NoMuzikNo:zilchide

作者 mstar (Wayne Su)
看板 share
標題 [資訊] 地震 規模、震度..與"能量"
時間 Mon May 12 23:05:53 2008

規模，表示該次地震釋放的能量，「理論上」一次地震只會有一個數字、
各地測得的數字應該都一樣，但有時因為儀器誤差或種種因素，會有一些差距
(另，美國用的計算法與台灣用的不一樣，所以數字會不同)

沒有「級」，是帶一位小數的數字，通常用 Mx.y 表示，或是直接說「規模x.y」

eg. 「芮氏規模 6.4」「M7.0」「規模 5.6」

震度，表示地震在各地方造成的損壞程度，會因與震央的距離、地形因素而變動
所以會有好多個，為０～７的整數，後帶一個「級」字

eg. 「台北２級」「台中震度３級」「全台最大震度５級」


至於記者每次喜歡要講的「相當於○顆原子彈...」，是用算的：

log 能量 = 11.8 + 1.5 x 規模

此次規模 7.8 的地震，放的能量為

log 能量 = 23.5

能量 = 10^23.5 (erg)


而一噸 TNT 炸藥爆炸的能量約為 4.61E+16 erg
若廣島原子彈能量約為 12500 噸 TNT 炸藥能量：5.76E+20 erg
^^^^^^^^ (有時「顆數」會不同，是因這裏定義不一樣)


則 本次規模 7.8 地震釋放能量約為 549 顆廣島原子彈...



: → tooooooo:為什麼不用手榴彈 不是更多

一顆美製 mk3 手榴彈內裝有 8 oz 的 TNT，能量換算約為 9489152380400 erg

把地震能量 10^23.5 erg 拿來除，則約等於 33,325,185,780 顆


: 推 pooooooo:乾脆換算成5.65公釐步槍彈數量吧 05/12 20:51

一枚 5.56x45 NATO 步槍彈的能量約為 1785 J，換算為 17850000000 erg

把地震能量 10^23.5 erg 拿來除，則約等於 17,715,841,230,000 枚

: → tooooooo:乾脆換算成水鴛鴦好了 05/12 20:53

一根水鴛鴦約有 1 g 的黑火藥，能量約為 4437500000 erg

把地震能量 10^23.5 erg 拿來除，則約等於 71,262,595,160,000 根


: → aoooo:那 406 呢 ? 05/12 22:28

一顆 40x46 mm 榴彈，約有 40g TNT 裝藥，換算後能量為 1673600000000 erg

把地震能量 10^23.5 erg 拿來除，則約等 188,950,6250,000 顆


: 推 aoooo:那等於多少個營養午餐呢? 05/12 20:56

一份營養午餐約 700 KCal，換算後為 29307600000000 erg

把地震能量 10^23.5 erg 拿來除，則約等於 10,789,957,760 份營養午餐的能量



不覺得原子彈對一般民眾很難理解嗎？ 不如改用這個各大媒體最愛的單位
只要報導說「這次地震的能量相當於全國三百萬名學童吃將近十年的營養午餐」，
觀眾就能馬上理解地震的可怕程度！

建議各大媒體以後都如此換算，除了好懂，還能喚起國民做好防範震災的準備工作，
可是一舉數得呢！

那天夜裏，我夢到了吳念真。 

        嚴格的說，我只是夢到我急著想打電話給吳念真，但是已經深夜十二點了，我不敢打，怕他已經睡了，因為明天我們有重要的期末考。夢裡面的我們是大學同班同學，成績不相上下，就是那種第一名和第二名的競爭關係。夢裡的我，比他聰明很多，哈哈，當然，那只是夢。在真實生活中，我記得當我們還面對面一起上班的那段日子，吳念真對我說過最多的話就是：「小野，我覺得我比你聰明，而且聰明很多。」 

    　通常他在說這句話時眼神中流露出一種少見的溫柔，如果他正在抽菸的話，隔著一層煙霧，那種眼神豈止是溫柔而已，簡直就是偉大的劇作家才會有的那種悲憫和仁慈。（我就是在他的菸害中長大的）他在說這句話時並沒有要貶抑我的意思，他只是覺得我真的很笨，許多事情都已經知道是沒有結果的，還要勇往直前的做，其實是一種疼惜或讚美吧？（當然，這種特質只有我身上才有。）如果我自己不做這樣的解釋，我們的友誼怎能維持到現在？因為我們見了面一定會以刻薄無比的語言嘲諷著對方，從身材到品味，我們樂此不疲；如果沒有一點想像空間和信心，我們早就打一架結束長達三十年以上的友誼了。 

        回到那個夢境吧。夢裡面的吳念真並不是目前台灣社會普遍認識的那個簡直就要和台灣庶民文化畫上等號的各種產品的代言人，那個簡直要替全體台灣人打點所有食、衣、住、行、交通和生死的廣告代言人。夢裡的他還是青澀的大一學生，就像我們當年初相識的模樣。在夢裡的他上課時都坐在第一排，非常認真聽講，他要花很多力氣才能考得和我一樣好。我常常不去聽課，所以連考試的時間都忘了，夢裡面我焦急的要打電話問他，就是關於考試的科目和時間。我這大半生都被這樣的考試夢所苦，如果考試的夢中又出現了吳念真，那就是沒完沒了的苦了，因為夢裡他的成績已經遠遠超越了我。

    　夢裡的吳念真是白皙溫柔的，長得比我高大英俊（我可能是把他的兒子的模樣移植給他了）；所以追求者也很多，當然，我是說，在夢裡面，真實和夢往往是相反的。在真實生活中我們一直是一種隱約的競爭關係。說「隱約」只是禮貌，其實簡直是赤裸裸的生死之爭。才二十幾歲的我們，同時被簽約成為報社的專屬作家，我們也同時參加著一個又一個的文學獎。三十歲的我們，成為同一家電影公司的編審，一起企劃著每一年的拍片計畫。（後來我當上他的主管，他拒絕任何升遷機會，理由又是他比我聰明多了，當主管要開太多無聊的會，他寧願多寫劇本對公司比較有貢獻。）

    　我們的競爭越來越白熱化。我們常常一起坐在金馬獎頒獎典禮的台下，等著頒獎人宣佈得獎人。有一年，我上台領了兩座金馬獎，有一座是自己得的，另一座是代替他領的，他去了香港寫劇本。我上台替他領獎時說了一段笑話，當然是比他自己上台精彩多了。（所以他是故意缺席的。）

    　後來才知道，連我們各自讀著不同的小學的那一年全省作文比賽，我們竟然也是同一場的小小競爭者，連題目都還記得：「精神生活與物質生活」。那一次我們打成平手，因為都落選了。由此可見，我們兩人生命的意義就是用來彼此競爭的，是從小學就開始的。有一天，我和吳念真一起上廁所，他忽然嘆了一口氣說：「小野，我們這大半輩子什麼都比過了，現在，就只剩下一樣東西沒有比過。」「當然是你贏，OK？」我回答著。

         時間 

    　其實，我已經很久很久沒有見到「真的」吳念真了。 

    　在當年（遙遠的一九八九年），還未滿四十歲的我們「一起」辭職，「一起」離開了中央電影公司以後，我們和柯一正導演曾經想「一起」組一家影視製作公司。是的，什麼都是「一起」，一起這樣，一起那樣的。最後，我們終於相信，三個同質性的男人，最好還是彼此分開，自己開自己的公司。於是從那一刻起，我們決定分道揚鑣。從上個世紀的九十年代起，我們兄弟們各自登山，各自走了不太一樣的人生道路，一晃就跨過了一個世紀了。

    　我們總是會在對方有所「新的作為」時，被媒體詢問一下感想，包括他得了國際大獎，或是又要推出新的舞台劇戲，或是媒體要做他個人的特輯，我總得裝模作樣的說些「我對他很有信心，他簡直是天才」的檯面上光明的讚嘆，私底下想的卻是：「你真是太可憐了，那麼老了，還要像甘蔗被壓榨成甘蔗板一樣，還嫌自己不夠忙啊？我看你真是有被虐的傾向。」而我也總是在休息好一陣子之後，又忽然要匆匆上任新的工作，他也得被媒體追問，被迫發表一些言不由衷的感言，像是「祝福啊，新氣象啊。時代改變啦。」之類的，他的心裡一定是偷偷笑罵著說：「神經病，一定沒搞清楚狀況，老來不享受清福，沒事找點事幹，去折磨一下筋骨？真是自虐狂一個。」

    　雖然在一些資深記者心目中，我們是最應該知道彼此狀況的老朋友，其實關於他的最新消息，我往往是接到記者的詢問電話才知道的。有時候我為了滿足記者的垂詢，只好說了一些關於吳念真的舊事，對方會打斷我說：「那不是很久以前的事了嗎？」「不會很久吧，最多兩三年前吧？」我也會不服氣的反駁。「拜託，兩三年還不夠久嗎？兩三年的變化很大呢？」年輕的記者提醒我。「是喔？」我這才恍然大悟。原來時間的度量在我們之間差距是那樣的大。

    　原來我的人生有一大段時光像是停頓的，整整十年，我選擇了在家工作，過著閒雲野鶴、姜太公釣魚、大隱隱於市的生活，可是對吳念真而言，或許那正是他在絕望中為自己掙脫出一條繼續前行的道路的關鍵十年，相對於我的輕鬆自在，他過得比我辛苦多了。

