is sometimes known as the Virginia paintball case.

Hammami plunged headlong into Salafism, mastering its nuances and lexicon. The movement gave him a new sense of brotherhood and discipline. But it was, above all, “an excuse to disobey his father,” recalls Joseph Stewart, a Muslim convert who became close to Hammami.

Shafik Hammami was by then the president of the Mobile mosque. In many ways, he embodied the Muslim-American mainstream. He held a comfortable job and wore a suit and tie to work. His son, meanwhile, began striding around campus in a scarlet red turban and a thobe, the ankle-length gown used by gulf Arabs. He spent his free time with a group of white Salafi converts whom immigrant Muslims at the mosque dismissed as “the Dixies.” The circle included Stewart, a burly 29-year-old who had started a carpet-cleaning business, and Bernie Culveyhouse, Omar’s friend from Daphne High.

A towering, lanky boy with sky blue eyes, Culveyhouse met Hammami playing basketball in fourth grade. He was brought up by a single mother who drank heavily and fashioned herself a “Harley honey,” disappearing into the night dressed head to toe in black leather. By the time Culveyhouse came to Islam, he was fighting marijuana and Ecstasy habits and failing out of school.

Everyone in the group took a new name. Culveyhouse chose Suhayb. Stewart called himself Yusuf. Hammami sometimes went by Abu Hafs, one of the venerated companions of the prophet. They distanced themselves from the mosque, meeting weekly with Sylvester to parse theology and questions of moral conduct.

Hammami soon began denouncing the militant Islamists he once defended. He came to believe that Muslims were suffering because they had lost their religion, Culveyhouse and Stewart recall. The solution, Hammami now argued, was not to take up arms but to engage in a spiritual jihad, practicing the faith with greater devotion. He and his friends ordered their lives around a strict code: they could not look at women, listen to music, be photographed or sleep with their backsides facing Mecca.

No one in the group was more dogmatic than Hammami. He insisted on eating with his bare right hand, as the prophet had, and wearing his pants above the ankle, a popular look among Salafis. Shafik found some of his son’s new convictions theologically debatable. The conflict between them, which had been simmering for some time, blew open when Omar refused to pose for a family photograph in April 2002. Shafik ordered him to move out.

In a town where 9/11 had prompted a thick canopy of American flags, Omar devoted himself to da’wah, the practice of spreading the Islamic faith. His style was to provoke inquiry. He strolled through Wal-Mart and Arby’s in his robe, hoping to attract questions from strangers. He drove a red Honda Civic with a sign on the back that read: “As Muslims we believe in one God. We don’t worship rocks, trees or men.”

More often than not, he and his fellow converts were met with disbelief.

“Everybody looked at us as if we were Satan,” Culveyhouse recalls.

One afternoon, a group of young men in a pickup truck approached Hammami and Culveyhouse near a pier south of Daphne, where they sometimes read the Koran.

“This is the stick I have for boys who wear dresses,” one of the men warned them, waving a miniature baseball bat.

In a flash, Hammami reached into his car and grabbed the broken-off handle of a wooden shovel, Culveyhouse recalls.

“And this is the stick I have for faggots,” he shot back.

Throughout his religious transformation, Hammami kept much of his former self intact. Some nights, he and Culveyhouse darted around the mosque in their robes, sparring with invisible light sabers in homage to “Star Wars.” He continued to run red lights and rack up speeding tickets, refusing to rise for a judge in traffic court.

Above all, he remained close to his sister, Dena, who was dating a dreadlocked Deadhead (she later married him barefoot, wearing a crown of daisies). When Dena and Omar spent time together — he in his tunic, she in her “Jesus sandals” — they seemed blind to their differences, reverting to their sibling code of inside jokes and silly songs. “I wanted to keep how we always were,” she says.

But aside from his sister and mother, Hammami had nothing to do with women. Much of the time, he and his friends were tormented by sexual frustrations, two of them recall. Hammami would stare at a woman on the street and then chastise himself for hours, Stewart says. He surfed Islamic Internet forums in search of a wife. His father promised to help him marry a Syrian woman provided that Hammami completed his degree in computer studies. But in December 2002, he dropped out of college, saying that he could no longer bear to be in the company of women.

Over the next few years, Hammami, Culveyhouse and the other Mobile Salafis traveled around the country attending Islamic conferences. With Sylvester, they opened a small Muslim bookstore in Mobile, opposite a storage lot. Hammami worked to master Arabic and talked of becoming an Islamic scholar. In the meantime, he had to earn a living, and few jobs meshed with his piety. He loaded trucks, cleaned carpets and sold light bulbs.

For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart. Their boss, an ex-Marine, tolerated their odd look (they tucked their pants into their socks), but he was frustrated by their demands: they refused to touch alcohol, pork, Christmas cards and even dolls. The boss finally assigned them to the women’s clothing section.

“I looked at Omar and said, ‘Man, we can’t do anything in life, can we?’ ” Culveyhouse recalls. They quit that day. Soon after, Culveyhouse left for the bustling Muslim crossroads of Toronto, where he had found a wife. The following year, Hammami joined him, hoping to do the same.

HAMMAMI FOUND TORONTO — with its labyrinth of mosques, Islamic bookstores and halal grocers — enthralling. He took an apartment near Culveyhouse in the western part of the city and found a job delivering milk to Somali housewives. Living in Canada, Hammami began to see his country through a new lens. The war in Iraq was deeply unpopular at the mosques and coffee shops he frequented. Being an American invited a stream of questions and commentary for which Hammami felt unprepared, Culveyhouse recalled.

For years, Hammami had tuned out current events, dismissing politics as dunya — a worldly distraction from his Islamic practice. One afternoon in April, he and Culveyhouse dropped by an Islamic bookstore. The owner, an Afghan, told them to “pray for the people of Fallujah.” Months earlier, the U.S. military had invaded the Iraqi city, an insurgency stronghold, for the second time.

“What’s going on?” Hammami said.

Over the next few months, Hammami became consumed with events in Iraq and Afghanistan. He began subscribing to conspiracy theories about 9/11, Dena and Culveyhouse recall. He soon found himself rethinking his nonmilitant Salafi stance.

