Azzam al-Amriki

In my previous post, I speculated that Azzam al-Amriki may have written the bulk of Osama bin Laden's. Having read of his life, and having viewed his video messages, I am now fairly certain that that is the case. He is a highly disturbing individual, because he reminds me so much, in his mannerisms and speech, of those that I know, yet he has fallen into the clutches of the Apostasy. He is, as I had suspected, something of a disaffected Leftist; he was born to a pair of hippy goatherds living in seclusion in Southern California and grew up feeling and perceiving the emptiness that most of today's youth have either observed or experienced themselves. He first sought to express that emptiness through the Death Metal subculture, and later sought to fill it with religion. The religion he found, based on its true merits, was Islam, but through an unfortunate quirk of fate the mosque that he found had a strong extremist presence. He fell in with and was assimilated by these extremists, and was radicalized through them. Despite having spent many years in the Middle East, his old ties to the Grumpy Young Californian Liberal culture are still readily apparent — at one point in one of his tapes he refers to Bush as "Dubya" — and he is thus almost certainly the source of the familiar, though perverted, tone of the middle part of Osama's speech. He does seem to have laid it on pretty thick, though, in comparison with his other videos, which leads me to suspect that he may have been trying to reach out to the 71%.

An excellent article on him can be found here, and some of his videos can be found here and here (part one of six).