Meet the Tupac Shakur of Jihadi Islamists

A big h/t to Wired for bringing our attention to the story of Alabama native Omar Hammami, aka Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, a jihadi rapper who has released two new hip-hop tracks refuting rumors of his death:

In one of the tracks — “Send Me a Cruise” (.mp3), as in cruise missile — Hammami portrays himself as a sort of jihadist Tupac: distantly aware of a grim fate that awaits him, but fearless nonetheless. “There’s nothing as sweet as the taste of a tank shell,” he tells listeners.

It’s a tough image to pull off, though. He sounds more like Somalia’s Vanilla Ice, mumbling his way through hokey lyrics with too many syllables inartfullly crammed into too few beats. Using lines like “Or better yet send me a cruise, and send me on a cruise” to express his hope for a cruise missile-aided “martyrdom” don’t help his reputation as a lyricist, either.

Click here to listen

In “Make Jihad With Me” (.mp3) — released as a B-side to “Send Me a Cruise” — Hammami goes into recruitment mode, dedicating the song to “those Muslim youth in the west who are finding their way back to their glorious roots.” In it, the small town-raised, Alabama-born Hammami lets listeners know that he understands what it’s like in the inner-city. ”You grew up on the streets of the wild wild west / Every day you’re surviving test after test,” he says, charting a fictional Muslim protagonist’s journey from the mean streets of America to redemption in Somalia’s jihadi training camps. ...

At this point, Hammami’s released almost enough awful songs for either a best-of album (“Now That’s What I Call Jihad, Volume 1″?) or a really disturbing episode of “Glee.”