    　在這黑暗絕望摸索前進的十年間，原本他，還不想放棄電影，除了自己下海當導演拍了「多桑」和「太平．天國」外，也試圖去找資金當電影監製，繼續提拔年輕的導演，想用他自己當時的名氣，以一己之力，繼續完成當年我們在一起當電影公務員時代的任務。當有線電視風起雲湧的戰國時代，他又做了一系列影響台灣電視節目深遠的電視節目「台灣念真情」。（這一整段，請用貝多芬的快樂頌作為配樂，讀起來會更感動。）

    　他原本真正想做的是這些其實缺乏遠景的電影電視創作，可是沒想到無心插柳的廣告代言，卻讓他紅到家喻戶曉，這和整個時代的劇變有關。九十年代正是台灣本土化越來越深化的時代，他本身參與造就了那樣的時代，那個時代也造就了他。從此以後，「吳念真」三個字本身就成了某種本土象徵意義，這，讓他後來越來越好辦事情，許多理想和夢想得以實踐。（這一段的配樂可以考慮桃花過渡，請東京愛樂管弦樂團來演奏。）

    　不管是超級市場、連鎖店、大賣場，我到處看到吳念真的人像看板和人像立牌，想要看不到他，也難。基於一種本能的嫉妒心理，每當我不小心撞見他正推銷著不同產品的人像立牌時，都會對著立牌上笑得很虛偽的他罵一句說：「難道你不知道你這樣陰魂不散真的很煩嗎，你想嚇死人也不要用這招嘛？」

    　我終於見到「真正」的吳念真了。那天我們一邊開著會一邊等著大師駕到。當他出現時，引起大家一陣騷動，許多人都衝到門口迎接他，他並不立刻走進來，他站在門口，一身中學生模樣的白色襯衫黃卡其褲裝扮，右肩背著一個年輕人的黑色酷酷背包，他讓自己斜斜屌屌的站著，手中還叼著香菸，像是要等著攝影機架好拍照，想像中的鎂光燈，已經如夜空的煙火般四起。（天哪，還在抽菸？）

    　我注意到他炯炯的眼神。我很想找一個形容詞來形容他那一瞬間橫掃過來的眼神，用前面用過的溫柔、悲憫、仁慈都太虛偽，用「睥睨」這樣的字眼又怕他和我翻臉。他的眼神似笑非笑，有一種想要自我嘲弄的，看穿一切的，透徹的，當然，還有那種無法抹去的，深深的倦意。

    　「不用再擺姿勢了，老朋友，怎麼擺都無法掩飾你的倦意，多年不見，你看起來比我老多了。因為我的時間整整停頓了十年。」我暗暗得意起來，其實，就算是當年分道揚鑣了，原來我們之間隱約的競爭，包括外貌和生活，竟然是無休無止的。

    　人間條件

    　三月底京都的櫻花樹上都還是花苞，櫻花季還沒正式登場。我在遊覽車上說著幾則關於吳念真的舊笑話，全車笑得最大聲的是聽過很多次的柯一正導演，後來連櫻花都被大家笑得乖乖的開了。

    　當年柯導演接下了我們三個人合組的公司繼續做到現在，這趟是公司員工們的日本之旅，我只想重溫一下當年和老朋友一起工作、玩樂的感覺。說說沒有在場的老朋友的笑話是我們當年立下的規矩，吳念真曾經寫著：「我們朋友之間有個惡習，聚會場合誰不在場，所有的笑話、消遣、刻薄就繞著他轉，近幾年來主角幾乎全是小野，可是講來講去老是那幾套，一如他的長相，簡直無趣乏味之至。」

    　能夠在那麼老之後，維持著老朋友之間相互刻薄的優良傳統，我內心的快樂可想而知。（我們在四十歲以後。就這樣老氣橫秋的囉唆起來，其實最不甘心老去的就是我們這個世代的人。）不過我說的笑話也像吳念真所寫的，講來講去還是那幾套，包括馴悍記、開會灑尿記等，不過「一如他的長相」，簡直越看越好笑，連柯導聽了都忍不住要自動加入，說一些關於他的新笑話。其實，他本人渾身上下就是一個笑話，每次見了他，就想笑，能夠認識他，人生真是幸福又美好。（請播放「我一見你就笑」）

    　時序進入到二十一世紀後，我們偉大的「國民劇作家」吳念真迷上了舞台劇，接二連三的推出了「人間條件」系列劇作，創造了一種全新的劇種，引進了許多原本不看舞台劇的觀眾，就像當年他寫的近百本的電影劇本一樣，一再締造了全新的票房紀錄。（我這樣狗腿的讚美方式，到底是想搞笑，還是真心的歌頌，連我自己都迷惑了？）

    　吳念真在一系列的「人間條件」劇作中，刻劃著人世間各式各樣互動的情感，包括了感恩、情義、責任和了解，他總是慣用笑中帶淚的幽默手法來處理他的每一齣戲劇。坐在舞台下的我，忍不住會想著這個天才般的劇作家是如何在對自己極為不利的人間條件下，創造了屬於他自己的奇蹟？我認識他的時候，他還在半工半讀的讀著大一。出生在礦工家庭的他，在沒有任何資源和條件下，早早就放棄了繼續升學，隻身來到台北當學徒，受盡各種人世間的欺凌羞辱。最後他還是考進了輔大夜間部，讀了將來可以謀生的會計系，白天就在市立療養院當圖書管理員。對很多人而言，這樣的人間條件是走不下去的，是很容易怨天尤人自暴自棄的，可是他卻一點一點走出來，越活越自在，對社會的影響力也越來越大。

    　他讓我想到了煤礦。當然，我說的不是他的外表，而是整個人所散發出來的生命特質。植物的枝葉落入土裡成了腐植質，經過了幾番地殼變動被壓到更底層，隔絕了空氣，高溫高壓讓這些千萬年的腐植質變成了煤礦。吳念真用他的作品散發著人間的光與熱，但是他自身在人間所受的痛苦和煎熬，卻讓他內心有一種孤絕的寒冷，就像埋在地底層的煤礦。這種冷熱的不協調，讓他自己也很難平衡。（抱歉，我無意要為他立紀念碑，但是，這回可真的是在讚美了。）

    　
         天天天藍

    　「天天天藍，想不看到他，也難。不知情的孩子他還要問，你的眼睛為什麼出汗？」

    　我唱著自己改過歌詞的「天天天藍」，獻給我的老朋友和我們一起走過的飢渴的青春，還有那個曾經讓我們眼睛一起出汗的，壓抑、苦悶卻一定要自己幸福的歲月。

是何等的失策 他在遊過岩石之間時
被鬆動的岩石卡住

人們也會陷入困境
在房間裡來回踱步

而山椒魚的生息處 卻容不得他游來游去
他只能前後左右地搖擺身體
結果只是蹭著岩壁上的水鏽 觸感光滑
他深信這樣下去
自己的背 尾巴 肚子上終會長滿青苔
他深深地嘆了一口氣
宛如在自言自語地說 至少要下個決心吧
既然無論如何都出不去 我也算想得很清楚了
但是說到底
他所想通的並不是甚麼高明的道理

岩洞的頂上長滿了杉苔蘚和錢苔蘚
錢苔蘚用自己綠色鱗片像佔地盤似的繁殖
杉苔蘚非常纖細
在鮮紅的花梗尖上 開著可愛的花朵
可愛的花結著可愛的果實
他按著無花植物授粉法則
不時地散著花粉
山椒魚不喜歡看著這些杉苔蘚和錢苔蘚
甚至想離的遠遠的

杉苔蘚的花粉總是飄落到岩洞的水面上
山椒魚深信 自己的住處已經被污染了
不只如此 岩壁和洞頂的坑窪處 也全長滿的霉斑
霉斑他有多麼愚蠢的習性阿
總是長了沒 沒了長
完全沒有要繁殖下去的意思
山椒魚喜歡把臉貼在洞口 看著洞外的世界
從昏暗的地方窺視明亮的地方
不是件很有意義的事嗎？
而且 沒有甚麼比從小小的窗口往外張望
能夠看到的更多

我們必須思考的是，台灣有任何一位政治人物，能夠讓你獲得這樣的感動嗎？
馬小九？謝小夫？或許你心中根本找不到任何一個能夠回答這個問題的答案，但我想我有！
不管Barack Obama 最後是否能在民主黨初選出線，他的一席演講都已經成功打進許多人的心坎裡了！

PS.英文並不難，可以嘗試著認真看一看，真的很棒！我考完再來翻譯吧！
黑眼豆豆這首致敬歌曲，要看超高畫質的話請按"這裡"！你會很感動喔！

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation:
Yes, we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom :
Yes, we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness:
Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized,
women who reached for the ballot,
a president who chose the moon as our new frontier,
and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land:
Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity.
Yes, we can heal this nation.
Yes, we can repair this world.

Yes, we can.


We know the battle ahead will be long.
But always remember that,
no matter what obstacles stand in our way,
nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics.
And they will only grow louder and more dissonant .

We've been asked to pause for a reality check.
We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.


Now the hopes
of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon
are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA;
we will remember that there is something happening in America;
that we are not as divided as our politics suggests;

that we are one people; we are one nation;
and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words
that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --

yes, we can.
yes, we can.
yes, we can.