“I was finding it difficult to reconcile between having Americans attacking my brothers, at home and abroad, while I was supposed to remain completely neutral, without getting involved,” he wrote in the December e-mail message responding to questions posed to him through an intermediary.

Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been “hiding many parts of the religion that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics,” he wrote. He began searching for guidance on the Internet, Culveyhouse says, discovering a documentary about the life of Amir Khattab, a legendary jihadist who fought in Chechnya. The documentary traces Khattab’s evolution as a promising Saudi student who gave up a life that “any young man would desire” to embrace a higher purpose. Hammami was mesmerized, Culveyhouse recalls.

“Once you’ve made that step, it’s a gateway,” Culveyhouse says. “Once you’ve legitimized the jihad in Chechnya, you’re compelled to legitimize the jihad in other places as well.”

Back then, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked about jihad in the way that star football players at Daphne High School dreamed about the N.F.L. The idea remained romantic and hypothetical. Hammami assured friends, for instance, that he would go to Syria to fight if the United States ever invaded.

But action required the right set of circumstances. Hammami remained unimpressed by most of the militant Islamist groups he studied: he still disapproved of how Al Qaeda attacked civilians, and he saw the insurgency in Iraq as too secular, Culveyhouse said. Only a “pure jihad” — one that was carried out in defense of Muslim land with the purpose of creating an Islamic state — met Hammami’s standard.

Besides, Hammami had more pressing matters at hand. He was desperate to marry. Culveyhouse arranged an introduction to his Somali sister-in-law, Sadiyo Mohamed Abdille. A tall, wisecracking 19-year-old who wore skinny jeans and played basketball, Sadiyo grew up in Toronto with Culveyhouse’s wife, Ayan, after their family fled Somalia’s internecine violence. Hammami found her amusing and eager to learn more about Islam, Ayan recalled. Within a matter of weeks, he persuaded her to socialize with only women and to wear the abaya, a cloaklike garment. In March 2005, just two months after their first meeting, they married in a small, spartan ceremony.

With limited prospects in Toronto, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked quixotically of making hijra — migration — to a Muslim land. Culveyhouse proposed Egypt, where they could study Islam at the revered Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In September, Hammami and his pregnant wife boarded an airplane with Culveyhouse’s family, including his formerly Harley-riding mother, who had also converted to Islam.

The two families settled in Alexandria, Egypt, which they found disappointingly secular. When the applications to Al-Azhar fell through, Culveyhouse and his family returned to the United States. “I didn’t want to continue down this fool’s path,” he says. Hammami felt betrayed, Culveyhouse recalls, and they drifted apart.

Alone with his young wife and newborn daughter, Hammami seemed overwhelmed, Dena recalls. He found freelance work translating Islamic texts into English but had trouble supporting his family. In the December e-mail message, he wrote that he was yearning to live in a country “where Shariah was being implemented completely.”

In April 2006, Hammami joined an online discussion forum called Islamic Networking. Using the alias “al-Mizzi,” a relative recalls, Hammami began communicating with the administrator of the forum, an American convert who also happened to live in Egypt. The convert, Daniel Maldonado, was a 27-year-old from New Hampshire who moved there with his wife and children the previous year.

Hammami and Maldonado soon met in person, relatives recall, and began venturing into poor neighborhoods to attend underground mosques. That summer, Hammami wrote to two Muslim friends, saying he had met “a pious brother” and was planning “a trip.” He seemed to be communicating in code.

“Our family members to the south need doctors,” he told the friends, who described the exchanges only on the condition of anonymity.

When Hammami discussed Chechnya with them years earlier, “doctor” was their word for “those who make jihad,” one friend says. By the “south,” Hammami seemed to be referring to Somalia; he had been sending them news articles about the remarkable events unfolding there.

A BOOMERANG-SHAPED country on the Horn of Africa, Somalia had been consumed by a catastrophic civil war since 1991. What was not destroyed by famine and drought was plundered by warlords and pirates. Amid the chaos, an Islamist movement gave rise to an insurgency that took control of Mogadishu in June 2006. The insurgents — known as the Islamic Courts Union — promised a new unity under the banner of Islam and brought an unfamiliar peace to the streets of the capital.

Officials in Washington found the developments troubling. The group’s military wing — the Shabab, which means “youth” in Arabic — was said to be sheltering foreign Al Qaeda operatives. They were calling for a jihad against neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country and longtime enemy. Ethiopian troops gathered at the border, threatening an invasion with backing from the United States. News of the conflict quickly spread in jihadist chat rooms, as bin Laden called upon Muslims to join in Somalia’s fight.

From Egypt, Hammami followed the events closely. He was convinced that “jihad had become an obligation upon me,” he wrote in his December e-mail message. He wanted to help his “captive brothers and sisters” while helping himself “obtain the highest rank available” as a Muslim. (Jihadists believe that the greatest rewards in the afterlife are granted to them.) On their Internet forum, Hammami and Maldonado made impassioned pleas for action without directly referring to Somalia.

“Where is the desire to do something amazing?” Hammami wrote on Aug. 7, 2006. “Where is the urge to get up and change yourself — not to mention the world and other issues further off?”

“Stop sticking to the earth,” he continued, “and let your soul fly!”

Secretly, Maldonado and Hammami began planning to leave for Somalia, according to a written statement Maldonado later provided to U.S. investigators. On the morning of Nov. 6, Hammami woke his mother, who was visiting from Alabama, and kissed her on the cheek. He told her that he was going to Dubai for a few days to look for a job. “I love you,” he said.

Several days later, he called his apartment in Alexandria and told his wife, Sadiyo, that he was in fact in Somalia. Sadiyo, who agreed to answer my questions through her sister Ayan, found the story odd. Hammami told her that he traveled to Somalia because he wanted to meet her relatives. Indeed he was staying with Sadiyo’s grandmother in Mogadishu. Yet he seemed in no rush to leave. In other phone calls, he told Sadiyo and his parents that he was stranded because someone stole his passport.

Shafik and Debra scrambled to help their son, contacting the F.B.I. in Mobile, a local congressman and the State Department. They were told nothing could be done because the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Somalia. They tried to arrange for Hammami to cross the border, into Kenya or Djibouti, where a new passport could be issued.

