Tennessee Is the Capital of American Jihad

[Valin]

Politico Magazine:

JAMES KITFIELD

July 23, 2015

 

Tennessee seems an unlikely birthplace for American jihad. Yet long before the five U.S. service members were murdered this past week in Chattanooga, before the Boston Marathon bombers, the Fort Hood shooting or the rise of the Islamic State, it was another troubled teenager from the same state who embarked on a journey of jihad and ended in the first deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9/11.

 

The road to jihad began here, where Highway 40 bisects the state Abraham Lincoln once called the “keystone of the southern arch,” heading southwest out of Nashville and Jackson and through endless miles of rich Mississippi delta before riding the steel scaffolding of the Hernando de Soto Bridge across the wide lazy waters.

 

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A few years back, Melvin Bledsoe was living a black middle-class, Southern Baptist version of the American dream. Both of his children were college bound, a step up the socioeconomic ladder that Melvin’s own parents could never afford. The Bledsoes were a tightly knit family clasped in the bosom of a supportive and familiar community. And then a personal crisis opened the door to an utterly unfamiliar intruder, and an idea was planted in a wounded psyche that improbably blossomed into a dark and noxious ideology. And before they even understood the gathering peril, the Bledsoes’ American dream became a nightmare.

 

Somehow, in ways that a heartbroken Melvin Bledsoe even now doesn’t fully comprehend, his beloved son Carlos was transformed into a murderous jihadist, a hate-filled man who called himself Abulhakim Mujahid Mohammed.

 

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