FAISAL SHAHZAD: FRUSTRATED INNOCENT VICTIM OF FORECLOSURES OR FAMILY MAN TURNED INSTANT JIHADIST?

HOW THE NEOCONS MILK A PROPAGANDA OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL IT’S WORTH

I suppose for the Americans and their allies in the West the story of the Propane Bomb that Fizzled in New York is really big and important headline news that deserves massive air time in the Western TV, print and online media while stories like the mass killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by bombs launched from drones get virtually no attention at all in the same Western media.

There is only one reason for the disparity – its called propaganda.

In this case, the propaganda machinery of the West has found the perfect patsy with which to perpetuate the myth of a Global War on Terrorism.

Yet another American, disgruntled about being foreclosed on by a bank that had been the recipient of billions of dollars of bailout money, felt compelled to display his frustration by undertaking an extreme act if violence. Fortunately, he failed. Now, if he’d been a white Christian American-born American the story by now would be just a sheet of newspaper blowing around in the wind up the side streets of New York. But he wasn’t. It turns out he’s a Pakistani-born American that had recently visited Pakistan. That was enough to get the propaganda machine whirring into life.

Let’s break this story down and take a look at it from two perspectives; first, from the perspective of the propagandists, and then from the perspective of a more logical reality devoid of rhetoric and emotive propagandising.

The Washington Post tells us that the wannabe bomber, Faisal Shahzad, together with his wife and two kids, in June of last year upped and disappeared from their home. We’re told that he left his job as a financial analyst just prior to ‘disappearing’. At about the same time, they put their home on the market. Then, according to the Wall Street Journal, three months later in September, presumably after having no success in being able to sell his rapidly depreciating home, his bankers, JP Morgan Chase and Co, began foreclosure procedures on them. So far it sounds like a very familiar story that has been repeated all over America. But the way the WSJ and the Washington Post tell it one is left to believe that Shahzad threw in his job, put his house on the market and then left for Pakistan in order to receive training on how to build bombs. The Washington Post, however, are sceptical about the story. They write:

“Many details surrounding Shahzad's alleged attempt to bomb Times Square are hard to reconcile. Why would someone who spent a decade pursuing U.S. citizenship seek to bomb an American landmark and flee the country within a year of being naturalized?”

Why, indeed. They also ask:

“How could someone with a degree in computers, who authorities say admitted receiving bomb-making training in Pakistan, assemble such an unsophisticated and unsuccessful device?”

We don’t actually know that Shahzad has ‘admitted’ any such thing; we’re only told that ‘authorities say’ he had. We are now expected to believe that an organisation that we were told was sophisticated enough to organise the destruction of the Twin Towers and other buildings as well as attack the nerve centre of the worlds sole remaining superpower at the Pentagon by flying several airliners into them within the space of a few hours and that have successfully built thousands of improvised explosive devices that have killed hundreds of allied soldiers cannot properly instruct a computer expert in the art of crude bomb making.

According to the neocon propagandists at Commentary magazine Shahzad gave up everything simply in order “to become a terrorist and to train in Pakistan”. But even the neocons can’t get their stories straight. According to The Weekly Standard, who quote a New York Post article, Shahzad became a Jihadist because of what he witnessed while in Pakistan. This conflicts with Commentary’s assertion that he left America to become a Jihadist.

Here’s is a far more realistic scenario which is supported by about as much evidence as the scenarios told by the media and their neocon propagandists but has a much more viable and rather more prosaic ring to it.

Seeing Shahzad’s home plummet in value due to the so-called Global Financial Crisis, JP Morgan Chase and Co start making noises about the value of his property not being anywhere near enough to cover the debt he has against it and they ask him to cough up more cash to cover the shortfall in the debt/asset ratio of the property. Realising that he won’t be able to either come up with the cash or even substantially increase his repayments to help cover the shortfall, Shahzad decides to retreat to his homeland where just maybe his father, a retired senior Pakistan Air Force officer, might be able to help him out either financially or, at least, be able to support him in Pakistan while he attempts to sort out his problems. There’s nothing unusual in this; many victims of foreclosure have had to return to their parent’s home – it’s just that most don’t have to head off to Pakistan to be with their parents.

Finding his father unable to help him financially he falls into arrears and the bank begins foreclosure proceedings against him. Frustrated that this has happened to him and that it has not been his fault he decides to return to America and, taking a leaf out of Joe Stack’s book, embarks on a plan to take revenge on a society that has, in his view, let him down. Fortunately, his plan came to nothing. Unlike Joe Stack, Shahzad didn’t attempt to go out in a blaze of glory but, rather, decided to leave the country and return to Pakistan where he was less likely to be caught. As we know, his plan to escape was thwarted and he was captured as he was attempting to leave the country.

So far, there has been no hard evidence at all that Shahzad had any connections whatsoever with al Qaeda or the Pakistan Taliban despite what the statements from the notoriously unreliable and utterly discredited government’s security and intelligence organisations say.

You be the judge. Is my totally unsupported story about how Shahzad may have found himself in the position he’s in less plausible than the propagandists equally totally unsupported story about him always wanting to be a terrorist and abandoning all to become a Jihadist?