Fifteen years after the arrest of Mohamed Mohamud, Portland writer Jamila Osman reflects on the aftermath of that time on the local Somali community in a new essay in Oregon Humanities. Osman grew up in the same tight-knit community as the young man who would go on to press a button that he thought would blow up the Christmas tree at Pioneer Square. She joins us to discuss the essay.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It’s been nearly 15 years since a Somali American student Mohamed Mohamud was arrested in an FBI sting operation. He had tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb at the 2010 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square.
Jamila Osman is a writer and educator. She’s also a fellow member of Oregon’s Somali American community. She wrote a recent essay in the Oregon Humanities magazine about the ongoing impact of Mohamud’s arrest and conviction on that community, and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.
Jamila Osman: Thanks so much.
Miller: Many articles and even a book have been written about this case. What did you think hadn’t been covered enough?
Osman: As a writer, I know and I understand the appeal of these kinds of grand dramatic narratives, but I feel like a lot of what’s been written about this case failed to deal with the humans that were involved and the humanity of everybody that was part of it.
Miller: You referred to Mohamed Mohamud by his first name in your essay, not his last. How well did you know him growing up?
Osman: I didn’t know him very well, but we were part of the same community, and it was a small enough community that most people knew of each other. So I used his first name to sort of indicate that kind of intimacy, the intimacy of belonging to the same community and experiencing a lot of the same struggles as one another.
Miller: Zooming forward to one of the important details that you wrote about here, that probably a lot of folks may have forgotten if they knew it or never knew if they weren’t here – what prompted Mohamud’s father, Osman Barre, to call the FBI about his son in 2009?
Osman: It’s an interesting question. I think the specifics of what prompted him to call the FBI are far less interesting, perhaps than the more universal story, that this was a father who loved his son, who was worried about him and didn’t know how to help him, so was willing to try sort of anything and everything to try to keep him safe.
Miller: One of the things that is so striking about it is the amount of trust that his father, I guess, must have felt in the FBI if he felt comfortable enough to turn to this national law enforcement agency, eight years into the war on terror, when he had concerns about his father. What does it tell you that he would call the FBI in the first place?
Osman: I think it shows that when we are desperate, we do things that we might not ordinarily do. And I think one of the things that this case ended up doing, and the reaction of the FBI to his phone call, was that it really eroded people’s trust in the government, it made people even more distrusting of law enforcement. And like I wrote in the essay, it made us more wary of each other and it showed us really the conditional nature of civil liberties in this country.
Miller: I want to get to that as we go, because it’s really important pieces. But just to stick with the timeline a little bit, you write that even at the time that Mohamud’s father had called the FBI to say, I’m worried about my son, that he was already on the FBI’s radar. Why?
Osman: Again, at the time that this was happening, I wasn’t really aware of the larger political and social landscape that we were all situated in. But this was post 9/11, this was the earlier years of the war on terror. This was post Patriot Act. So none of those realities can really be divorced from this case or can be divorced from the fact that the way that surveillance operated in this case [was] to try and find Mohamed and then to try and entrap him.
Miller: As you note, Mohamud had gotten onto the FBI’s radar because he had been on internet message boards that you write “served as echo chambers for Islamic extremists.” What led him to do that? What does it seem he was searching for?
Osman: I think it’s the same thing that leads young boys today to be on these sort of alt right, misogynistic message boards, right? There was this idea when this first happened that this was a failure, perhaps on the part of the Somali or the Muslim community, when the things that led him to these sites – alienation, isolation, fear, a desire for community and for belonging – are not desires that are unique to our community. And neither are the sometimes misguided ways that people can go about trying to achieve those things.
Miller: The FBI file on Mohamud at that time described him as a pretty manipulable, conflicted kid. How did FBI agents develop their relationship with Mohamud?
Osman: I mean, by preying on his vulnerabilities, like this was clearly someone who was vulnerable at the time and that vulnerability was taken advantage of.
Miller: What did FBI agents do over the course of months to convince Mohamud that he was going to blow up a bomb at that ceremony on November 26, 2010?
Osman: Well, a lot of that I wrote about in my essay and a lot of that is also public records. But I do just want to say that I didn’t write this story necessarily to exceptionalize the case. Of course, it’s extraordinary in the context of one young man’s life and his family’s life, but in the larger political landscape at the time, and now, it wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened and it certainly wasn’t the last.
Miller: Do you remember how you heard the news about what had happened?
