As the facts about the young man who plotted and carried out the #ChattanoogaShooting where four Marines were killed on Thursday come out I am forced to roll my eyes and say “Well DUH!!” each time a new “revelation” about him comes to light in the press. My utter frustration has led me to create the following list-the Top Five warning signs that Mohammed Yousuff Abdulazzez had been radicalized.

5-A previously clean shaven young man who is the son of Muslim parents from the Middle East suddenly begins sporting a scraggly beard. I live in Hipster Hell so this would not necessarily indicate that a 24 year old had been radicalized. But when you add this to the fact that his parents have been in this country  for decades and the majority of his female relatives still do not venture out of the house without sporting a hijab-it points to a  fundamentalist orientation in the family’s religious observation.

4-He began keeping a blog about Islam-Now I understand sometimes in early adulthood, especially when one is confronted by certain truths about the world (its hard to be a grown up), some find religion comforting. That is fine, except when you write hypothetical stories about Earth as a “prison” and allude to a test that will either free one from this prison or send one to another, more restrictive place.  People should get scared especially when your blog explains that this test is:

“designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire.”

3-A 24 year old suddenly starts attending Friday religious services religiously without any prompting from his family,  when he had stopped attending for so long that the imam thought he had moved away.

2-When any young man displaying the above attributes talks about wanting:

“… complete understanding of the message of Islam, and the strength the live by this knowledge, and to know what role we need to play to establish Islam in the world.”

Passages like the one above call to mind the “dar al-Harb” or the “House of War” in Islam-and believe me when I tell you no good can come of that (it is where we find the concept referred to as jihad, a core tenet of the theory of Islamic supremacy).

1-The young man who has done all of the above travels to Jordan for seven months. It seems that Government officials are interested in finding out where Abdulazeez went during his prolonged trip to Jordan in 2014. It is not uncommon, according to a presentation by a former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism, for overseas experience to solidify the transition from one who is willing to one who will act on their beliefs.

 “Overseas experience can also be a significant element in facilitating the transition from one who has a proclivity to be radicalized and who may espouse radicalized rhetoric, to one who is willing and ready to act on those radicalized beliefs.”

In short, I think the current politically correct environment prevented the authorities from catching this man’s transition from an apparently normal naturalized citizen into a dangerous Islamic radical.

After all, when our own Homeland Security Department views our returning veterans as the “Number One Terror Threat” you are bound to let a few jihadis slip under the radar.