Soon after, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia and swiftly gained control of Mogadishu. Leaders of the Islamic Courts Union fled the country, while their military wing, the Shabab, retreated to the south and mounted a new rebellion aimed at driving the Ethiopians out. Without a word to his family, Hammami vanished. It is not clear who connected him to the Shabab, but in the December e-mail message, he wrote, “I made it my goal to find those guys should I make it to Somalia,” adding that he “signed up for training.” Meanwhile, his friend Maldonado, who had also enlisted with the Shabab, was picked up by a multinational counterterrorism team along the Somalia-Kenya border. He has since been convicted in the United States for receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization and is serving a 10-year sentence.

Over the next few months, Mogadishu descended into a hellish war zone. That May, Hammami suddenly reappeared at the grandmother’s apartment, asking for a phone number to reach his wife, who had moved back to Toronto. Over the phone, Hammami told Sadiyo that he was still trying to leave Somalia, Ayan said. A month later, he called with a different story. He wanted his wife and daughter to join him.

“He was saying: ‘It’s so wonderful. There’s going to be an Islamic state,’ ” Ayan recalled Sadiyo telling her. “He was making it this utopia of happiness.”

THE PROMISE OF an Islamic state, and by extension a caliphate, or Islamic world order, has long been the anthem of the global jihadist movement. It is central to the ideology of Al Qaeda, which has allied itself with smaller militant groups as its financing and core leadership have come under assault.

Al Qaeda offers these groups a powerful brand; the groups offer Al Qaeda an expanded platform. Yet the exact nature and significance of Al Qaeda’s connection to the Shabab remain unclear. The majority of the Shabab’s fighters are Somalis, many of whom were drawn to the movement by nationalist fervor (including some of the first Somali-American recruits). A smaller contingent of foreign fighters — young men like Hammami — joined as part of the global jihad. Rookie recruits from the United States and Europe would seem to offer little but cannon fodder to their battle-hardened Somali counterparts. But Westerners bring the Shabab prestige and possible financing from abroad. They also bring their passports — with which they could conceivably return to cities like Sydney, New York or London to carry out attacks.

When Hammami joined the Shabab in late 2006, he had no known military training. Like other foreign fighters, he quickly fell ill, probably with malaria, he told Dena in e-mail messages and phone calls. He started reaching out to her the following summer, after his wife in Toronto asked for a divorce. He never disclosed what he was doing, but he seemed to have little power: he had to ask permission to make phone calls, he told Dena.

But over time, Hammami caught the attention of his superiors. He brought an unusual skill set: he was articulate, computer savvy, well organized and fluent in Arabic. “He has that charisma,” says an American law-enforcement official. Hammami came to be seen as an asset by two Qaeda-linked militants, the official said: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.

Mohammed, who is also known as Haroun Fazul, is believed to be Al Qaeda’s longtime chief in East Africa. A native of the Comoros Islands off Mozambique, he is accused of organizing the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left more than 200 dead. He also is wanted for the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel and the unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter jet in Mombasa, Kenya. Nabhan, a Kenyan of Yemeni descent, was also suspected in both attacks. He was killed in Somalia last September in a daylight raid by a helicopter-borne team of American Special Operations troops.

In October 2007 — less than a year after Hammami landed in Somalia — he made his public debut as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he stared confidently into the camera, a thin, green scarf concealing half of his face. “Oh, Muslims of America, take into consideration the situation in Somalia,” he began in English. “After 15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up and established peace and justice in this land.”

Over the next two years, Hammami’s stature in the Shabab continued to rise as the group launched suicide attacks and ruled in fear. Where its rebels held sway, they carried out public floggings, amputations and beheadings in the name of Shariah, alienating many. Hammami gave no indication that he was troubled by such punishments. “Human rights,” he said in an audio recording released by the Shabab last July, is “the Western form of democracy which cannot be reconciled with Islam.”

By the summer of 2008, Hammami was leading military strikes in the field — including a deadly ambush on Ethiopian troops that the Shabab captured on the video now popular on YouTube, American law-enforcement officials say. Among the fighters in the ambush were several of the Somali-Americans from Minneapolis, officials said, including Shirwa Ahmed, an aloof 26-year-old college dropout. Three months after the ambush, on Oct. 28, Ahmed blew himself up in northern Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. Senior American and Somali intelligence officials say that Hammami helped organize that attack — along with four others the same day that together left more than 20 dead.

The Shabab continued to lose support after Ethiopia withdrew from Somalia last January, and a new president — Sheik Sharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamist insurgency — began paving the way for a democratic Islamic state. Around that time, Hammami called Dena with a stunning announcement. “In the next video, I’m going to show my face,” he said. “It makes more of a statement if my face is uncovered.”

The 31-minute video, released by the Shabab last March, is a veritable homage to Hammami. He is shown running in slow motion, a line of fighters behind him, as a jihadist rap song plays in the background. He reads to them from the Koran, moving in and out of Arabic while stroking his beard. He then lectures them in English, with what struck his old friend Bernie Culveyhouse as an “E.S.L. accent.”

“The only reason we’re staying here,” Hammami tells the recruits, “away from our families, away from the cities, away from — you know — ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we’re waiting to meet with the enemy.”

BACK IN DAPHNE, Debra Hammami stared at the video in shock.

She had long known that her son was “in the wrong hands.” Since Shafik first went to the F.B.I. in 2006, he had spent countless hours answering their questions.

But it was something else to see Omar on her laptop. She studied his face, replaying the same images again and again, trying to decode his mental and physical state. His cheeks were gaunt; his eyes, glassy. “He looks like a homeless person,” said Debra, whose husband first spotted the video while searching a Somali Web site for news of his son.

Emotions in the Hammami house had run like a fickle stream, from anger to grief to dread. Shafik talked about his son the way a parent talks about a child lost to a cult. Terrorism, he says, “goes against everything I taught him.”

Bernie Culveyhouse was also at a loss. He said he could understand the logic of defending Muslim land from invaders. But it was beyond him how Hammami had come to align himself with a group that attacks civilians and supports Al Qaeda. Both he and Joseph Stewart remained Muslim but not Salafi. They had “grown up,” as they put it. They were back in school, pursuing professional degrees. Like the Hammamis, they kept quiet about the F.B.I.’s investigation, but they assumed it was only a matter of time before the case became public.