Osman: Yeah, I think I heard from friends. And part of why I wrote this is because I wanted to sort of reflect and come to terms with a story that had been incredibly monumental for our community but that occurred when I was much younger. So it was sort of my way to go back in time as an adult to reflect on this thing that happened during the most formative years of my adolescence, and to sort of try and think about how it shaped me and the people around me.
At the time, what I remember is there was a lot of silence. There were a ton of rumors, a ton of speculation. And I remember that the adults around us were afraid – although at the time, I didn’t quite understand why.
Miller: One of the specific factors that led to that fear was the use of informants. And you note that it preceded the particular case of Mohamed Mohamud and it continued after him. You talked to a childhood friend of his – who didn’t want to be identified with his real name – who said that sometimes a man that he’d never seen before would go up to him and his friends, and ask how they felt about Jihad. So in ways that, I guess as I read it, felt transparently, either provocative or clearly these people were just trying to entrap more young men.
What kind of mistrust did that introduce into the community?
Osman: That’s a good question. I mean, prior to that, there was already mistrust between the community and the state for various reasons. But after that there was an even greater sense of mistrust between congregants of our message, between people who had for years prayed shoulder to shoulder. And that kind of fear and that kind of isolation is what creates the context for more things, like what happened to Mohamed, to happen. Instead of having the support of community during times like that, people were actually driven apart from one another.
Miller: In other words, people would wonder if the person they’d known for decades was now being a paid informant for the FBI, if they could trust their neighbor or their friend?
Osman: Exactly.
Miller: How much does that mistrust linger to this day, 15 years after that arrest and 24 years after September 11, 2001?
Osman: It’s still very much alive. It’s still very much alive. I think that one of the things that became very clear, at least to me while I was writing this, was that I was reflecting a lot on the way that people were afraid to openly support or associate with Mohamed or his family, for fear of being thought of as guilty by association. Because it was like the big T word, right? Terrorism was and still is, in a lot of ways, a four letter word and no one wanted to come within an inch of it.
And I think some of that fear has abated a little bit, only because now we’re able to see, this many years since the case and this many years since 9/11, how the malleability of that kind of language and that kind of post 9/11 logic can be used to describe anyone – from an 18-year-old boy in 2015, who was entrapped by the government, to today a college freshman who’s maybe protesting in support of Palestine or something.
Miller: You wrote, as Black Muslims, “Somali Americans occupy a complex space at the crossroads of race and religion in a country that prefers neat demographic boxes.” Can you explain that more fully?
Osman: Yeah, I think that in some ways, it’s human nature to want to see the world in terms of patterns and to want to be able to categorize things. And we don’t know what to do with people when we can’t categorize them in a way that feels coherent with these sort of systems of demarcation that we’ve inherited. A lot of people don’t know that Black people can be Muslim, or that Muslims come from every country in the world and are not just Arab. So these sort of one-dimensional stories about who other people are in relation to us is what I was sort of trying to get at when I wrote that.
Miller: Looking back at the way this one case reverberates to this day, you interspersed it with a number of sections about Douglas fir trees. Why?
Osman: I think because as I was writing this, one of the things that became really clear was how so many people who were involved wanted to distance themselves from this thing that had happened, when we are all implicated. This was, at the end of the day, Mohamed’s home, this is where he was from, in addition to being from other places as well. So it might be easier to sort of turn away and look away from the things that make us uncomfortable or the things that we think are ugly, but these are still, this is still Oregon history, right? It’s not just the Somali community’s history. This is not just our story. This is everyone’s story.
Miller: What kinds of reactions have you gotten from the Somali Oregonian community since your piece came out?
Osman: I feel really grateful. Most of it has been really positive. This is something that happened and then was sort of swept under the rug. Of course, not for those who are most directly and those most intimately involved, but for everyone else, it was something that happened that we then never talked about again. So I’m grateful if this essay in any way could sort of help us have these conversations and continue to have these conversations, not just about this case but about what it meant and what it means.
Miller: You ended your essay with a description of a conversation that you had with the community leader Musse Olol. Can you tell us what he told you?
Osman: Well, as we were having this conversation, I had asked him, “what do you wish that you had known at the time or what do you wish our community had known at the time?” So one of the things that he left me with is that we’re co-dependent. Like, we can’t abandon each other. Our well-being is intertwined.
Miller: Jamila, thanks very much.
Osman: Thanks so much for having me.
Miller: Jamila Osman is a Portland-based writer and educator. She wrote a recent essay in the Oregon Humanities magazine about the ongoing impact of Mohamed Mohamud’s arrest and conviction on Portland’s Somali American community.
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