Soft Tacos
Jose Padilla may not have been a major player in al Qaeda's war on America, but one thing seems certain: the south Florida environment that "produced" him is a hotbed of Islamist extremism, as this Washington Post piece on Padilla's background reveals.
We're not talking about a network of evil geniuses here, but rather a widespread subculture that attracts disaffected converts and steers them towards anti-American Islamist radicalism. Some of it is scary, while some of it appears to be quite innocuous. Some of it is simply pathetic. You've got firebrand agitators with ties to international terror funding (like Adham A. Hassoun of Sunrise, Florida, arrested Wednesday); fundraisers for "charity" front organizations that funnel money to terrorist groups (Raed Awad, for example, former imam of the mosque attended by Padilla and Hassoun); and most of the September 11 hijackers spent at least some time living and training there before the attacks. But the shadowy "infrastructure" in Sunrise, FL also seems to have included the local Taco Bell, where recent converts Padilla and his wife Cherie and their manager Mohammed Javed all worked together.
For some reason, the anecdote about Padilla's Taco Bell name tag still makes me giggle:
In early 1993, after about six months on the job, Padilla told Javed that he had taken the name Ibrahim. Javed, the founder of a Muslim school in Sunrise, knew his employee had taken the shahadah oath, a declaration of faith that marks a conversion to Islam. But Javed refused to change Padilla's name tag because the name change was not yet official, and Padilla accepted the decision without argument.