by David Paulin

The Miami terror plot is among several terror plots and attacks with links to the Caribbean — and Jamaica in particular.

The British have "Londonistan."¯ Americans have a jihad hotspot of their own — the island-nations dotting their Caribbean backyard.

Call it "Caribbeanistan."

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Middle East was widely presumed to be the main incubator for Islamic-inspired jihad. However, the Caribbean has emerged often enough in terrorism-related cases to suggest the region may have some pathologies of its own.

The most recent example was the foiled Miami terror plot. Its seven plotters — all Muslim converts in their 20s and 30s — had strong ties to the Caribbean. Four were born in the U.S. to Haitian parents, two were Haitian immigrants, and one was born in the U.S. to Dominican parents.

Their targets were Chicago's 110-story Sears Tower and FBI offices in six major U.S. cities. Alleged ring leader Narseal Batiste is reported to have admired Osama bin Laden.

The Caribbean's connections to jihad hardly stop here. Caribbean threads also run through Canada's terror plot; London's suicide bombings; the Washington-area sniper killings; and the aborted "shoe bomber"¯ attack on a passenger jet. Altogether, these five plots brought together 13 young Muslim converts who had connections to the Caribbean in varying degrees. The island of Jamaica had ties to all but one plot.

And in London, two Muslim clerics known for their hate-filled sermons have ties to Jamaica. One, Jamaica-born Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, may have influenced aspiring jihadis who also had ties to Jamaica. The other cleric is London-born Omar Brooks, who was born into a Christian family of Jamaican origin.

Brooks, who calls himself Abu Izzadeen, recently sparked outrage for a video mocking non-Muslims and praising London's suicide bombers, who killed 52 people and injured 700 last year on July 7. His video was posted on the Internet ahead of memorial services on the bombing's one-year anniversary. One suicide bomber was Jamaica-born Germaine Lindsay, a 19-year-old Muslim convert.


Anti-Western Political Culture

At first glance, the Caribbean would seem an unlikely source of jihad. After all, it's one of the world's biggest recipients of U.S. foreign aid, and its economies are kept afloat thanks to U.S. tourism and remittances.

What in the region might inspire jihad?

One possibility is its political culture. Beneath its idyllic image as a tourism playground, the Caribbean bristles with some of the same pathologies and grievances as the Middle East. It comes not from ordinary people, to be sure, but from educated elites and those who move within their circles.

Many in the Caribbean — mainly its left-leaning academics and intellectuals — still boil over the region's legacy of slavery. A conference bringing together black academics and intellectuals may produce the sort of emotions one would expect had slavery ended just a few months ago. In October, 2002, for instance, whites were ejected from an anti-racism conference in Barbados.

Even mainstream politicians, in discussing the Sept. 11 attacks, have been known to publicly say America got what it deserved. Generally, the region's left-leaning leaders can be counted on to oppose Washington in the United Nations.

In short, some of the talk one hears from some mainstream left-wing intellectuals and people in the region is similar to the hate speech of Sheik Abdullah el-Faisa and Omar Brooks. Some is clearly racist. However, it is never labeled as such — at least not when the speakers are black.

Could the Caribbean's anti-Western and anti-American pathologies explain it ties to recent terrorism cases?

It's a possibility worth considering. Radical Islam, after all, attracts those who already seethe with grievances against America and the West. Ideology, not poverty, motivates young jihadis. Before discussing the region's pathologies in more detail, however, consider the four other Caribbean links to terror plots — all involving Jamaica to varying degrees:

In Canada's terror plot, two of the 17 plotters had connections to the Caribbean. Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, a 21-year-old Trinidadian, was the university-educated son of a doctor who had immigrated to Canada. Another plotter, according to authorities, had origins in Jamaica. His name was never revealed, presumably because he was a juvenile. The plotters had planned to destroy major landmarks and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Then there were London's suicide bombers. Nearly one year ago, the deadliest bomber was the Jamaica-born Lindsay. He had moved to London as a child and returned to visit Jamaica as a youngster. He killed 25 people aboard one of three underground trains that he and his three companions — Britons of Pakistani descent — targeted along with a double-decker bus.

Lindsay left a pregnant wife, their baby son, and relatives in Massachusetts and the Caribbean.

Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber," was another jihadi with Jamaican origins. Nearly six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the al-Qaeda adherent tried to blow up an American Airlines jet bound from Paris to Miami. A former petty criminal who had served prison time, Reid was born to an English mother and Jamaican father; his father spent much of Reid's childhood in prison. Before Reid could light the fuse to his explosive-packed shoe, startled passengers subdued him.

