Our high school terrorist

Parent Cafe
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Usaama Rahim, Brookline High School, class of 2007, one year behind one of my kids. Go Warriors!

He also went to Baker School (a K-8 school) for a few years - not our school - but spent his freshman high school year in Saudi Arabia.

To explain, Brookline is one of the nicest communities in the US. It’s becoming wealthier as rents and real estate prices reach the stratosphere but it has a lot of ethnic diversity. As my kids would say, BHS was more diverse than almost any college or university and possibly the most diverse place they’ll ever spend time at. The schools are great. BHS is one of the best high schools in the country.

Baker is the suburban school of Brookline, located in South Brookline, which is mostly single family homes (though with a large apartment complex). I don’t know if he was a METCO student. That’s a student from Boston who goes to another district.

So we have a kid who went to a super school district populated with achievers and his response is to plan to cut off a police officer’s head. Our superintendent said, “His Guidance Counselor and Dean remember him as a bright young man who benefited from the attention of his teachers and tutors in reaching graduation. In addition, he had no major disciplinary infractions while at BHS. After graduation he went to college in Florida and, several years later, sent an email to his former Dean and Guidance Counselor thanking them for the help that they provided in getting him through high school.” His brother Mohammed graduated from BHS in 2004.

Note the amazing, reflexive nonsense passed around after Rahim was killed. His father, who lives in California, immediately claimed his son had been shot in the back and that was repeated by Rahim’s brother Ibrahim, adding that he was shot at a bus stop while going to work without warning while he was on his phone. How exactly would they know this? His father said he was on the phone with his son when the shooting occurred. The police had the area completely roped off all day but this didn’t stop the rumors and allegations being sent all over the place.

So the police showed the video to a bunch of interested parties. Per the non-Muslim viewers such as Darnell Williams of the Urban League, ““What the video does reveal to us, very clearly, is that the individual was not on the cellphone. The individual was not shot in the back. And the information reported by others that that was the case was inaccurate.” A Muslim viewer, Abdullah Faaruuq of the Mosque for the Praising of Allah, said “it was clear that Rahim was not shot in the back and that officers were backing up. “It wasn’t at a bus stop and he wasn’t shot in the back,” he said. He added, “However, we couldn’t see clearly at all exactly to answer the question whether he was brandishing a knife or not. It was like 1/20th of the overall frame. It was very far away. So we can’t be clear as to what transpired.” In other words, the father lied, the brother at least exaggerated or lied and the police in this case told the truth. But I would bet a million dollars that the word will spread that Rahim was shot in the back without provocation while he was on his phone.

The sad thing is, just like with the hideous Tsarnaev brothers, this is a Muslim kid who was not marginalized, who was well educated in some of the finest schools in the US … and his response as a young Muslim male was to seek to kill and not just kill but to behead. That’s really bleeping sick.

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Disturbing, indeed.

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Why is there such an emphasis on his religion in your post?

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Because these young men cited their religion as the motive for their crimes.

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So do lots of other terrorists and other nasties of various religions. Should it be a reason to emphasize the association of all of those various religions with terrorism and other nastiness as well?

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Yes, to ucb. Religion was cited as motive in this terrorist case. And beheading is particular to the religion.
As to being educated by the finest schools–that is probably the most irrelevant part of the equation. Real education starts at home. As every therapist knows.

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Yes. Because one can’t make sense of something like this unless she is honest about why. And there have been so many “lone wolves” now in the US that we all need to think about how to spot the next one. Reasonable, decent people can wonder in anguish if the best life possible here in America doesn’t prevent this, then what? since there is no answer to that as yet, it behooves us to be honest and open. And let me tell you, secular Muslims are more concerned about these monsters because they know firsthand what horrors are possible from the extremists.

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The fact that he was educated shouldn’t be a surprise, a lot of horrific acts have been committed by people who were educated. The people who bombed the world trade center in 1993 were educated, one of them was an engineer working at Allied Signal, the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks were fairly well off Saudis who had gone to college. In the 1960’s, the members of the weather underground and other such groups, that among other things carried out bombings and such, were mostly college educated kids from pretty well off backgrounds.

The problem is assuming because someone is educated or came from a decent economic background that they don’t have issues, don’t feel alienated, is a mistake. Religion can fill that void (specifically the wrong kind of religion), but ideology of any kind can fill that void, it could be a cult like figure like Manson, it could be an extreme ideology of hating the government, it could be an ideology of racial purity, the key is something that either channels their anger towards something and/or fills a void in their lives.

I think questions like this come up because it is very easy to look at someone who has had a hard life, who has had very little to look forward to, is poor, whatever, and understand them being angry, but you look at someone who ‘had it all’ and you wonder why, and it is troubling because I think the answer is you never really know…and it is troubling because then it could be anyone.

As far as the families reaction, while I understand their grief and anger, why the father would lie (which easily can be substantiated, the cops can get the call records for the kids cell phone, and see if he was talking, or if the father was talking to him) I am not so sure of, I don’t know if he was trying to deflect it from being a kid gone bad to being police killing him (presumably because he had semitic features), whether he himself is some sort of extremist and was doing that to try and deflect from that, there are a lot of reasons. You see this all the time, someone gets killed, does something bad, and everyone is telling you it must be a mistake, they were a good person, they went to church every sunday, the kid was an honor student, etc. I can remember from my childhood a case where this solid suburban dad in NJ, guy was known as a straight arrow, went to church every sunday, taught sunday school, had the ‘perfect’ family, and so forth, killed his whole family and disappeared, and all these people were saying he couldn’t have done it, he must have been kidnapped and killed, he was a moral person who loved his family, etc…and then they investigated, and found out the guy had a ton of debts, I think was having an affair (this happened over 40 years ago), and all these other things…people, especially family, don’t want to believe it is true.