The new Shabab video generated a burst of public speculation about the identity of the mysterious American. Hammami’s high-school girlfriend, Lauren Stevenson, caught a glimpse of the video on the news in April and instantly recognized him, watching aghast. He seemed like a shell of the guy who took her to homecoming, a boutonniere pinned to his lapel. “When you look in his eyes, it’s just dead,” she says.

The story finally broke on Sept. 4, with Fox News reporting that Hammami had been charged with terrorism offenses in a sealed federal indictment. Reporters descended on the Hammamis’ home and Shafik’s mosque. The local newspaper swiftly identified Shafik as a government employee. “Waterboard him!” one reader demanded on the paper’s Web site.

Shafik and Debra did their best to keep a low profile. One afternoon in October, they sat opposite each other in their living room, picking at a silver tray of dates and baklava. Their two religions, the ocean between them, had offered the same salve: the belief in God’s preordained plan. “You take solace in knowing that it’s in God’s hands,” said Shafik, sunken in his armchair, as Debra nodded. “And there is nothing you could have done to change it.”

DENA SEES OMAR in her dreams.

“Sometimes he is emaciated and about to die,” she said one recent afternoon, as her 19-month-old daughter toddled about the house. “Sometimes he is coming back to hang out with me.”

The last three years have also been something of a surreal dream. Dena has come to expect the sudden rap of F.B.I. agents at her door. She suspects that her phone is tapped. She is used to feeling exposed and, at the same time, walled off. “The fact that my brother is a terrorist — it’s not something you can talk to anyone about,” she said.

Ultimately, she said, “you can either accept him or disown him. Those are the choices.” Dena chose to stay in touch, as much as she abhors violence. She found news accounts of the Shabab deeply disturbing. On Oct. 27, 2008, Shabab militiamen dragged Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old rape victim accused of adultery, into a stadium filled with spectators and stoned her to death, according to Amnesty International.

Sometimes months would pass with no word from Hammami. When he reached out through Facebook in early September, he told Dena that he hoped his infamy would prompt people to ask, “How did this guy become that?”

“They can’t blame it on poverty or any of that stuff,” he continued. “They will have to realize that it’s an ideology and it’s a way of life that makes people change. They will also have to realize that their political agendas need to be fixed.”

Dena tried to temper her reply.

“I think it’s admirable to stand up for what you believe in, but it gets hairy when you affect the lives of others,” she wrote.

Hammami responded that he understood how strange it might seem to “fight for beliefs,” especially as he had once been a liberal (under the influence, he wrote, of the teacher he still referred to as “Mrs. Hirsch”). But he had come to the realization that “we don’t live in a utopian society.”

“When I came here I saw that firsthand,” he wrote. “There are villages that live in a constant state of war between rival tribes. There are roads that people cannot pass except with fear of being robbed or raped.”

He and his fellow fighters, he wrote, are helping those people. “Regardless of what the media says,” he added, “we do not kill innocents.”

Throughout the exchange, Hammami seemed to slide back and forth between the boy from Daphne and the jihadi propagandist. He asked his sister for news about his grandmother in Perdido (“Maw Maw,” he called her) and signed off “later tater” and “I love you.”

They soon lost contact again. These days, his family and friends wonder what will become of him.

“There is no out,” Dena said. “He’s in too deep.”

On Dec. 3, a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up at a graduation ceremony for medical students in Mogadishu, killing nearly two dozen people, including three Somali government officials. Somali and American authorities said the attack was carried out by the Shabab. That same month, Hammami seemed more taken by his cause than ever. “I have become a Somali you could say,” he wrote in the December e-mail message. “I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds” — Islamic songs — “and play soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I’m chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!”

“I have hatred, I have love,” he went on. “It’s the best life on earth!”

Andrea Elliott is a reporter for The New York Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.

Abdi Aynte contributed reporting to this story from Washington D.C.

Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has ‘Always’ Added New Testament References

To view dictionary popup window put your cursor on the blue scripture words.

Lovers of the Truth

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
Hebrews 4:12

Perplexity

“…upon the earth distress•Strongs 4928: sunoche, soon-okh-ay´; from 4912; restraint, i.e. (figuratively) anxiety: — anguish, distress. of nations, with perplexity•Strongs 640: aporia, ap-or-ee´-a; from the same as 639; a (state of) quandary:—perplexity.
•Strongs 639: aporeo, ap-or-eh´-o; from a compound of 1 (as a negative particle) and the base of 4198; to have no way out, i.e. be at a loss (mentally):— (stand in) doubt, be perplexed….”
—Luke 21:25

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
—Isaiah 5:20

Hated for His Name’s Sake

“Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.”
—1 John 3:13

A key Senate vote during the wee hours when most Americans were asleep has added the so-called “hate crimes” plan, which creates federal protections and privileges homosexuals and others who have chosen alternative sexual lifestyles, to a defense spending bill.

While there are procedural hurdles yet, opponents say they expect the proposal that essentially makes homosexuals a protected class of citizens in the United States soon will reach the desk of President Obama, who has lobbied for it.

But the vote prompted both a warning about what a law linking criminal behavior to thought would do to free speech and a promise that the nation won’t give up its citizens’ basic rights easily.

“In six months President Obama and the Democratic-led Congress have forced on the American people the most radical and and immoral agenda,” said Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel. “The administration and the Democratic-led Congress are out of touch with the mainstream. They represent the most fringe extreme elements of America. They will not be able to continue their efforts to undermine moral values, socialize the economy and trash American pride and heritage.

“The people will not remain silent forever,” he said.

The House approved its version, H.R. 1913, or the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, April 29. But the Senate plan remained in the Judiciary Committee until Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced its consideration this week.

Then in a middle-of-the-night vote, senators approved 63-28 a plan to add it as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill pending, despite opposition from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“This is a complete abdication of the responsibilities of the Judiciary Committee,” McCain said.

As WND reported, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted a homosexual activist who is attacked following a Christian minister’s sermon about homosexuality would be protected by the proposed federal law, but a minister attacked by a homosexual wouldn’t be.

The revelations came from Holder’s June testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was taking comments on the proposal. The measure also was the subject of discussion on talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s July 3 show.