Nearly one year after that came Jamaican-born Lee Boyd Malvo, the infamous 17-year-old sniper who was born in Jamaica but moved away as a child. He and his 41-year-old partner, New Orleans-born John Allen Muhammad, killed ten people in the Washington D.C. area. Muhammad and Malvo may not have spouted jihadi ideology. They nevertheless shared some traits with other jihadis: unstable family lives and a world view consistent with jihadi ideology. Indeed, Muhammad is said to have remarked that the Sept. 11 attacks "should have happened a long time ago."

According to Malvo's psychiatrist, Muhammad told Malvo their $10 million extortion plot would help establish a new nation for blacks in Canada. Muhammad, a U.S. Army veteran who served in the first gulf war, had lived in the Caribbean. He had been linked to the black separatist group Nation of Islam.

Lastly, there is another plot of sorts with Jamaica links. It involved Muslim cleric Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, who made a name for himself delivering incendiary sermons in a London mosque that Lindsay and Reid may have attended. On March, 2003, el-Faisal was sentenced to nine years in prison, both for soliciting murder and inciting hatred for urging followers to kill Jews, Americans and infidels. He promised young Muslims who died in jihad that they would spend eternity in paradise with 72 virgins.

The race of the Canada plotter was not mentioned in news reports. The others are of African origin.


Jamaica's terrorism connections

With Jamaica figuring into four of the five plots and attacks with Caribbean links, two questions naturally arise. Is it all a coincidence or is there something about Jamaica's culture that might inspire jihad?

Most Americans know Jamaica for its tourism and Bob Marley, the dreadlocked Rastafarian and reggae superstar who wrote the classic, "One Love." Trinidad, not Jamaica, would be a better candidate for inspiring jihad. It has a large Muslim population that includes some radicalized Muslims with a history of violence. However, Jamaica has a dark side stewing beneath the idealized image of a paradise inherited from former African slaves. Here are some of the same deeply felt grievances and paranoia that exists in radical and politicized Islam — whether in the Middle East or among millions of Muslims in Britain, France, or the Netherlands.

To some extent, the island of 2.7 million also serves as an intellectual beacon for the region. The main campus for the University of the West Indies is on the island; and more than a few of its faculty propagate an anti-Western worldview.

To most American tourists, to be sure, the ordinary Jamaicans they encounter are friendly. Many long for U.S. visas. Jamaica has neither a large Muslim population nor history of Muslim radicalism. And like much of the English-speaking Caribbean, it is overwhelmingly black and Christian. But those who venture away from the island's gated resorts and beaches will be in for a surprise. At academic conferences, political gatherings, and in the opinion pages of Jamaica's two Sunday newspapers, the discourse is animated by left-wing ideology, anti-Americanism, and a crackpot theory or two.

Some of this discourse is institutionalized in the educational system. At the University of the West Indies, for instance, "colonialism"¯ and "slavery"¯ are among the most popular subjects for books coming off the university's press. Jamaica's left-leaning People's National Party, a major booster of the university, has ruled the island for decades.

What kind of effect might it all have had on Lindsay, Malvo, Reid, el-Faisal, Brooks, and the plotter in Canada?

To be sure, it may have been years since they set foot in Jamaica. But in an age of air travel, the Internet, and multiculturalism, immigrants in new countries are less likely to assimilate. For many, it's easier to identify with the countries from which they migrated, or from which their parents migrated. This is more likely in areas where there are large concentrations of immigrants from the same country. Miami has areas where Haitians predominate, and London and the United States have areas with large concentrations of Jamaicans. In some cases, they won't identify with any country; jihad, however, may provide them a sense of identify.


Jamaica's 9/11 conspiracy theories

Interestingly, Lindsay, the suicide bomber, is reported to have cried after the September 11 terrorist attacks, whose 3,000 murder victims included several Jamaicans. Between then and his suicide mission, something changed him.

Perhaps it was the anti-American discourse emanating from Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean. It went into overdrive after the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Perhaps Lindsay and other Jamaicans believed a crackpot conspiracy theory that's popular in the Middle East; that 4,000 American Jews failed to show up for work on Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. A lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Sultana Afroz, gave credence to that theory during a public forum dealing with the possibility of a war in Iraq.