2008/04/17 update

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Visual Rock(15)

Drama/Actor-ress/Other Artists(9)

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Collections 收藏(2)

ART 啊特塗鴉與廢渣(2)

藝文vs.文藝x青年vs.年輕(2)

Taiwan & Politics 台灣逆轉勝！(2)

Books(2)

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SPORTZ(4)

第八藝術-映画(6)

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動漫推薦(5)
未分類文章

孔子的名片

孔子收到美國「世界漢學國際研討會」的請柬，邀他在開幕典禮後作專題演講。
孔子十分高興，準備先去印一盒名片。 
文具店老闆見聖人來了，異常恭敬，問清楚名片要中英文對照，就對孔子說：
「英文的一面，不知該怎麼稱呼？」
「不是有現成的Confucius嗎？」 孔子反問。
「那是外國人對您老的尊稱， 把『孔夫子』拉丁化的說法。」老闆笑笑說， 
「您老不好意思自稱『孔夫子』吧？」
「那倒是的。」 孔子想到自己平常鼓吹謙虛之道， 不禁沉吟起來。
「那，該怎麼印呢？」

「杜甫昨天也來過，」 老闆說。
「哦，他的名字怎麼印的？」孔子問。
「 杜 先生本來要印Tu Fu，」老闆說，
「我一聽表示不好，太像『豆腐』了。」
杜 先生說，「那就倒過來，叫Fu Tu好了。」
我說，「那更不行，簡直像『糊塗』！」
「那怎麼辦？」孔子問。
「後來我就對詩聖說：『您老不是字子美嗎？子美，子美……有了！』
杜甫說：『怎麼有了？』
我說：『杜子美，就叫Jimmy Tu吧！』」
孔子笑起來，叫一聲「妙！」

「其實韓愈也來過，」老闆又說。
「真的呀？」孔子更好奇了。
「他就印Han Yu吧？」
「本來他要這樣的」 老闆說。「我一聽又說不行，太像Hang you了。 」
韓老說，那『倒過來呢？』
我說，「You hang？那也不行。 不是『吊死你』就是『你去上吊吧』，太不雅了！」
「那後來呢？」孔子問。
「後來呀，」老闆得意洋洋，
「還是我想到韓老的故鄉，對他說：『您老不是韓昌黎嗎？』他說『是呀』，
我說就印Charlie Han好了！」

「太好了，太好了！」孔子笑罷， 又皺起眉頭說，
「他們都解決了，可是我到底怎麼印呢？」
老闆想了一下，叫道，「有了！」
「怎麼樣？」 孔子問。
「您老不是字仲尼嗎？」老闆笑道。
「對呀，」孔子滿臉期待。
老闆大聲道
「而且還曾週遊列國...是吧!」 





那就印...
“ JOHNNIE WALKER “

Bereft of any information, their mothers wait. Some of them told me they refuse to believe that their boys could be capable of such horror. They are really in Spain, they said. They will be coming home any day.

“A mother can feel it when her child has a fever,” Souad Ashtut, the mother of Bilal and Muncif, said. “So how could I not feel that he died? I feel that my children are still alive.”

Any little thing stirs a memory. The mother of Abdelmunim, the sea smuggler, opens the wrong drawer, and there are his swimming trunks. She spots a stranger with the same lumbering stride. She sees his black eyes in the daughter he left behind.

“I want proof,” Abdelmunim’s mother told me in July. “I want to see just a piece of his bone. Just to be sure. Just to be sure if he died.”

She leaned on a rusty door, her face buried in a towel. Chicks staggered around the yard. A breeze rustled the trees as a gate whined shut in the distance.

“If I ever find the person who put this idea in his head, I will kill him,” she said.

Grief has aged Abdelmunim’s 22-year-old wife, Boushra. She dreads walking in public. People talk. Some gossip that he sold her gold jewelry to buy the plane ticket. She has lost 17 pounds and can no longer look at photographs of her husband. “He could not have done this,” Boushra said as she sat in the sun one afternoon, rail-thin and draped in black. Her toddler, Maram, squealed at her feet.

Abdelmunim’s little brother, Usama, withdraws into bouts of silence. He used to ride into the ocean on his brother’s shoulders, he told me one afternoon. Then he paused and covered his face with small hands. He could no longer speak. His father has stopped working and wanders the neighborhood in a long djellaba. He is sure that his son is still alive.

In the months following the men’s departure, the authorities opened a police station next to the school where the young jihadis once congregated. In the course of reporting this story, families talked to me in their doorways while watching nervously to see who might be listening. I was followed closely by a government agent, who aggressively questioned several people I interviewed, threatening at least one of them with a visit from the police.

Suspicions have chilled the neighborhood. One afternoon in June, a woman peered out her window at Abdelmunim’s house. Her son played soccer with his little brother Usama. The boy seemed nice enough, but she worried that he was so quiet. “You can’t know what a quiet person is thinking,” the woman said. Usama might put the wrong ideas in her son’s head. A few weeks later, she sent her son to live with her parents a few blocks away.

People in Jamaa Mezuak seem deeply troubled by the violent fate of the young men who grew up in their midst. Some of the neighbors view the phenomenon as a sort of freak accident. Others see an obvious and alarming pattern. Whatever caused these men to become terrorists, the aftershocks of their decisions have been deeply felt. Mechanics, politicians, homemakers and schoolchildren have argued endlessly about the true meaning of jihad, about why some people are willing to kill themselves and take the lives of others, about whether these men did it simply for fame.

They seem most disapproving of the Madrid bombings, in part because so many locals have relatives living in the Spanish capital who could have easily been killed on the same commuter trains. Again and again, I heard the same refrain: killing innocent people is not jihad.

But some people in Jamaa Mezuak have a different take on the five men who left for Iraq. “They are resistance fighters,” Mohsin Chabab, a party planner, told me.

I asked Chabab about his own interpretation of jihad. Couldn’t these men have worked to improve their own lives, or conditions in their own neighborhood, rather than leaving to fight in another country? “Why didn’t George Bush work on the United States?” he shot back. “He went and occupied Afghanistan. It’s the same thing.”

The closer I got to the friends of the Madrid and Iraq groups, the less criticism of violence I encountered. In Madrid, Chino’s brothers live in the shadow of their brother’s notoriety. Five of them share a dingy apartment. They are closely watched by the police, they say. Yussef, who works as a waiter, no longer knows whom to trust. If he tells people about his brother, they may think he is capable of the same. He keeps to himself. “I’d prefer to put up a mirror and talk to it,” he said. Yet he still finds justification for Chino’s catastrophic plot and the many innocent lives it claimed. He does not consider his brother a “terrorist,” he said. “This was about injustice,” he said as we sat on a bench in downtown Madrid in July. “He wanted to help people. His intention was not to kill. It was to save.”

If people from Jamaa Mezuak feel conflicted about the meaning of jihad, they seem to have fewer differences in their view of the United States. Conversations about terrorism typically lead to the same pronouncement: “The biggest terrorist in the world is the American president,” a 30-year-old barber told me while wearing a baseball cap with gold letters that spelled “America” across the front. The same discussions often bring a facile condemnation of Jews. In the neighborhood, heroin is known as the “bone of Jews.” It was Jews, according to lore, who planted the drug in Jamaa Mezuak.

This kind of talk leaves Youssef Hnana, a local historian, feeling hopeless. His city has not lived up to its promise, he said. He prefers to reflect on the Tetouan of the mid-19th century, when the thriving port nearby drew a peaceful coexistence among Jews, Christians and Muslims. He believes that many young Muslims today are headed in the wrong direction. “The way they think has changed,” he said, swatting a fly from his face. “The fact that you kill yourself just like this, it is a very strange thing. It’s a shame for our city.”

The Moroccan authorities claim to have stemmed the flow of volunteers headed for Iraq. But terrorism continues to torment the country. This spring, six suicide bombers strapped with explosives blew themselves up in Casablanca, killing themselves and a police officer. Then in August, a man in the city of Meknes tried and failed to blow himself up, along with a bus full of tourists. Investigators are still trying to make sense of these amateur attacks. Some of the bombers knew one another from Sidi Moumen, a section of Casablanca that bears a certain resemblance to Jamaa Mezuak.

One evening in July, the sun was setting over the neighborhood when Dayday began making tea. He crushed mint leaves into a bowl as the water boiled. In the next room over, where he and his brothers sleep, I looked at an album of photographs. Bilal appeared again and again. The most recent picture was taken one month before he left. They had gone on a picnic in the mountains. In the photograph, Dayday, Bilal and two other men had formed an acrobatic pyramid. Bilal is standing on his friends’ shoulders. His arms are extended, as if he is flying.

Later that night, Dayday and I hiked up the highest hill in Jamaa Mezuak. The air had cooled, and the sky was black. A shepherd passed by with his herd. We continued to climb the garbage-strewn slope. Clouds rolled over us, almost close enough to touch. “We are living in heaven,” Dayday said with a chuckle. The city sparkled.

Suddenly Dayday extended his arms out and began running toward a cliff. “Watch me,” he said. “I’m going to make jihad.”

Then he bounded down the hill, pretending to disappear.

Andrea Elliott is a reporter for The New York Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.

Hamza’s friends admired his soccer skills. “No ball entered his net,” one fellow player said. But off the field, he seemed adrift. He dropped out of high school and worked selling car parts in his father’s shop. His friend Younes Achbak made it further in his studies. He was also a gifted athlete, though he smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds a day. He promised his mother he would run the family’s shops once he graduated from college. But his heart was in Europe, she told me. He tried sneaking into Spain but was caught at the border and roughed up by the authorities.

Before the Madrid bombings in March 2004, Hamza, Younes and the Ben Abouds would chat casually about the day’s news. Their attention drifted from topic to topic. Sometimes it was soccer; sometimes politics. But after the bombings, they became consumed by one subject: the war in Iraq. They began meeting after the ishaa, or evening prayer, at the dusty entrance of a middle school around the corner from the Ben Aboud home, a young man with intimate knowledge of the group told me. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was one of Hamza’s best friends. He is also related to two of the men who left for Iraq. He said the friends became obsessed with the war. They traded details of the day’s news, stirring the anger in one another. They were outraged by the graphic deaths they saw on television and by the American contractors they heard were profiting from the occupation.