“This is the question,” Limbaugh said. “(Sen.) Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) presents a hypothetical where a minister gives a sermon, quotes the Bible about homosexuality and is thereafter attacked … by a gay activist because of what the minister said about his religious beliefs and what Scripture says about homosexuality. Is the minister protected?”

No, said Holder.

“Well, the statute would not – would not necessarily cover that,” Holder stated. “We’re talking about crimes that have a historic basis. Groups who have been targeted for violence as a result of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, that is what this statute tends – is designed to cover. We don’t have the indication that the attack was motivated by a person’s desire to strike at somebody who was in one of these protected groups. That would not be covered by the statute.”

Continued Limbaugh, “In other words: ministers and whites are not covered by the hate crime statute because we’re talking about crimes that have a historic basis, groups who have been targeted for violence as a result of their skin color, sexual orientation. So hate crimes are reserved exclusively for blacks and homosexuals. Everybody else can get to the back of the bus on this one.”

WND has reported the plan would give special protections to homosexuals, essentially designating them as a “protected class.” However, it could leave Christian ministers open to prosecution should their teachings be linked to any subsequent offense, by anyone, against a homosexual person. The bill earned its nickname, “The Pedophile Protection Act,” when Rep. Steve King proposed an amendment during its trek through the U.S. House that would specify pedophiles could not use the law to protect their activities.

Majority Democrats flatly refused.

Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, told WND the move is alarming because “this would be the very first governmental and societal disapproval of a sincerely held religious belief, held by a majority of Americans, namely that homosexual behavior is immoral.

“It’s the first time the federal government is writing into law a disapproval of that belief,” he said.

While he said he doesn’t believe there will be “immediate” prosecutions of pastors and churches for teaching the biblical injunction that homosexual is sin, “I think the effect on speech and religious speech is nonetheless real.”

He said he does expect that pastors soon will begin being called to testify in “hate crime” cases in court “as to what that pastor preaches, what the church teaches, what the Bible teaches.”

“When this happens, there will be a shock wave through pastorates in America,” he said.

Ultimately, he warned that the homosexual advocates who have pushed the “hate crimes” plan consider this law just the first step “toward silencing Christians.”

That’s already documented not only with the development and application of “hate crimes” laws in other nations, but in the “hate crime” related speech codes already existing on many university campuses within the United States, Stanley said.

Staver noted the procedural hurdle still to be overcome: the fact that the “hate crimes” plan is attached to the $680 billion Defense Authorization bill that also includes funding for the F-22 jet program, which Obama opposes.

Staver also noted an amendment to the “hate crimes” measure from Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that apparently strengthens protections for free speech and religious exercise. It was adopted 78-13 and states “hate crime” laws shall not be “applied … in a manner that infringes” the First Amendment.

“Language designed to protect speech and religion notwithstanding, the hate crimes amendment discriminates against some classes of crime victims and gives special rights based on ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity,’ including sexual fetishes and philias,” Liberty Counsel explained.

“The name of the bill itself (It’s also known as the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill) is telling. Matthew Shepard is touted by homosexual advocates as a hate crime victim, but the evidence now shows he was not targeted because he was homosexual but was killed because of a drug deal,” Liberty Counsel said.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has said such a law – by definition – requires judges to determine what those accused of crimes were thinking.

“This could create a chilling effect on religious speech, connecting innocent expression of religious belief to acts of violence against individuals afforded special protections,” he wrote. “The criminalization of religious speech, such as speech against the practice of homosexuality, has already been seen in other countries with similar hate crimes legislation in place.”

President Obama, supported strongly during his campaign by homosexual advocates, has indicated he would like to see the legislation become law.

“I urge members on both sides of the aisle to act on this important civil rights issue by passing this legislation to protect all of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance,” he said.

A now-concluded special Fed Ex campaign to warn U.S. Senate members of the dangers of the “hate crimes” plan dispatched more than 705,000 letters to senators.

The letter-writing effort was organized by WND columnist Janet Porter, who also heads the Faith2Action Christian ministry. It allowed citizens to send individually addressed letters to all 100 senators over their own “signature” for only $10.95.

Rick Scarborough of Vision America, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Janet Porter of Faith2Action and many other opponents of hate crimes legislation have been urging voters to immediately contact their senators to oppose the plan.

And here’s the crazy part: The officials weren’t looking for drugs, weapons, or stolen property. They were looking for evidence that Michael and Suzanne Salman are holding church services in their backyard.

Hated for His Name’s Sake

“Then shall they deliver•Strongs 3860: paradidomi, par-ad-id´-o-mee; from 3844 and 1325; to surrender, i.e yield up, intrust, transmit:—betray, bring forth, cast, commit, deliver (up), give (over, up), hazard, put in prison, recommend. you up to be afflicted•Strongs 2347: thlipsis, thlip´-sis; from 2346; pressure (literally or figuratively):—afflicted(-tion), anguish, burdened, persecution, tribulation, trouble., and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated•Strongs 3404: miseo, mis-eh´-o; from a primary, misos (hatred); to detest (especially to persecute); by extension, to love less: — hate(-ful). of all nations for my name’s sake.”
—Matthew 24:9

Last Thursday, a swarm of police officers descended on Michael Salman’s northwest Phoenix home. Armed officers herded Salman, his wife Suzanne, their five young daughters, and their visiting friends into the living room — and kept them under watch for 90 minutes while other city officials searched the grounds.

And here’s the crazy part: The officials weren’t looking for drugs, weapons, or stolen property. They were looking for evidence that Michael and Suzanne Salman are holding church services in their backyard.

Sounds unbelievable, right? The First Amendment assures us that the government cannot interfere with the “free exercise” of religion. Surely, it’s none of the city’s business who worships where, or when.

But that’s exactly what the city of Phoenix was investigating last week.

One of the visitors in the Salmans’ home that day, Sam Atallah, came here from Syria for graduate school and now has a Christian ministry focusing on his fellow Middle Easterners. Atallah couldn’t believe his own eyes: Seven or eight police officers held the family and their guests at bay. When Suzanne had to leave the room to change her baby’s diaper, she was escorted by a cop. When Michael Salman initially demurred at producing a key to an outbuilding, the cops threatened to break down the door.

