Brief Thoughts on the Imprisonment of Ali Shukri Amin at 17

 

Seventeen year old Ali Shukri Amin has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison, as an adult, for "supporting" ISIS. I listened twice to the news story this morning on NPR. A US Attorney made a point of going in person to the studio to be interviewed, which alerts me that the Feds are intent on making a grand example of this young man. The Feds are making the rounds to massage the reporters.

I listened carefully to the interview. The reporter asked a few times about this "support," and I leaned in. I don't understand how having a Twitter account [with 4,000+ followers] supporting the ISIS mission or helping a friend go to Syria or even encouraging others warrants a terror charge and an 11-year sentence in a white-settler country where the Klan thrives, in the open, in most states, and its former Grand Wizard, David Duke, walks freely and commentates in his reactionary fashion about US politics.

Looking further into this case, it is reported that Amin is an honor student at his high school, described various times as un-assimilated among his peers, which is code to many of us peoples of color. He immersed himself in the internet and online discussions. It is not surprising, however it happened, that such a person in such a country, would begin to look to the lands of his ancestors for the spiritual nourishment denied him by being "un-assimilated."

In any case, Amin's parents, concerned for him, elicited the help of a local imam to counsel the boy.

The imam, it is now reported, is an FBI informant. From there and from that, things went predictably downhill to this then-16 year old kid having the weight of his mosque [headed by the informant], the FBI, and the Federal courts upon him.

Who could take that pressure without folding, which is what Amin did, in exchange for a lighter indictment? He's written a pitiful letter to the court, worthy of a Soviet-era apology.

The case of Ali Amin, and the resources put towards punishing this boy reveals how far, how wide, how deep the US plays its role in the imperial wars on Western Asia (aka, the Middle East). They have plucked a mere child from the soil, who fired no weapons, dropped no cluster munitions.

Since the US has shown itself to be that desperate, I reiterate the hopelessness of its cause. It must know how badly it's losing.

This is not a source of joy but of alarm. Europe and its spawn have shown themselves to be capable of the most brutal genocides to prop up its culture.

Meanwhile, it is not Amin but Kim Davis, the jailed public official in Kentucky, who has become a Cause for a strange circle of white leftist radicals who are disturbed that her "free-speech rights" have been violated; that, recalling the more militant trades-unionism, she has a "right to with hold her labor;" and somehow they allege Marx is spinning in his grave at her ill-treatment and the prison-industrial complex.

Strange things are coming from their mouths.

It is always revealing - as if we need more evidence - what our so-called white allies select as their causes, and those things they pretend not to see at all.