Muncif, the math student, came to find television coverage of the war inadequate. He began sitting at his computer late at night, surfing the Web for hours at a time, the friend said. Muncif discovered Web sites that showed footage of American soldiers bursting into the homes of Iraqis as women and children cowered. The links were sent to him by a Middle-Easterner he had met online. Muncif began posting them on his own Web page, which he shared with friends in Tetouan and Tangier. He collected books and CDs on jihad, which he bought from a Moroccan man who lived in Madrid and passed through Tetouan from time to time.

Muncif came to believe that defending Iraqis was an obligation of all Muslims — that the occupation of Iraq should be viewed as part of a global struggle. “If they do not have someone to help them, maybe this will happen to all Muslims,” a relative recalled him saying. “Maybe if Iraq doesn’t have sovereignty, Morocco will be the next country invaded.”

Muncif’s brother Bilal was soon talking the same way. He insisted that the war was not simply aimed at conquering Iraqis but also at defeating Islam. “The goal of the United States is to wipe Islam out,” he said, according to the relative.

Over the next year, people in the neighborhood noticed changes in the group. Hamza stopped going to the barbershop. His hair grew past his shoulders, and he began wearing a hat, tunic and sandals. Younes and Bilal started dressing the same way, styling themselves after the Prophet Muhammad. “When they became very religious, they did not sit and talk to us,” said 25-year-old Marwan Bilamri, who smuggles wine for a living. “They kept to themselves.”

Another young man began dressing like the Prophet, the barbershop owner recalled. This young man, Abdelmunim Amakchar Elamrani, had little in common with Hamza’s group. His family struggled. “We didn’t have money for books,” said his father, Ahmed, who trades sheep for a living. Abdelmunim kept going to school, bravely empty-handed. Finally he flunked out. After that, he would rise for the dawn prayer and then walk out the door, joining the stream of other men headed to Ceuta.

A tall, lumbering fellow, Abdelmunim had fallen into an especially perilous line of work. He bought car tires and bedcovers in Ceuta and stuffed them into plastic bags. He then waded into the Mediterranean and swam back to Morocco, pushing his bags through the ocean. He tried settling down a few years ago and married a conservative girl who wore a niqab and bore their first child. He was tender with his baby and wife. He helped her hang the laundry, she said, and knead the dough for their bread. But on his days off, he veered to more boyish pursuits, watching “Conan the Barbarian” and losing himself in PlayStation with his little brother. They played soccer on the roof of their house, dodging clotheslines as they struggled for the ball.

Abdelmunim had one certain connection to the others who would leave for Iraq: they worshiped at the same mosque. It sits across the street from Hamza’s house, a tower of concrete that reaches high above the boxy homes. The mosque has no official name and was never approved by the authorities. It is affiliated with Dawa Tabligh, a generally peaceful group of proselytizing Muslims who travel around Morocco. Strangers in silk tunics and caps passed through with such frequency that neighbors began calling it “the Afghani mosque.”

The young men who prayed at this mosque were taken with its imam, Abdelilah Fathallah. He sang verses of the Koran with a melodious voice and struck his people as warm and youthful, a refreshing departure from the older imams in the neighborhood.

He would sit chatting with his congregants well into the evening. But if he was popular inside the mosque, he had a reputation of intolerance outside it. One day last year, the imam walked into the Coiffure Cyprus barbershop to have his beard trimmed. The talk turned to the situation in Lebanon, and the owner of the shop, Ali, asked the imam what he thought of Hassan Nasrallah, the Shiite cleric and leader of the Hezbollah movement there.

“Shia are unbelievers,” the imam declared, according to a barber in the shop.

Moroccan officials told me that at some point in 2006, the imam began talking to young men in the neighborhood about making jihad in Iraq. He acted as their recruiter and helped arrange their travel, a senior Moroccan intelligence official, Abdelhak Bassou, told me. He added that the men also got help from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an Algeria-based group. When I asked Bassou how the imam operated, he outlined a general process that he said applied to the Jamaa Mezuak cell. Recruitment starts in the mosque, he said. The recruiter looks for people who are easy to approach and gives them books and CDs on Islam and then shows them jihadi Web sites. Eventually they become convinced.

But in describing what happened to the men of Jamaa Mezuak, Hamza’s close friend offered almost the opposite narrative. They became interested in jihad on their own, he said, and then found a way to get to Iraq, possibly through the imam. “They weren’t recruited,” he said.

According to a sealed Moroccan court document I obtained, the imam first raised the idea of going to Iraq with Younes, the chain-smoker. The imam also discussed it with Muncif and Abdelmunim, who had quit his job as a smuggler that year after the authorities caught him pushing bags through the ocean. The imam introduced the three young men to a shoe vendor in Tetouan who was raising money for the travel of jihadi volunteers, according to the document. It details the confessions of 29 people, including the imam, who were charged with participating in a Moroccan terrorist cell that recruited, financed and sent volunteers to Iraq. (The veracity of the document is questionable. Moroccan prisoners are sometimes tortured into giving confessions and often retract them later, according to Moroccan defense lawyers and human rights groups.)

In the months before they left for Iraq, Muncif, Bilal and the others became secretive. But a few clues slipped out. One afternoon, Bilal and Hamza walked up to Bilal’s friend Dayday and some other men. Dayday hardly recognized Bilal anymore. He no longer wrote comedy sketches. He had grown a beard and lost his easy laugh. The men began chatting when someone in the group joked about doing jihad in Iraq.

“You don’t need to,” Bilal replied. “I’m going with my friend Hamza.” Dayday thought he was kidding. Plenty of young men talked that way. Bilal just did it more forcefully, Dayday thought. “Our brothers are dying, and we have to help them,” he recalled Bilal saying. “Islam orders us to do jihad.”

In preparing to leave, Bilal burned his nonreligious belongings, including a recording of the song he wrote, a close friend said. Bilal and the others made a secret plan. They would travel in pairs, using aliases, shaving their faces and wearing Iraqi clothes to try to fit in, the friend said. They bought one-way plane tickets from Casablanca to Istanbul. They planned to cross over to Syria by land, American intelligence analysts told me, and would then continue to Iraq.

Younes was the first to leave. He walked out of his house in June 2006 without saying goodbye to his mother. Fearful of government surveillance, his friends stopped meeting at their usual spot by the school.

Muncif left in July, telling his mother he was going to Mauritania. Three days later, he called home and asked for his parents’ forgiveness. He was already in Syria.

Abdelmunim left on a Friday morning in September. He kissed his wife on the cheek and told her he would be spending the week in Ceuta. His little brother, Usama, remembered that he left quickly, without a farewell.

Bilal and Hamza disappeared the following month.

A few days before he left, Hamza asked a friend to take his photograph. In the picture, Hamza is wearing a striped tunic and a black prayer cap. His long hair is tucked behind his ears. He stares intently at the camera, his mouth slightly agape, like a child’s.

The day before Bilal left, he ran into Dayday at a busy indoor market in Tetouan. Bilal had shaved his beard, Dayday recalled, and was carrying a yellow travel bag. He said he was going on a trip. They hugged.

“If he had told me where he was going, I could have gone with him,” Dayday told me. “Or stopped him.”

I asked which it would have been.

“I would have stopped him,” Dayday said. “But maybe he would have convinced me to go with him. He knew how to convince people.”

The Choice

Dayday seems to walk along a precipice. Some days he is tempted to jump, to leave for Iraq himself.

“If I found someone to take me, I would go tomorrow,” he told me one afternoon in June.

In some ways, Dayday believes that Bilal was right to leave for Iraq. All Moroccans have a duty to defend other Muslims under attack, he says. He spends hours listening to the pirated CDs of incendiary sheiks. He can tick off the requirements of jihad like a grocery list: You must ask your parents’ permission; you must pay your debts. He breathlessly defends suicide bombings as a necessary weapon against the American forces in Iraq. When a Muslim land is occupied, he argues, Muslims must rise up to defend it. This vocabulary has entered the realm of his personal life. When his mother tells him he can’t marry Leila, his lifelong love, he threatens to “go do jihad in Iraq.”

But something always holds him back. He has seen too many images of Muslims dying at the hands of other Muslims. Most suicide operations in Iraq are now targeted at Shiites or Sunnis, he says, not at the American soldiers whom he would gladly face. “You can’t know who you’re going to kill,” he told me. That critique of suicide attacks in Iraq is often heard around Jamaa Mezuak these days.

Dayday’s thinking reflects his moods, which swing with the highs and lows of an uncertain life. He earns about $6 a day by selling smuggled goods at the market. It will take years for him to save enough money to build a floor atop his parents’ ramshackle house. And that is the prerequisite for marrying Leila.

Dayday sings her name sometimes. She lives in a village high in the Rif Mountains. They rarely see each other, and time is running out. He is sure that someone else will marry her first. And yet there is no solution. It is his obligation, as a Muslim man, to provide a home for his wife. Every night, when Dayday returns to the cramped dwelling he shares with a dozen relatives, he is reminded of his failure. “You want to feel like a man,” said Dayday, who has a soft beard and tired eyes.