All because they’re holding church services?

“If you tell somebody in the Middle East that this happened, they can’t believe you,” Atallah says. “We came to America to get away from this kind of persecution.”

Even some officers on the scene seemed uncomfortable.

“In the 12 years I’ve been a police officer, I’ve never been on an administrative search warrant like this, okay?” one officer told the Salmans that day, according to a videotape of the incident. “They had to take it to this level, which I’ve never seen before.”

Police Detective James Holmes was on the scene. He tells me the police were summoned by zoning officials to help serve an administrative warrant. Typically, the city would take that step only if it had previously been denied access by the homeowner, he says.

But Salman says he never turned city officials away from his home — a fact that a city spokesman ultimately confirmed. That makes the warrant, and the police presence, reek of overreach.

As is usually the case, the backstory is more complicated. After talking to city officials, touring the property, and looking at records, it’s pretty clear that this is not just an issue of religious freedom. It may well be that — but it’s also an issue of municipal zoning, and the Salmans’ attempts to manipulate it.

Indeed, your perspective on this story shifts dramatically depending on whether you take a micro or macro view.

To the city, the question is simply whether the Salmans are holding services in a building that’s permitted only for residential use. The services, they say, hold a genuine safety risk.

But for the Salmans, the questions are as big as the Constitution itself.

What exactly is a church? And what is a group of people who meet once a week to celebrate their faith? Should the government really be in the business of delineating?

After all, if it’s okay to have friends over every week for game night, why isn’t it okay to have them over to worship God?

For the past year and a half, the Salmans jumped through the hoops required by City Hall for construction of a 2,000-square-foot outbuilding in their backyard. It took engineers, architects, and roughly $80,000, but the city ultimately signed off on everything.

The problem is that the Salmans told the city they planned to use the building as a personal “game room.” Instead, they’re using it as a church.

They won’t come right out and say that, of course. But when I visited the Salmans’ home in the quiet North Glen Square neighborhood last Friday, a day after the unannounced police visit, the couple acknowledged that they are using the building for worship.

In fact, it was clear to me that worship is the building’s only use. The interior looks like any number of the Valley’s small, Bible-based churches, from the altar to the neat rows of blue-quilted chairs to the reproduction of da Vinci’s The Last Supper on the wall.

“Look, I’m inviting my friends and my family to do the most important thing in my life — which is worship God,” Suzanne Salman says. “What’s the difference between that, and if I had them over for movie night? Is the city now going to come to the neighbors and say you can’t have a movie night every week?”

To anyone not familiar with evangelical churches, that might sound stupid. Of course a group of people that meets regularly to worship is, by definition, a church.

But to anyone familiar with evangelical churches, and their myriad home-based groups, the argument is bit more complicated. After all, a “church” in the old-school Biblical sense isn’t a building; it’s people. Often, those people do their best worshipping outside a formal structure, in loosely organized home groups.

That is exactly the kind of meeting we can’t allow the government to interfere with.

When I was a kid, my parents held a Bible study in their home. Every Monday night for more than 20 years, our narrow suburban street was packed with cars on both sides. The worship itself was no quiet undertaking: My parents’ brand of born-again Christianity leaned heavily toward the euphoric, with guitars and tambourines and shouts of exhortation to Jesus. I used to walk my younger brother in his stroller and marvel at how far we had to go to escape the sounds of fervent worship blasting from our living room.

My parents were lucky, I realize now, in that our neighbors were incredibly tolerant. We never got so much as a phone call asking them to turn down the music. In fact, when the parking situation got really awful, the spinster two doors down actually volunteered her driveway for the overflow.

But what if we’d had different neighbors? What if they hadn’t put up with our noisy worship? I cringe to think that we could’ve been visited by cops armed with a search warrant, insisting that if we drew 75 people every week, we would qualify as a church under municipal ordinances. It seems absurd.

In reality, the Salmans’ enterprise appears to have far less impact on their neighborhood than my folks’ Bible studies used to. The Salmans’ house is behind a gate, and Michael and Suzanne tell me they draw a dozen cars, maximum. They all park behind the gate.

Frankly, I think the trouble at the Salmans’ is less about the impact of a dozen cars every week and more about the relationship between Michael Salman and his neighbors.

I wrote a cover story more than a year ago about the dispute between Salman and his neighbors. At the time, Salman publicly spoke of building a big church in his backyard; he was thinking 4,200 square feet. Petrified about the impact that such a big project could have on property values, the neighbors did whatever they could to stop him, from lobbying City Hall to hiring a lawyer.

The neighbors dug up Michael Salman’s criminal history — he did time for a drive-by shooting before finding Christ while in prison — and accused him of preaching at a neighborhood park with a megaphone, aiming the speakers toward their homes. He fired back by producing witnesses who attested that Councilman Claude Mattox had branded him a “religious zealot” at a neighborhood meeting. It was bad blood all around.

Things have only gotten worse.

In April, a pickup belonging to one of Salman’s most vocal critics was set on fire. It’s being investigated as arson — and, as Salman acknowledges, he’s been accused by some neighbors as a “person of interest.” (For the record, Salman says he had nothing to do with the blaze; the Phoenix Fire Department didn’t return a call seeking comment.)

Last week, two neighbors asked for restraining orders in Maricopa County Superior Court, saying Salman has been harassing them. Salman plans to dispute those charges in court.

The neighborhood’s ire clearly triggered the police visit last week. As Detective Holmes points out, the outbuilding is impossible to see from the road, but the Salmans say the neighbors have been videotaping people as they show up for Sunday services.

The neighbors surely aren’t happy that, even after they effectively blocked construction of a real church, they still have a congregation in their midst. And even if their response to the weekly gatherings is an overreaction, they may well have municipal law on their side.

And that’s because the Salmans have been trying to have it both ways.

Last year, when the Salmans realized that they couldn’t meet the city’s commercial requirements for a church building, they went ahead with constructing the game room. They tell me they were planning all along to use it for religious activity. But they weren’t exactly straightforward about their intentions.

Interestingly, both city officials and Michael Salman referred me to the same set of e-mails to buttress their positions. In the e-mails, sent in April just before the city signed off on final construction, city officials pointedly explained that the building can’t be used for church assembly.

