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Vice Blog

Pakistan - Terror Rock

If you grew up on a goat farm in Southern California being home-schooled by your born-again ex-hippie dad, I can see how that would make you want to blow yourself up in the middle of a crowded mall. At the same time, if you were a doughy, acne-scarred...


If you grew up on a goat farm in Southern California being home-schooled by your born-again ex-hippie dad, I can see how that would make you want to blow yourself up in the middle of a crowded mall. At the same time, if you were a doughy, acne-scarred teenager into Death Metal in the early 90s, I’d probably peg you for more the “cruelty to neighbors’ pets” type but I wouldn’t take suicide bombing completely off the table. Adam Gadahn got it from both ends, so is it any wonder that when he hit 20 he packed his bags for Pakistan, adopted the catchier-in-Arabic stage name "Azzam the American," and signed up as a VJ for Al Qaeda’s "media committee"? No, it’s not. The only real mystery in Adam’s decision to go to bat for Team Jihad is which side of his upbringing pushed him over the edge. As somebody on the Terminal Boredom just reminded us, Adam’s dad was originally Phil Pearlman, by all accounts a groovy-enough dude who fronted several decent psych-folk groups in the late 60s and early 70s. But then he found God, changed his last name to a shoddy attempt at “Gideon,” and dragged his family to the country.
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