So why has Dayday not followed Bilal’s path? The question of what drives someone to terrorism has given rise to a cottage industry of theories since Sept. 11. None may fully explain what happened in Jamaa Mezuak: why some of its young men chose to become terrorists when most have not. The notion that poverty is to blame has been debunked again and again. And while religious extremism can feed militancy, many experts prefer to emphasize the anger generated by political conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the Arab-Israeli struggle.

Many may sympathize with a cause, but few ever turn to violence. Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer, holds that people prone to terrorism share a sequence of experiences, which he outlines in his forthcoming book, “Leaderless Jihad.” They feel a sense of moral outrage that is interpreted in a specific way (the war in Iraq, for example, is interpreted as a war on Islam); that outrage resonates with the person’s own experiences (Muslims in Germany or Britain who feel marginalized might identify with the suffering of Iraqis); and finally, that outrage is channeled into action.

This process, Sageman told me, is rarely a solitary one. He and a growing number of law-enforcement officials and analysts argue that group dynamics play a key role in radicalization. While ideology may inspire terrorists, they say, it takes intimate social forces to push people to action. Friends embolden one another to act in ways they might not on their own. This might be called the peer-pressure theory of terrorism. Experts in the field refer to it as the BOG, for bunch of guys (or GOG, for group of guys). “Terrorism is really a collective decision, not an individual one,” said Sageman, who coined the theory. “It’s about kinship and friendship.”

Kinship can also work to opposite effect. It is certainly part of the reason why Dayday has not left Tetouan. Most of the men with whom he prays and works admire Bilal’s courage in going to Iraq but prefer a different kind of jihad, or struggle, for themselves. They want to improve their lives. “I’m working to support my family,” one of Dayday’s closest friends, a merchant in his 30s, told me. “If I go, who will support my family?”

Jihadi groups, like most social circles, tend to rely on frequent, sustained interaction, Sageman told me. People are drawn together by a common activity, like soccer, or by a common set of circumstances, like prison. Often they meet in the temporary spaces born of immigration. Tetouan, in its own way, is a diaspora setting, with families in constant migatory flux. In groups predisposed to violence, there is often a shared grievance around which members first rally. In the case of urban American gangs, the grievance could be police brutality. For the Hamburg cell behind 9/11, it was the war in Chechnya.

Law-enforcement agencies have begun changing their approach to counterterrorism in tandem with their heightened awareness of the role that groups play. Investigators in Europe, Canada and the United States are now conducting surveillance of suspects for longer periods of time, in part to observe the full breadth of their social networks.

Yet in Jamaa Mezuak, the notion that groups play an important role in radicalizing young Muslims is nothing novel. “It’s the problem of friends,” said Ahmed Asrih, the father of the candy seller who was linked to the Madrid bombings. “If you’re friends with a good person, you’re good. If your friend is a pickpocket, you become a pickpocket.”

The Aftermath

Bilal tried to sound calm on the phone from Syria. But he called again and again, five or six times. He asked trivial questions, as if pretending everything was fine. Had his little brother done his homework? How were his parents? On the other end of the line, they were frantic. When the calls stopped, the house fell quiet, except for the occasional wail of grief. Only three of the five Ben Aboud boys remained.

That week, the youngest son went hunting for his passport. When he found it, the skinny 19-year-old quietly approached his father.

“Take it and hide it,” he told his father, “so you can have some peace.”

When news of the men’s departure first circulated in Jamaa Mezuak, people experienced a familiar wave of shock. The authorities raided the imam’s house and took him away. By then, three men from other neighborhoods in Tetouan had also departed.

Their journey to Iraq appears to have been well planned. American intelligence analysts familiar with the case told me that the men from Tetouan headed to Damascus, where they bought cellphones under the instruction of two Moroccan men living in Scandinavia. The Tetouan men then e-mailed the phone numbers to the men in Scandinavia, who forwarded the numbers to a person in Damascus with links to militant networks in Iraq. That person contacted the volunteers to arrange their voyage into Iraq.

Bilal and Hamza did not make it that far, according to the analysts. They were arrested and held in Syria, possibly awaiting extradition to Morocco, though the news had not reached Jamaa Mezuak when I was there. Moroccan officials told me that one of the other men from Tetouan, Said Oulad Akchine, died in Iraq, but they offered no details.

The fate of the five other Tetouan men — including Muncif, Younes and Abdelmunim — remains unknown. But a recent American military operation in Iraq offers some clues. In early September, soldiers raided a suspected militant safe house and seized a trove of documents related to the foreign-fighter network in Iraq, a senior military official told me. The material included what amounted to intake forms for foreign fighters arriving in Iraq, with their names, countries of origin, how much money they had and details about their families. Such forms were found for at least some of the eight men who left Tetouan for Iraq, the official said. He would not identify the men but said they are probably dead or in military custody.

Since the start of the war, a few thousand foreign jihadis have heeded the call to join militant networks in Iraq. Most are men in their 20s. Typically, they fall under the influence of an imam who helps them contact intermediaries for the insurgents in Iraq, the American official told me. They go off expecting to fight a heroic battle but often find out after arriving in Iraq that they are to be deployed instead on suicide missions targeting other Muslims, the official said. Based on the accounts of captured fighters, even when they protest, they are sometimes given no choice. “At the end of the day, nobody cares about these kids,” the official said. “They are Al Qaeda precision-guided munition.”

The numbers of foreign fighters entering Iraq have dropped substantially since this spring, the official said, at least in part because would-be jihadis have become more aware that the majority of suicide attacks are aimed at other Muslims. Military officials also gleaned information from the raid in September that indicates a shift: fewer jihadis are coming from Saudi Arabia, while more are arriving from North Africa, an estimated 40 percent of the roughly 60 to 75 fighters who land in Iraq every month. The shift happened in the summer of 2006, when the first men from Jamaa Mezuak began leaving for Iraq.

None of them, it appears, left behind videos explaining their decisions, as is common for suicide bombers in some Arab countries. There are no posters in the neighborhood exalting them. “It’s forbidden,” Hamza’s friend said. “Maybe you can feel it. But you cannot show it.”

Yet Chino’s turn to militant Islam was neither swift nor decisive. He felt conflicted about his criminal livelihood but unwilling to start over. His solution, his brothers said, was to give his money away. He dispensed with watches. He regaled his Moroccan nieces with gold necklaces and rings. One day, while traveling in Holland, he called his brothers and told them to set fire to his cars. “Life is worth nothing,” Chino told his brother Mustafa. “We won’t live long.” (They ignored the instruction. “Mustafa likes cars,” one brother explained.)

Chino had come to believe that Muslims who earn money illegally suffer in the afterlife — unless they put the money to good use. He began sending cash to the mother of the man he had stabbed in Tetouan. He continued to drink and do drugs. But his drunken binges sometimes ended with him crying over the stabbing and the mother of the victim, one of his Madrid friends, Abdelilah el Fadwal el Akil, recalled. “He would say that it was his fault she had lost a son, and that the least he could do was take care of her,” Akil wrote to me from a Spanish prison, where he was being held as a defendant in the Madrid bombing trial.

During a rare visit home to Morocco in 2000, Chino was arrested for the man’s murder and imprisoned in Tetouan. But key evidence was still missing in the case, including a witness who failed to appear. Chino’s parents hired a local criminal attorney, Mourad Elkharraz, who told them their son stood a good chance of acquittal. The lawyer assured them that the process would take no more than a year. Instead, it dragged on for three. During that time, the lawyer witnessed a startling transformation in his client. At first, the change was merely physical. Chino went from wearing gold necklaces and jeans to a gray, Afghan-style tunic and matching pants. He began carrying a Koran. Then he started fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. He stopped swearing and began peppering his sentences with “Allah.” Eventually he became a prison imam, leading prayers five times a day. “He said: ‘I’ve become someone else. I’m a new man,’ ” the lawyer told me. “But his anger rose more and more.”

Chino grew deeply frustrated by the delays in his case. He yearned to see his son, an absence that “broke his heart,” Chino’s mother said. He lost his temper in meetings with his lawyer, demanding to know why his case had not been resolved. Yet every time Chino got angry, his lawyer recalled, something odd happened: he turned to the subject of Palestine. He seemed to conflate the personal with the political. In one breath, he would say that “Jews mistreat Muslims”; in another, that he wanted to “do jihad” to the Moroccan judges who kept him in prison. By then, Chino had befriended another prisoner who belonged to a banned Islamist party, Justice and Charity. Chino took a brief interest in the group, but he concluded it was “too passive,” according to documents filed in the Madrid bombing case.

Chino was finally freed from the Moroccan prison in June 2003; the court declared him innocent of the murder charge, Elkharraz, his lawyer, said. But Chino returned to Spain a different man. He had become obsessed with the war in Iraq, his brothers recalled. He said he couldn’t sleep at night knowing that women and children were dying at the hands of Americans, all in the greedy pursuit of oil. He no longer had time for small talk. He would walk into a room and within minutes begin the same diatribe.

“He would say, ‘The soldiers of bin Laden are soldiers of God,’ ” Chino’s brother Jaber told me. “Because the world was looking for them —”

“And couldn’t find them,” said another brother, finishing the sentence.

Chino told his brothers to cut their hair, to stop smoking, to stop going out with girls. He scolded them for not praying and urged a sister in Holland to wear a veil. He seemed agitated that so many of his siblings — eight in all — had moved to Europe and began pressing them to return to Morocco. “This isn’t paradise,” he would tell them. They soon tired of his campaign. He had become unbearably serious. He told his childhood friend Anwar that if he wanted to continue the friendship, “you have to go to the mosque.”