“A church assembly use is not allowable under City Code unless the site is developed as a commercial project,” a staffer wrote.

Salman responded, agreeing that the building “will not be used for a public place of worship. It is for private use. Yes, we are not planning to convert the 2,000-square-foot building into a public place of worship and do understand that if we want a public place of worship that we will have to adhere to the building codes and such.”

Sounds clear-cut, right?

Not to Salman. He may have assured the city he wasn’t building a public place of worship, but his emphasis was on public.

“This is for private, personal use,” Salman says. “We’re not going to put signs up there with worship service times. We don’t advertise anywhere. We have gatherings at our house. That’s not against the law.”

That’s a distinction the city isn’t buying.

City spokesman David J. Ramirez says the issue isn’t the nature of the assemblies. It’s safety. There are no sprinklers in the outbuilding and no emergency exits, yet the room features 145 chairs. “It’s a hazard to pack 145 people into a space like that,” Ramirez says.

So last Thursday, no fewer than seven officers showed up at the Salman home, escorting a group of zoning officers with an administrative warrant. While the Salmans have yet to be cited for a crime, the cops did leave behind a “notice of code violation.” It reiterates that the outbuilding may be used only for residential use.

Indeed, for all the protestations that they aren’t hosting church services, the Salmans are, at best, walking an incredibly fine line. Unlike most small, home-based fellowships, they’ve got all the trappings of a church. A sign on their gate announces “Harvest Christian Community Church.” Advertisements for the fellowship’s Web site, www.hcfaz.org, pepper the family’s two vans. And, of course, Salman goes by “Pastor.”

The main difference between their group and any other start-up church is the Salmans’ insistence that they chose to be “private.”

Does that matter? Should it? Really, what can the city do? Bad enough that they sent a half-dozen officers last week to do the work of city bureaucrats. Shut down a religious service, and they will have triggered all sorts of constitutional issues.

The Salmans aren’t stupid. They realize this. So despite the officers’ arrival on Thursday, on Sunday, the Salmans invited some friends and family into their “game room.”

They didn’t play poker or pool or Pictionary. Instead, they worshipped God, exactly as they’d planned.

The police were nowhere in sight. Not this Sunday, anyway.

Next Sunday is anyone’s guess.

‘This is first time protected status given to whatever sexual orientation one has’

Hated for His Name’s Sake

“Then shall they deliver•Strongs 3860: paradidomi, par-ad-id´-o-mee; from 3844 and 1325; to surrender, i.e yield up, intrust, transmit:—betray, bring forth, cast, commit, deliver (up), give (over, up), hazard, put in prison, recommend. you up to be afflicted•Strongs 2347: thlipsis, thlip´-sis; from 2346; pressure (literally or figuratively):—afflicted(-tion), anguish, burdened, persecution, tribulation, trouble., and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated•Strongs 3404: miseo, mis-eh´-o; from a primary, misos (hatred); to detest (especially to persecute); by extension, to love less: — hate(-ful). of all nations for my name’s sake.”
—Matthew 24:9

Members of the U.S. House today approved a plan to create a federal “hate crimes” plan that will provide special protections to homosexuals and others with alternative sexual choices, but leave Christian ministers and pastors open to prosecution should their teachings be linked to any subsequent offense, by anyone, against a “gay.”

The vote was 249-175, and came despite intense Republican opposition to the creation of the privileged class.

Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the High Impact Leadership Coalition also condemned the action, offering a warning about the future of the United States.

He was interviewed on the issue by Greg Corombos of Radio America/WND, and the audio of his interview is embedded here:

Jackson said the action simply puts “sexual orientation” in a specially protected class under federal law.

“Based on history, it really isn’t something that needs to be protected,” he said. “There’s a problem that this is going to mark the first time that a protected class status is given to … whatever sexual orientation one has.”

He said the history in other nations is a fairly certain prosecution of Christians. In Sweden, for example, a minister who preached out of Leviticus was sentenced to 30 days in jail – for preaching out of Leviticus.

Similar state laws have resulted in similar results. In Philadelphia several years ago a 73-year-old grandmother was jailed for trying to share Christian tracts with people at a homosexual festival, he said.

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said H.R. 1913 will create “thought crimes,” and U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said it will end equality in the United States.

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, charged the plan will divide America into groups of more favored versus less. He again cited USC Title 18, Section 2a, the foundation of H.R. 1913, which says anyone who through speech “induces” commission of a violent hate crime “will be tried as a principal” alongside the active offender.

But there is no epidemic of hate in the U.S. he noted.

U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., introduced a striking argument: If Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who supports traditional marriage had slapped the homosexual judge who derided her on the stage under H.R. 1913 she could be indicted as a “violent hate criminal,” facing a possible 10 years in prison. But, Forbes said, if the homosexual judge had slapped her, she would have had no special protection under H.R. 1913.

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, said, “The Anti-Christian Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives has acted today to lay the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute pastors, youth pastors, Bible teachers, and anyone else whose Bible speech and thought is based upon and reflects the truths found in the Bible.

“A pastor’s sermon could be considered ‘hate speech’ under this legislation if heard by an individual who then acts aggressively against persons based on ‘sexual orientation.’ The pastor could be prosecuted for “conspiracy to commit a hate crime,” she said.

“This Democrat-controlled Congress has now elevated pedophiles and other bizarre sexual orientations, as well as drag queens, transgenders, lesbians and gay men to the level of protection of that already given to African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities in the law,” she said.

House Republican leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the Democrats simply have placed a higher value on some lives compared to others, a decision he said is unconstitutional.

Not happy with just making Christian teachings on homosexuality illegal, noted officials at Liberty Counsel, supporters have approved the law that also provides grant money for so-called “sensitivity-training” to provide pro-homosexual propaganda.

When a plan virtually identical to the current Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 was developed in the last Congress, Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., admitted during a hearing on the bill it could be used to prosecute pastors merely for preaching against homosexuality under the premise that they could be “inducing” violence in someone.

The bill ultimately failed then because President Bush determined it was unnecessary – the crimes banned in the legislation already are addressed by other laws – and it probably was unconstitutional.

“The federal hate crimes bill is bad news for everyone,” said Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute, who testified in Congress against the bill two years ago.