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I mentioned Muslim in the first instances for two reasons: to show that an important Muslim viewer of the video saw the same thing and also that he was somewhat less willing to agree that this kid was a threat. That’s important to me, as a person and as a citizen, because this person is viewed in 2 “special” lights: that he’s a person of color and that he’s Muslim. The African-American viewer of the video has said in additional thoughts that the police were correct. This is important to me because so much going on in society is about the police and the treatment (and killing) of African-Americans. The Muslim reaction is important to me for 2 reasons. First, that there was reluctance to blame the dead guy simply because he’s also Muslim and, second, that I’m sure this guy’s death will be treated as martyrdom in many circles (especially since he was, it seems, involved in spreading ISIS materials).

As for the other mentions, are we supposed to pretend that attacks are random and have no cause? To pretend that grandmother over there with a walker is just as likely to pull out a bomb? To pretend that non-Muslims intend to behead police officers? In some cases, religion isn’t an obvious issue, as with Timothy McVeigh, but the entire point of the Tsarnaev bombing and of this guy’s plans to attack police is their religion. And I find it fascinating that a kid I almost certainly have seen more than once, who I’ve likely been next to on more than one occasion, can be so mentally corrupted by religion that he does this. There are all sorts of loony people in the world - and we had the lovely folks from the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrate at our school - but the current religious danger is the hold violent Islam has on young men and young women.

If this were the 80’s, we’d probably be talking about the massacres of Muslims by Christian Croats and Serbs. A little bit further back, we could talk about the mass murders committed in the most grotesque fashions by the most Christian nation (Germany), abetted by such other Christian nations as Hungary and Poland. But this is now and the context is even somewhat different: this Islamic violence in the West is sometimes directed at Jews but mostly at the West itself and that is different from the ethnic and religious murder of even recent times. The Croat gunmen were just trying to kill Bosnians so they could take their land, not eliminate a form of civilization to establish Croat or Christian hegemony.

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I had a comment but the person I quoted in it retracted his words in a story put online just a bit ago.

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the religion aspect is 100% relevant. It does not mean that all people from religion X think a certain way, but there is clearly pattern of people that identify as religion X acting in a certain way. Without understanding religion X, and what it means to different people and how some people can manipulate/distort/change/portray/interpret it to achieve a certain goal… you are missing a huge part of the picture.

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Wow. It’s always a shock when crazy hits close to home. I can’t think that I’ve known anyone quite this evil.

His religion is relevant because he had expressed a plan to behead Pamela Geller, the woman who organized the cartoon of Mohammad contest in Texas. She lives in NYC.

In the article I read a day ago he had told his nephew that he decided the NYC plan was too much trouble so he would kill the boys in blue instead. The nephew has been arrested and charged with aiding him. Nephew told the magistrate that he supports his uncle’s plan. The whole family is probably part of a loose conspiracy.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/06/03/everett-man-face-charges-connected-with-tuesday-shooting-roslindale/A4GN3KGxekIvQG4JljKMUP/story.html

It is good that there was video of the incident and officials got out in front of the story for once. I think it is now a necessity with social media. It was federal LE, not Boston Police who shot him. Personally I am thankful for his swift demise.

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It was actually an FBI agent and a Boston cop.

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@Lergnom …“It was actually an FBI agent and a Boston cop.”

I wrote what I read. Just goes to show the quality of reportage out there these days.

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What will be interesting is to see what happens to the father,if he gets arrested as well. This goes beyond a parent not willing to believe his child did something horrible, he could have said something like “my son would never do something like that, I don’t believe he had a knife, etc”. Instead, he openly lied, claimed he was talking to the son on his cell phone when he was shot, which means either the guy has an IQ of 10, or he had ulterior motives (like, there is a little thing known as phone records, that would show if a)the son was on the phone and b)if it was him), or he was trying to turn the son into a martyr, to try and inflame radicals either here or abroad into acting. After hearing what the father said, I cannot believe he is just a grieving parent. Then, too, last I heard there was some lawyer from Harvard Law School arguing that the kid was wrongly killed, that the knife he had wasn’t a lethal weapon, didn’t justify being shot…in other words, same old story, different day…

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Bin Laden came from one of the best families you could come from…

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@Vladenschlutte "Bin Laden came from one of the best families you could come from… "

Yes. And they were very wealthy and had assets in this country that we should have frozen. I’ll never understand how his family members were permitted to leave the U.S. in the days after 9/11.

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and their “clergy” preach to pick up weapons

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The video has been shown to the media and per the Boston Globe:

"The video shows the task force members suddenly backing away and the person identified by authorities as Rahim advancing toward them in a steady, methodical pace. He walks directly toward one of the officers who eventually is one of the two who allegedly shot him.

It was not clear on the videotape whether Rahim had anything in his hands. The video showed that after he was shot an officer reached down to him and picked up an object. Authorities allege it was a foot-long combat knife that he had been brandishing."