Yet for all of his religious fervor, Chino continued to sell drugs. A few months before the Madrid bombings, he shot a debtor in the knee in Bilbao. Chino’s underworld activities might seem incompatible with the norms of a born-again Muslim. But they did not necessarily contravene those of takfir, an ideology that divides the world between believers and nonbelievers. Some takfiris believe that Islamic law can be broken in the name of jihad — that they can commit violence or theft, for example, in order to finance attacks against the infidels. These beliefs, while unfathomable for many Muslims, were commonplace in the circles in which Chino moved.

That summer, back in Madrid, Chino reconnected with his old crew from Jamaa Mezuak. Three of his friends worked for him dealing drugs and would also fall into militant Islam, playing key roles in the deadly bombing plot, Spanish prosecutors later said. The circle included two brothers who grew up near Chino, as well as Abdennabi Kounjaa, a square-jawed man known for his religious devotion. A soft-spoken candy vendor from Jamaa Mezuak also joined the circle.

It was possibly that same summer, in 2003, that Chino met the other chief of the bombing plot, a Tunisian immigrant who would emerge as the group’s spiritual leader. The man, Sarhane Fakhet, had moved to Madrid to pursue a doctorate in economics, but he never finished. For a while, he earned his living as a real estate agent. Among his fellow militants, he was seen as a visionary. He had attended a series of clandestine meetings in Madrid in 2002 that were infiltrated by a police informant, who reported back to the Spanish authorities that the group was discussing jihad, listening to sermons and watching violent videos.

By the time Chino and Fakhet became friends, the landscape of terrorism had changed considerably. Law-enforcement agencies had cracked down on organized groups like Al Qaeda and the financing on which they depended. Even as terrorist funding sources dried up, the message of violent jihad was spreading on the Web, enabling militant ideologues to link up with petty criminals. The marriage of these groups defined the Madrid plot. Fakhet, the thinker, lacked the cash and organizational muscle to pull off an attack. Chino, the hoodlum, may have seen the plot as his salvation after a life of crime.

Before long, Chino began searching for explosives and, through an old criminal acquaintance, found his way to a drug dealer who was selling stolen dynamite. The plot seems to have gained momentum in December 2003, when a 42-page document became available on a well-trafficked jihadi Web site. Fakhet got hold of the document, which was produced by a militant Islamic think tank of sorts. It analyzed the political situation in Spain and argued that “painful blows” were needed to force the Spanish government to withdraw its troops from Iraq. It also suggested making “the utmost use” of the approaching elections. In January, Chino rented a farmhouse 30 miles south of Madrid, where he and his friends hid a cache of dynamite he bought with hashish. It was there that the plotters assembled their bombs, which they would plant on the trains in sport bags.

On the morning of March 11, three days before the Spanish general elections, 10 bombs went off within minutes of one another, tearing through the platforms of three train stations packed with commuters and ripping apart a fourth train that was seconds late to its destination. The attacks left 191 people dead and more than 1,800 injured. As the bodies were still being identified, Spanish voters ousted the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar, which tried to blame the bombings on Basque separatists. In its place, they elected José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist who swiftly removed Spain’s troops from Iraq.

Over the next few weeks, Chino turned up twice at a Madrid bar owned by his brother Mustafa. He seemed withdrawn and anxious, one of his brothers recalled. During the second visit, Mustafa asked Chino if he was involved in the bombings.

“Yes,” Chino said, according to Mustafa’s testimony. “It’s the people from your neighborhood who have done this.”

As an international manhunt intensified, Chino went into hiding in an apartment in Leganés, a placid, tree-lined suburb of Madrid. On April 3, the police quietly surrounded the building, and then a helicopter arrived. Chino refused to leave, holed up with Fakhet, his four friends from Jamaa Mezuak and an Algerian man. They were heard praying and singing jihadi songs. Then they began calling their relatives to say goodbye. Chino’s mother answered the phone in Morocco and heard her son say, “The police are surrounding the house and shooting at us.” She fainted and then called back twice. Chino hung up on her, she told me. She then called her son Yussef in Madrid and told him that Chino had asked for her forgiveness because he “was going to God,” Yussef recalled. At 9:05 p.m., the police broke the door open. Before they could enter, the apartment blew up. All seven men died instantly, along with a police officer. Chino’s remains were later pulled from a swimming pool outside.

Sifting through the demolished apartment in Leganés, investigators discovered dynamite, suicide belts and evidence of more planned attacks. Kounjaa’s former boss appeared at a local police station and turned over a handwritten will that the young Moroccan had left for his family in Jamaa Mezuak. In it, he reprimands them for not supporting his decision to make jihad, an obligation of “all believers.” He writes of the humiliation he has felt “in the eyes of infidels and of tyrants” and declares himself a martyr. He encourages his young daughters to follow the path of the mujahedeen.

Finally, addressing himself to his “brothers on Allah’s path, anywhere,” he offers some advice. “Many people take life as a path to death,” he writes. “I have chosen death as a path to life. You should hold onto Islam, through words and deeds, action and jihad.”

The Road to Iraq

News of the suicides swept through Jamaa Mezuak. People watched in shock as photographs of the five men from their neighborhood were shown over and over again on television. Some of the Moroccans had been previously named as suspects in the train bombings, but many of their neighbors refused to believe the reports.

“We never thought that somebody from our neighborhood could do something like this,” one 28-year-old man from Jamaa Mezuak, Mohsin Chabab, told me.

In the scrubbed, dimly lighted home of the Ahmidan family, Chino’s mother, Rahma, stared in disbelief at the bloody images of the apartment where he died. “I saw pieces of my son’s flesh,” she recalled. Still, she could not bring herself to believe he killed himself or that he played any part in the Madrid attacks.

The Moroccan security forces showed no such doubt. Investigators soon appeared in Jamaa Mezuak, questioning relatives and friends of the Madrid suspects. The government had set out to crush terrorism following the Casablanca attacks a year earlier, earning a new reputation for ruthlessness. Almost anyone could be arrested, it seemed, simply for knowing the wrong person. The neighborhood was gripped by fear.

While many people kept their distance from the families of the suspects, a few young men in the neighborhood were determined to make sense of what happened. They included the Ben Aboud brothers — Muncif, the wandering student, and Bilal, the fan of hip-hop — as well as their friend Hamza Akhlifa.

Hamza, a lanky teenager and talented soccer goalie, had known Kounjaa, the author of the suicide note, all his life. They lived on the same block and prayed at the same mosque. Their families were joined by Kounjaa’s marriage to Hamza’s cousin. The Madrid bombings, followed by the group suicide, left the young man at a loss.

“He wanted to understand why Kounjaa killed himself,” one of Hamza’s closest friends told me.

In the search for answers, Hamza and his friends began reading about Islam.

At the time, these young men were seen as no more religious than many of their peers, who made their daily prayers and attended Friday services and fasted during Ramadan. But the Madrid bombings set them on a new course, one that would eventually lead them to Iraq. Chino’s group had planted a seed. “They wanted to be like them,” Hamza’s friend said. “What they wanted was to die, to become martyrs.”

I spent much of June and July in Tetouan and spoke with more than 20 people who knew the local men who had departed for Iraq. I met with many of their parents and siblings, as well as close friends and neighbors. Most of the men who left grew up just blocks apart, in the tranquil, southwestern corner of Jamaa Mezuak. They were not thought of as troubled boys. To their friends, they appeared privileged. They dressed well. Two had gone to college. One owned a valuable piece of land.

Perhaps none had fared better than Muncif and Bilal Ben Aboud. Their parents own a Mercedes, a Peugeot and three shops in the city’s bustling markets. Their three-story home towers over a steep slope, claiming a sweeping view of the neighborhood below. Inside, the house is filled with delicate rugs and ornate, wood-carved furniture.

Among the family’s eight children, Muncif was the indisputable star. A slight boy with short-cropped hair and protruding ears, he was quiet and bookish. School excited him more than soccer. He excelled at math, engineering, physics and languages and was always first in his class. When he wasn’t studying, he mostly kept to himself, reading novels or newspapers or watching documentaries on Al Jazeera.

From the time he was small, he seemed unusually adult. One day, Muncif’s little brother was playing with a boy from the neighborhood whose father had died. Suddenly, the Ben Abouds’ father came home and Muncif’s brother rose to greet him, as was custom. Muncif — who was about 10 at the time — later pulled the brother aside. “Whenever you are with that friend, do not greet our father,” he said. “He has no father.”

At 15, Muncif left for Marrakesh. He was one of three students from Tetouan chosen to join the prestigious École Royale de l’Air, an air-force academy where he began studying to be a pilot. It seemed a good fit, given his curiosity and discipline.

But during his third year at the school, Muncif abruptly decided the military was not for him. He had become more religious and wanted to be learned in Islam. He looked up to his father and grandfather, both of whom could sing passages from the Koran. Still, he needed a career. He pursued an engineering degree in Tangier, but he left after a year, telling one of his siblings that his teachers did not like his new beard. Back in Tetouan, he began studying mathematics at a local university.

By then, plenty of Muncif’s peers had dropped out of school and drifted into menial jobs or worse. “You have to study,” Muncif told his youngest brother. “This is the only way of becoming respectable.”

Yet for all of Muncif’s scholarly gifts, he seemed unconvinced that college would pay off. He worried he would be unable to find a worthy job. He eagerly accepted his father’s invitation to run one of the family’s shops while continuing with his studies. “He said, ‘I can use this money to secure my future,’ ” his mother, Souad Ashtut, told me.

