Bring Us Back Food, Or Be Food Yourself: The FBI and Ayyub Abdul-Alim

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The Deep State requires terrorists as its food. Only by claiming, falsely, to thwart terrorist attacks before they happen, can the three-letter agencies justify their vast increases in budget, manpower and technology over the last ten years. The problem is that there’s just not enough terrorism to go around. On the amount of actual terrorism we have – which, excluding school shootings, has killed about thirty Americans in the last twelve years – you simply can’t justify NSA mass surveillance, 78 state-funded fusion centers, the massive and unnecessary DHS, or the ruinously expensive foreign adventures that have resulted in over 100,000 deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. If you can’t find enough terrorists, the obvious recourse – obvious, that is, if you have no decency and no actual love for justice – is to make your own terrorists. In Oregon and California and Ohio and New York and Massachusetts, the FBI has offered Muslims the same, terrible deal: Be our spy with your fellow Muslims, or we will ruin your life.

I have not come to this analysis lightly. It is a terrible observation to make about people who are supposed to protect us. But the bureaucratic imperative at work here is too powerful. Bring back a terrorist, and your career is made. Fail to find any, and people will start asking questions about why you need all those tax dollars to do your work.

Which brings us to the sad story of Amherst-born Springfield resident Ayyub Abdul-Alim – building manager, owner of the “Nature’s Garden” store, and the creator of “Connections Transportation”, which provided families with free commuter services to and from local prisons to visit their loved ones.

Ayyub is part of a legacy of political organizing in the United States, his father a member of the Black Panther Party and his mother a member of the Young Lords Party. Perhaps because of this legacy, or perhaps because of his presence in the Muslim community of Springfield, the FBI had a long-standing interest in having Ayyub work as an informant and spy on his own Muslim community.

Just after 7:00 p.m. on December 9, 2011, Ayyub Abdul-Alim closed up his store Nature’s Garden on State St in Springfield, and walked towards the Getty gas station near the intersection of State and Hancock Streets to get some milk before heading home. A drug bust was occurring at the gas station when Ayyub approached from down the block. Under the orders of Officer Ronald Sheehan, Ayyub was detained by Officer Anthony Sowers and Officer Angel Berrios. Sheehan ordered Sowers and Berrios to search Ayyub for weapons. A police radio transcript shows that an initial search of Ayyub produced no weapons of any sort. After private communications between Sheehan and Berrios, Ayyub was stripped naked outside and searched again by Berrios. Sowers approached Berrios with a handgun, which Berrios then held up as though he found it in Ayyub’s possession. […] Police radio transcripts from the night of Ayyub’s arrest and subsequent court filings have described how the officers stopped and searched Ayyub without warrant or cause, then planted a gun on Ayyub when the original search found him unarmed.

The current charges against Ayyub are unlawful possession of ammunition without an ID card, unlawful possession of a firearm and unlawful possession of a loaded firearm – all felonies carrying significant sentences. No other charges have been filed against Ayyub.

The only coverage of the ongoing court case is from the Socialist Worker.

This is not the first time that the deep state has tried to make its next meal out of a resident of Massachusetts. We have reported before on the cases of Cameron d’Ambrosio and Travis Corcoran. Let’s try and make Ayyub Abdul-Alim the last.

As Mr. Abdul-Alim enters his third year in lockup and is finally having his case heard, maybe it’s time to take a serious look at the pressures that encourage law enforcement officers to shake down members of the public and try to force them to turn informant. The anti-Soviet writer Solzhenitsyn describes how this goes:

Recruitment [of informers] is in the very air of our country. In the fact that what belongs to the state is higher than what belongs to the individual. That Pavlik Morozov is a hero. That a denunciation is not a denunciation but a help to the person denounced. Recruitment is interlaced with ideology: for if the Organs wish it, then the recruited person must also wish for one and the same thing: our country’s successful advance…

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis calls out this same conception of “justice”:

“The justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.”

We used to think that such tactics were wrong. We defined ourselves in opposition to them, and we measured our own progress by how far we had come from the dark days of McCarthy and the Red Scare. Now, to be considered “serious” on national security, it appears that we must pretend that two hundred lunatic fundamentalists are a deeper threat to us than was an entire nuclear-armed nation of two hundred million people, and further, that the terrorist threat is worth us adopting Soviet tactics. We should know better, and see better, and understand the pattern of which Ayyub Abdul-Alim is a part.

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