Local Oakton High School Grad Jailed for Terrorism

Meet Zack Chesser. He’s a privileged white 20 year old from a wealthy suburb in Virginia. And he is now in jail for trying to wage jihad. He wasn’t jailed for threatening the creators of SouthPark with murder, but for attempting to fly to Somalia to join terror cells there.

From the WaPo here:

A 20-year-old Oakton High graduate who played football and rowed crew at the Fairfax County school was arrested Wednesday as terrorist recruit after he had been stopped on his way to join an al-Qaeda-linked group in Somalia.

Zachary Adam Chesser was barred July 10 from leaving New York City for Uganda on a multi-leg journey to join al-Shabab, an Islamist insurgency that wants to topple Somalia’s weak central government.

Chesser described in haunting terms a two-year descent from a quiet and awkward suburban teenager to a willing “foreign fighter” for a designated terrorist group, which most recently claimed responsibility for bombings that killed 76 people in Uganda on July 11.

In doing so, Chesser — who gained online notoriety in April for attacking the creators of the animated satire “South Park” for an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad — became the latest in a wave of homegrown terrorist suspects.

Chesser, a George Mason University dropout whose parents live in Centreville, told the FBI that he only recently became religious and grew a beard, took the name Abu Tallah Al-Amrikee and married a Muslim woman in 2009. He looked to online videos, chats and over-the-counter CDs “almost obsessively,” before creating a stream of YouTube sites, blogs and postings spreading the call “to fight jihad”.

The kid’s parents are divorced and he was living with his Dad and his stepmother. He was 11 when he saw the towers fall which probably traumatized him, and people find strange ways to face and confront their traumas. And during his high school years there were tons of Bush bashing and most high school kids are leftist tools because they just don’t know any better. So, he hated women, hated America and wantd to die spectacularly. So of course Islam beckoned and he answered. At least he didn’t join the Army and frag his officers. TheSmokingGun has the FBI docs here.

Thanks to Cathy who pointed out to me that his name isn’t Zack anymore. I told her yep, but I bet he gets a new name in prison, and I think it will be “Shirley.”