While Muncif rarely showed interest in girls, his older brother Bilal was a heartbreaker. He had strong shoulders, soft brown eyes and a sheepish smile. He used to walk around the neighborhood, calling out, “Hello, mother-in-law,” to all the women who hoped he would marry their daughters. Kids flocked to him. He coached a local boys’ soccer team. But as a player, he was less charming. “He got angry easily,” recalled the soccer field’s caretaker, Aamy Absalam, who said he pulled Bilal out of games twice after he threw punches at other players, only for him to resume fighting outside.

Unlike his younger brother, Bilal never excelled at school and dropped out in the ninth grade. He dreamed of becoming a comedian, his best friend told me, and wrote comedy sketches that he sometimes performed at weddings. But his father disapproved, telling him that “it’s shameful to be an artist,” recalled the friend, who asked to be identified by his childhood nickname, Dayday.

Bilal began working for his father, smuggling baby clothes into Tetouan from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and selling them at a stall in the market. He crossed his parents again when he fell in love. The girl was not from a decent family, they told him. They insisted he marry the sister of his brother’s wife. He eventually became engaged to her, but “he always loved the other girl,” Dayday said.

Bilal found refuge in music. His car was filled with CDs. His tastes ran from Middle Eastern music to American hip-hop, including 50 Cent and Eminem. He especially liked a song by Eminem that derided President Bush and had it translated into Arabic. He also wrote his own ballads, including one that became something of a local hit. It tells the story of “a son of Jamaa Mezuak” who tries to immigrate to Spain, because “despite the diplomas in our pockets, we have no jobs.”

Go to Spain

      If for bread alone

     Continue till Germany

     And live like the Mafia

      Marry an old woman

     The age of my grandmother

     She will get me papers and a visa

At the end of the song, the man has been caught at the border, beaten and sent back to Tetouan, where he winds up selling cigarettes on the streets. The final verse reads: “Brothers, this is my story. I narrated it all for you. God help me.”

Bilal and Muncif grew up around a troupe of neighborhood boys whose worth was tested on the soccer field. This circle of friends fluctuated in size. They played soccer on Friday mornings and took picnics in the hills and roamed the beach in the neighboring town of Martil. A few of them frequented Coiffure Cyprus, a busy barbershop near the center of Jamaa Mezuak. In a neighborhood where few boys have money for nice clothes, many of them devote careful attention to their hair. Every cut has a name. There is the “taza,” derived from the Spanish word for “cup,” which looks like a stunted version of a bowl cut. There is the “coptaza” (a cousin of the taza), the “Beckham” and the “military.” Hamza, the soccer goalie, paid the equivalent of $2 for the “choltra,” short for John Travolta. The style apparently emulates the Travolta of “Saturday Night Fever.”

藉由森棚教官的介紹，我看到了這篇由去年普力茲獎得主在紐約時報雜誌上的專題報導
"在那兒, 男孩們長成聖戰士"，老實說我還沒有花時間將他完全看完，只是大略瀏覽了一遍～
但光是這樣就讓我感到內容的震撼性，究竟是甚麼樣的環境，讓他們毅然決然成為聖戰中的炸彈客？
或許這一切對我們來說就像電影情節一般難以想像，但不管如何我會在這個週末好好將它讀完！
誠如教官所說的～極端的意識型態會蒙蔽一切～ 那麼？現在的台灣呢？

Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

No one thought it was strange when Muncif Ben Aboud disappeared from his crowded, unkempt neighborhood in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. Men are always leaving Jamaa Mezuak, as the quarter is known. And Muncif, who was 21, had ventured off before, roaming the worn medinas of Casablanca and Marrakesh, posing stiffly for snapshots to take home. His curiosity pulled him in many directions. He was brilliant with numbers but would lose himself in novels. He began training to be a military pilot but then changed his mind and settled on engineering. A year later, in 2006, he switched to mathematics.

That summer, Muncif told his mother he was going to Mauritania, the parched Muslim country south of Morocco. He wanted to study Islam. She saw no reason to worry. He was a good boy; this seemed just another fit of wanderlust. But three days after he left, he called home.

“Forgive me if I have done wrong,” Muncif said. It was a phrase Moroccans use to bid farewell. He was going to Iraq, he said. He wanted to do jihad.

The family was shocked. Muncif had always been strong-willed. He was stubborn in his religious convictions. But the war in Iraq seemed a world away.

Three months later, Muncif’s brother Bilal disappeared. His mother told herself that Bilal, who was 26, must have found a way to Spain, where so many men from the neighborhood went looking for work. It was unthinkable that he would have followed his brother. Bilal’s passions were soccer and hip-hop. He loved to dance. He hardly seemed poised to blow himself up. But one afternoon in October, the telephone rang again.

Bilal was calling to say goodbye. He was in Syria with a group of strangers — some Turks, Moroccans and British Muslim converts — and he was heading to Iraq.

The family pleaded with him to come home. They had already seen one son leave. Bilal said he was sorry and then hung up. That same hour, another phone rang two blocks away. Bilal’s close friend, Hamza Akhlifa, was also calling home to say goodbye. He was in Syria with Bilal, bound for Iraq.

Word quickly spread through the winding streets where the families live, high above a littered bluff at the edge of the city. By the end of last year, at least eight men had left Tetouan for Iraq. They hoped to become martyrs by fighting the American occupation, according to Moroccan security officials. Five of them grew up within blocks of one another, racing through the same narrow alleys, past the same whitewashed homes.

The people of Jamaa Mezuak were no strangers to militant Islam. A few years earlier, five other men from the neighborhood said their own goodbyes. They went to Spain to seek their fortunes. But they became famous as key suspects in the bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid that killed 191 people on March 11, 2004. They called home a few weeks after the attacks, their voices urgent. They were hiding in an apartment on the city’s outskirts. As the Spanish police closed in, an explosion rocked the building. The men died instantly, in a ghastly group suicide.

In the years since Sept. 11, the question of what makes a terrorist has become ever more urgent. Much about young Muslim militants remains opaque, from the texture of their family lives to the full scope of their desires. Theories of radicalization have come and gone. Experts have variously blamed poverty, Arab nationalism, the Internet, geopolitics, alienation, charismatic sheiks, dictatorial regimes and youthful anomie. But in the study of contemporary terrorism, there has never been a laboratory quite like Jamaa Mezuak.

Perhaps no theory could have predicted Jamal Ahmidan, a mastermind of the Madrid bombings. He was a feisty drug dealer with a passion for motorcycles and a weakness for Spanish women. His fellow plotters from the old neighborhood in Morocco included petty criminals and a candy vendor. If they seemed a poor fit for militant Islam, so were the young men from Jamaa Mezuak who eventually left for Iraq. One styled his hair after John Travolta. Another was a frustrated comedian. They had yearned for a life in Europe, it seemed, not death in the Middle East.

What, then, caused them to embrace violent jihad? In a city flooded with televised images of civilians dying in Iraq, the forces of politics and religion surely weighed on these men’s lives. For some of them, public outrage merged with personal grievance. One man lost his job and left for Iraq six months later. Another was forbidden to marry the girl he loved. The drug dealer had languished in a Moroccan jail, separated from his young son.

Yet individual experiences and ideological convictions can only explain so much. Increasingly, terrorism analysts have focused on the importance of social milieu. Some stress that terrorists are not simply loners, overcome by a militant cause. They are more likely to radicalize together with others who share the same passions and afflictions and daily routines. As the story of Jamaa Mezuak suggests, the turn to violence is seldom made alone. Terrorists don’t simply die for a cause, Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies terrorism, told me. “They die for each other.”

The Neighborhood

There is nothing isolated about Tetouan. This city of 400,000 on the northern tip of Morocco sits just miles from the Mediterranean Sea. It has long been a crossroads between Africa and Europe, a place steeped in many cultures. Today, some of its streets still carry the Spanish names of their colonial past. Men sip espressos in weathered cafes. The city is a short drive from Tangier, the onetime retreat of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, where the Spanish coastline glimmers seductively on clear nights from across the Strait of Gibraltar. It is a constant reminder of what lies just over the horizon, the promise of a different life.

The neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak rises up over a meandering, muddy river on the western side of Tetouan, at the foot of a craggy mountain. Lines of parched clothing crisscross the rooftops, sharing space with satellite dishes. Much of the area was once farmland owned by a wealthy man who built the first local mosque, or jamaa, in 1933 and gave it his family’s name, Mezuak. Squatters eventually populated the area. Thousands more poured in from the nearby Rif Mountains after a devastating drought in the early 1980s. Many of these farmers and peasants struggled to adapt to city life and would feel alienated for years to come.

Their neighborhood is a cacophonous blend of urban and rural. Sheep spill down alleys, weaving around oncoming traffic. At night, the animals scuttle into converted garages, watched over by aging shepherds with wooden canes. No one knows exactly how many people live in Jamaa Mezuak — the mayor of Tetouan puts the number at 6,000, though others insist that it is triple that. But the streets teem with life. Drug dealers idle near butcher shops, where plucked chickens hang limply for sale. Boys in soccer jerseys linger on stoops. Their uncles gamble in Cafe Chicago, smoking cigarettes rolled with hashish. Weddings are held at the Palace of Peace, a catering hall aglow with glass chandeliers. Down the street, bearded men in djellabas, the hooded robes, gather outside a mosque as women pass by in whispering clusters and slip behind the mirrored doors of beauty salons.

If there is one outlet for the neighborhood’s wellspring of male energy, it is soccer. In the summer, hundreds of boys gather on bleachers to watch as players glide across a worn, concrete pitch, some of them barefoot. Sitting around the bleachers one afternoon in July, a group of teenagers talked to me about their heroes. They said they worshipped Zinédine Zidane, the Muslim of Algerian descent who conquered the soccer world from France. They loved the Prophet Muhammad. The mere mention of Osama bin Laden elicited a sea of upturned thumbs.