Perhaps Lindsay, Malvo, Reid, el-Faisal, Brooks, and the Canada plotter were enraged over the remarks of a lecturer at the University of the West Indies,Cecil Gutzmore. He's repeatedly asserted that the U.S. government cooked up the HIV/AIDS virus to control the world's "non-white"¯ population.

Gutzmore's public comments also were echoed by a well-respected columnist for The Observer, a daily newspaper in Kingston, the capital. On Sundays, the paper's opinion pages bristle with anti-American diatribes that, in the months ahead of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, grew increasingly shrill. Ironically, The Observer, the island's most virulently anti-American paper, is published by Jamaican businessman Gordon "Butch" Stewart, who heads the Sandals and Beaches resorts which depend on American tourism. That elites like Stewart countenance such anti-Americanism, either explicitly or implicitly, is common not only in the Caribbean but in many Third World countries.

Not long ago, a Jamaica-born columnist who lives in Florida, Rev. Mervin Stoddart, praised Osama bin Laden in an Observer column. In another column, he compared America to Nazi Germany, calling it a racist society even worse than South Africa's apartheid regime.

To date, the psyches of Lindsay, Reid, Malvo, el-Faisal, Brooks, and the Canada plotter remain a mystery. How they became radicalized is not known. Certainly there was plenty of hate speech to be found in London's mosques and among its anti-American chattering classes. Could they, however, also have been primed by the anti-American and anti-Western political culture in Jamaica and the Caribbean?

Another factor that may have affected them is Jamaica's frayed social fabric. Jean Lowrie-Chin, a columnist for The Observer, mentioned in a column in July, 2005, that Malvo, Lindsay, Reid, and other ill-starred Jamaicans suffered troubled home lives. They migrated abroad and fell into the "waiting arms of well-versed foreign criminals and fanatics." By "omission or commission, we had a hand in their fate," she argued.

Among other social problems, many Jamaicans grow up in single-parent homes. Fifty percent of Jamaica's households are reportedly headed by single women. A father's name is missing on well over 60 percent of birth records. This can stigmatize children because of Jamaica's conservative and judgmental climate.

Other Jamaicans have observed that the country's heavy reliance on remittances forces mothers and fathers to work abroad, leaving youngsters with little adult supervision. It's a common scenario in the Caribbean and other developing countries.

Neither Lindsay, nor Reid, nor Malvo appear to have had stable upbringings. Malvo's murder spree was widely portrayed as the case of a confused and vulnerable teen succumbing to the diabolical influence of his adult mentor.

In considering the Caribbean's links to jihad — and Jamaica's links in particular — another factor is worth considering that points to another potential threat. Haiti and Jamaica are major transshipment points in the drug trade. They're populated by violent gangs that, conceivably, could team up with jihadists. Jamaica, which suffered the world's worst murder rate in 2005, is particularly problematic in this respect.

For decades, Jamaica's inner-city areas have been dominated by "garrison communities." Divided along political lines, they're controlled by "dons"¯ who oversee criminal activity, maintain order, and have loose ties to local politicians. The island also is the region's top seller and producer of marijuana.

The U.S. State Department, to be sure, has praised Jamaica for its anti-terrorism efforts, but the country's mix of well-organized gangs, frayed social fabric, and anti-Western ideology may prove to be a potent incubator for future jihadists. The same may be said for Haiti, especially after the arrests of the Miami terror suspects. Curiously, though, the island has never been known as a bastion of anti-Americanism — despite being the hemisphere's most impoverished country.

That Jamaica is so problematic is ironic. Its official motto is: "Out of Many, One People."¯ Yet many of its intellectual leaders spout rhetoric sprinkled with anti-Americanism and thinly veiled racism. The good Rev. Stoddart, the newspaper columnist, is one of many examples.

Such hate speech is ironic in another sense. In the 1990s, Jamaica received more than $500 million in assistance, making it the Caribbean's second largest recipient of foreign aid. From 2000 until 2006, U.S. foreign aid averaged nearly $23 million annually.

After U.S. tourism, remittances from the U.S. have traditionally been Jamaica's biggest source of income. Most ordinary Jamaicans know this and appreciate the positive influence the U.S. has on their lives. The island's left-leaning intellectual elite, on the other hand, seem to hate the U.S. all the more because of that influence. It's a familiar story among many anti-American elites in Third World countries. In an age of terror, however, their hate-talk may be part of why young men take up jihad.