“Instead of treating all crime victims equally, it creates a caste system where select groups, such as gays and lesbians, are given greater priority in the criminal justice system. This is not progress; it is political correctness. In other nations and states, the adoption of hate crimes legislation has been the first step toward widespread suppression of speech and ideas critical of homosexuality,” he said.

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel has spoken out against H.R. 1913 a number of times.

“As has proved to be true in both Europe and Canada, this Orwellian piece of legislation is the direct precursor to freedom killing and speech chilling ‘hate speech’ laws. It represents a thinly veiled effort to ultimately silence – under penalty of law – morally, medically and biblically based opposition to the homosexual lifestyle,” he said.

Barber said the 14th Amendment already provides that victims of violent crimes are afforded equal protection under the law “regardless of sexual preference or proclivity.”

Barber cited FBI statistics showing there were about 1.4 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 2007, but only 1,512 were presumed to be “hate crimes.” And two-thirds of those involved claims of “hateful” words, touching and shoving.

Under the specifications of the law, a Christian needn’t touch a homosexual to face charges, he noted.

“If the homosexual merely claims he was subjectively placed in ‘apprehension of bodily injury’ by the Christian’s words then, again, the Christian can be thrown in prison for a felony ‘hate crime,’” he said.

WND reported previously that the plan was introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who said, “The bill only applies to bias-motivated violent crimes and does not impinge public speech or writing in any way.”

Section 10 of the act states, “Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

However, critics cite United States Code Title 18, Section 2, as evidence of how the legislation could be used against people who merely speak out against homosexuality. It states: Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.

Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, warned Christians to speak up before the legislation passes. He said they are acting like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating kettle that boils to death.

“They need to wake up and take action to oppose this threat to religious liberty.”

A fascinating story … the “old story” as the secularists like to call it. Barack Obama alluded to this in his speech in France. We need a new story, a discovery of “new ways” of thinking. We must throw off the old and embrace a much more enlightened, intelligent point of view. By doing so, we remove inconvenient barriers, cumbersome moral values and achieve self-determination with our new understanding of the world guiding the way. Surely we cannot be bound in this advanced new age by the old moral codes or put plainly, by what Jesus taught. Certainly not if we are to curry favor with the world in which we live.

To view dictionary popup window put your cursor on the blue scripture words.

The Falling Away

“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away•Strongs 646: apostasia, ap-os-tas-ee´-ah; feminine of the same as 647; defection from truth (properly, the state) (“apostasy”):—falling away, forsake. first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;”
—2 Thessalonians 2:3

“But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.”
—2Peter 2:1

“Even if others do, I will never deny you,” declared the Apostle Peter some 2000 years ago just hours before he did exactly that, three times, when the heat was on. Ten others boasted the same, but when the risk was more than theoretical, all deserted Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Only one was seen at the cross.

A fascinating story … the “old story” as the secularists like to call it. Barack Obama alluded to this in his speech in France. We need a new story, a discovery of “new ways” of thinking. We must throw off the old and embrace a much more enlightened, intelligent point of view. By doing so, we remove inconvenient barriers, cumbersome moral values and achieve self-determination with our new understanding of the world guiding the way. Surely we cannot be bound in this advanced new age by the old moral codes or put plainly, by what Jesus taught. Certainly not if we are to curry favor with the world in which we live.

This Holy Week, a key portion of the “old story” has been revisited in a very contemporary way. The last instruction Jesus gave as he left earth was Christ followers should tell His story of forgiveness and redemption not only in their communities, but to the “ends of the earth.” And as His followers told the “old story” they should not leave out all the other things as well. In the second part of the Great Commission, Christ admonished his followers to teach others “to obey all the things I have commanded you.” He wanted future generations to go beyond mere intellectual understanding and move to actually living out the principles … walking the walk.

One of those principles was marriage. “For this reason shall a man leave his parents and join with his wife and the two shall become one flesh,” Jesus instructed. One man, one woman, for a lifetime, with no sex outside of that union.

Fast forward to 2009: California voters of various religious persuasions, in a ballot measure called Proposition 8, held to the traditional view of marriage—a union between a man and a woman. Subsequently challenged in court, as the battle ensued, Pastor Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life” and pastor of Saddleback, one of the largest churches in the country, deeply influential, rightly told his congregation “…if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues I come out very clear.” Until this week … Holy Week.

On the first Holy Week Peter promised Jesus, “Though others may turn away, I will never deny you.” But then in the chill of night in a courtyard just outside the place of Jesus’ trial, as others around the fire began to probe his relationship to Jesus, he quietly denied even knowing him. No one was threatening his life, but the derision increased and with every barb, until Peter’s denial escalated to a curse as he emphatically denied he had ever known Jesus.

Peter was worried about his reputation. He didn’t want to be the odd man out in the courtyard over the fire … it wasn’t a Roman soldier with a sword who challenged him, it was a mere servant girl.

“On moral issues I come out very clear,” declared Rick Warren when writing in the safety of his office. But when confronted by homosexual friends and Larry King this week, he folded just like Peter. Now, to be clear, he did not deny Christ, but he backpedaled so fast from where he previously stood and reinterpreted his previous statements in a way that strains credulity. He went on to describe how he has “apologized” to his homosexual friends for making comments in support of Proposition 8. He “never once gave an endorsement” of the marriage amendment, he declared.

And in one fell swoop, he not only separated himself from the biblical teaching on marriage, but distorted the past in the process. Seduced by the pressure of fame? Driven by the desire to please his friends? Afraid to be seen as bigoted to a national television audience? Whatever the motivation, the behavior is no less significant

Rick Warren did not deny Christ on Larry King. But every believer who was watching had to question whether Rick was being faithful to the commission Christ left him with: Teaching others to “obey all the things I have commanded you.” And obedient biblical teaching on marriage is not a particularly difficult matter. Unpopular? Yes. Unclear? Hardly.

After Peter executed his betrayal, he went out and wept bitterly. On Larry King, Rick Warren went on to tell about his profuse apologies to his gay friends. In the broad scheme of things, I don’t think Rick Warren needed to apologize to them at all. An apology to Christ? Now that would be entirely in order.

This Holy Week, let’s pray America’s Pastor Rick Warren will not let this story end here.