Wednesday, September 06, 2006

California's Other Disaster


Adam Ghadan, clothed in a white robe, sitting by a computer and some books, looked into the camera and warned fellow Americans to convert to Islam. “To Americans and the rest of Christendom we say, either repent your misguided ways and enter into truth or keep your poison to yourself and suffer the consequences in this world and the next.”

Pretty tough talk for a boy from California…California…land of surfer dudes…Hollywood movies…plastic surgery and some of the poorest test scores in the nation. Land of beautiful weather AND people….Disneyland…mountains, deserts and everything gorgeous inbetween. Land of laws insistent on forcing little children be exposed to homosexuality and transgenderism in public school…land drowning in debt from guaranteed free services to illegal aliens…and mismanaged public utilities. Land of beautiful Pacific vistas, earthquakes and mudslides. Land of movie star governors, money and masters of play. It was in this atmosphere, Adam Ghadan was nurtured. Nursed on the milk of the shallow, educated in the halls of the twisted and graduated to the ranks of the confused turned evil. Adam Ghadan…California Boy.

“Who are the real terrorists?” He asked. “It’s hard to imagine that any compassionate person could see pictures and not want to go on a shooting spree at the Marine’s housing facilities at Camp Pendleton,” said the young American.

Boldly moving seamlessly from English to Arabic, Adam recounts the history of Islam…the battles…the teachings. The vacuous, rewritten-if- presented-at-all history of the California school system was evidently no match for the energetic, impassioned instruction of the Islamic Jihadists. The casual encouragement to yawn ones way through another language must have seemed profoundly unmotivating compared to the challenge of learning the ancient script and communicating with powerful warriors of the Middle East. And Adam learned these lessons very well.

But even though the mental challenge seemingly quenched by an otherwise bright boy through the rigors of a new language…and new religion might be on some level comprehensible, what about a boy leaving his family, his mother and father and his America…not only leaving them, but wishing them destruction and harm. How does a boy come to this?

It’s not so much of a mystery when you know that Adam was the son of an absent musician father, and an even more absent mother. The closest person in his life was his Jewish grandmother who lost track of his whereabouts years ago. What sort of teaching do you receive from a non-home like that? What sort of non-example? What sort of evidence of any God? What sort of reason to live? Especially if you have a good mind and the natural need to be loved.

There are thousands of Adam Ghadans in this country just waiting to be influenced by the next strong wind of seeming substance. The vacuum that is their heart and spirit is waiting to be filled by something…anything. And don’t be surprised if Islam, only too eager to recruit the young doesn’t carry them away.

“Bring up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” That Biblical promise is still true….even in California.