“He’s very courageous,” said Ayman, a short, spunky 13-year-old with honey-colored skin. “Nobody did what he did. He challenges the whole world. He even challenges George Bush.”

Another teenage boy said he would gladly volunteer to fight the American occupation in Iraq if it meant bringing independence to Iraqis. “We want to help our Muslim brothers,” he told me. Of the Americans, he added: “If they kill us, we go to God. If we stay here, there is joblessness.”

Such talk is unremarkable in many Muslim countries. But it hardly fits Morocco’s international image — not only the image that draws honeymooners to Marrakesh but also the one cultivated by many Moroccans. They take pride in their practice of a tolerant Islam and in a historical legacy that some still call “the Moroccan exception.” For decades, this country seemed immune to the political and religious struggles that engulfed the Middle East, not to mention Morocco’s roiling neighbor, Algeria. Only eight miles of ocean separate Morocco from Spain. Morocco’s ancient name, Al Maghreb Al Aqsa, means “the land farthest to the West.” Its strategic position on the map brought centuries of plundering and colonization but also a constant exposure to new languages and ideas. Long after Morocco won independence in 1956 — from Spain in the north and France in the south — croissants are still a mainstay of breakfast. Some restaurants openly serve alcohol. Many women reject the veil.

Yet Morocco’s isolation from the Muslim world was never absolute. Political power lies in the hands of a monarchy that claims a direct lineage to Islam’s prophet. In the 1960s, King Hassan II allowed Islamism to spread as a counterweight to secular political opposition. The north became especially fertile ground for Islamist movements and Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Saudi Islam. Hassan had largely abandoned the area after his forces crushed a Berber rebellion there. For more than 40 years, he rarely visited his palaces in Tangier and Tetouan. Government services in the region slackened, and Islamists filled part of the void, offering free food and medicine to the poor. Wahhabi teachings found their way to cities like Tetouan, where women wearing the niqab, or full-face veil, are now common.

Increasingly, northern Morocco is the site of cross currents: the arrival of tourists and the departure of locals. Since taking the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI has embraced the region, vacationing in his palaces there and fostering development. But not everyone has reaped the benefits. Many of the locals find their rickety cars are no match for the smooth new highways or that they are woefully untrained to compete for jobs in the area’s lavish resorts. The government has been refurbishing Tetouan in the hope of attracting foreign investment. But the city’s gleaming new high-rises, bus station and art museum are a world away from the garbage-strewn streets of Jamaa Mezuak, where every other wall seems to bear the same graffiti: “Don’t put your trash here, donkey.”

Year after year, thousands of young Moroccans attempt the crossing to Spain, buying fake visas or hiding under trucks parked on ferries. For those who stay behind, the best jobs are often found in Tetouan’s thriving contraband trade. Every morning before dawn, men and women pile into taxis and ride 30 minutes to the border with Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the northern Moroccan coast. They cross over to buy tax-free goods — sneakers, truck tires, peanut butter, linens — and then smuggle them back to Tetouan’s airless markets, climbing a hill they call Tora Bora.

King Mohammed has struggled to manage the country’s rising religious tensions. Early in his reign, he sought to distance himself from his father’s despotic rule by instituting a number of reforms. But his new family laws, which have raised the legal age for marriage and extended women greater rights in divorce proceedings, set off mass demonstrations before they were enacted. As the government secured free trade with the United States, as well as millions of dollars in aid, hard-liners assailed the king for being overly solicitous of the West.

Perhaps nothing has emboldened the king’s detractors more than his reaction to Sept. 11. He swiftly condemned the attacks, authorizing a memorial service for the victims and declaring Morocco an ally of the United States in fighting terror. In response, a group of Moroccan theologians signed a fatwa declaring it a sin to join a coalition against a Muslim state. The kingdom stopped short of sending troops to Afghanistan or Iraq, but it has helped in other ways. The Moroccan security services have reportedly detained and interrogated terror suspects targeted by the C.I.A. As the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, Osama bin Laden released an audio recording in February 2003 in which he singled out Morocco as one of several “tyrannical and apostate regimes, enslaved by America.”

Three months later, on May 16, a dozen Moroccan men blew themselves up at sites around Casablanca, killing 45 people. It was the first major terrorist attack in the nation’s sovereign history — “the price that Morocco paid for collaborating with the United States,” Mohammed Darif, a terrorism specialist at Hassan II University in Casablanca, told me. The attacks in Casablanca marked a turning point. Until then, Moroccan militants had waged jihad predominantly overseas, joining the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later in Kashmir, Bosnia and Chechnya.

Several hundred miles to the north, another plot would soon take shape. It would demonstrate the strange and unpredictable ways in which a terrorist circle can form. And it would eventually propel a new group of men to leave their families in Tetouan for Iraq.

The Road to Spain

No one from the neighborhood made it in Spain like Jamal Ahmidan. A short, pugnacious high-school dropout, he was the sort of guy who drew attention long before he bought his first BMW. He had crooked teeth and striking eyes that earned him the nickname Chino, Spanish for Chinaman. Before he was 30, he had built a lucrative hashish and ecstasy trade that operated from Holland to Morocco. Though he never grew taller than 5-foot-4, he had an indomitable air. He fought anyone who took him on.

“To his face you had to show respect,” one of his childhood friends, Anwar Belaman, told me.

How a small-time drug dealer from Morocco became one of the masterminds of the Madrid attacks is a mystery that continues to dog the Spanish authorities. In the epic bombing trial that concluded in Madrid on Oct. 31, Chino’s personal journey was barely glimpsed, despite his well-documented place at the center of the plot. I pieced together the following narrative from interviews with his mother, six of his siblings and his Moroccan lawyer, as well as neighbors and friends. A number of them had never spoken with a reporter.

Chino grew up as the fourth of 14 children, in a spare, cinder-block house near the center of Jamaa Mezuak. He began working for his father at 15, selling cloth from a stall in one of Tetouan’s crowded markets. He was restless with ambition. One sibling recalled that he yearned to be rich. After his older brother Mustafa moved to Europe, Chino followed in the early ’90s, crossing over illegally and settling in Madrid. Back home, they were considered pioneers — they belonged to the first large wave of Moroccans to arrive in Spain after its economy began to thrive. “They had to start from nothing, as if someone threw them from the sky to the ground,” Chino’s brother Yussef, who is 24, told me.

It was in Madrid that Chino became a man, Rahma, his mother, said. He learned to cook for himself. He told his mother he was working as a mason. In fact, he was selling drugs. He tore around Madrid on a motorcycle and went clubbing through the night, choosing Moroccan-themed locales over tapas bars. He didn’t like to dance. Women made him shy, one sibling said, though he pursued them relentlessly. He worked on his looks. After breaking his front teeth in a motorcycle accident, he paid handsomely for caps. He was fussy about his collection of pricey shirts and jackets, scolding one of his brothers when he borrowed an outfit without permission.

Surrounded by drugs and addicts, Chino succumbed to the temptation himself. He started snorting cocaine soon after he arrived in Spain, several of his brothers said. He fell in love with a teenage Spanish junkie named Rosa, with whom he would eventually have a son. In the early 1990s, while serving time in a Spanish prison for drug trafficking, he began doing heroin, according to his brother Rachid. But he kicked the habit the day he got out, forcing himself through withdrawal with a will that stunned his friends. “He was hooked, but didn’t touch it,” Rachid said.

Chino’s legend in Jamaa Mezuak was sealed by a visit home in 1993. He got drunk at a wedding and passed out in a taxi. When he woke up, Chino later told his friends, he found a man stealing his gold watch, a ring, a Walkman and some money. Chino stabbed the man in a drunken stupor, he claimed, but didn’t think he killed him. The man was later found dead. Chino fled back to Spain before the Moroccan police could find him.

Much of Chino’s life was invisible to his brothers, even after most of them moved to Madrid. They knew that he traveled frequently and that he had been caught crossing European borders with fake papers and drugs. He had served time in jails in Holland, France and Switzerland, several of his brothers told me in a rare interview in their Madrid apartment one evening in July. They look on Chino’s life with a mixture of sadness and awe. They talk with reverence of his escape from a Spanish detention center for illegal immigrants, which he managed by spraying mace in the face of a guard.

It was not until 1998, after Chino had served time in a prison in Spain, that his brothers first heard him mention jihad. He told them that he had seen videos of the mujahedeen who were fighting the Soviet Army in Chechnya. He also began talking obsessively about the plight of the Palestinians. “Before then, he wanted to be rich,” Chino’s 23-year-old brother said. “After, he wanted a life in another world. He wanted to fight.”

Two years later, Chino was arrested in Spain once again, this time for traveling with false documents. A jail official was so alarmed by Chino’s disruptive behavior that he filed a report in which he described Chino as a “megalomaniac” who dreamed of going to Israel “to kill Jews.”

  人人為狗  狗為人人                --狗父說「狗生以服務為目的」，嗯，服務ing…
      狗思故狗在                          --笛狗兒說「經由思考可証明狗的存在」，嗯，思考ing…
臨財吾狗得  臨難吾狗免          --聖狗說「信狗的人有福了」，嗯，招生ing…
      好路不擋狗                          --這是我說的啦，任狗行就是狗，哦，不對，就是我…

+ｌｉｔｔｌｅ　ｌｉｆｅ+

七分袖的季節來臨　在這之前我踏進了萬劫不復的ＯＬ生活
就職前的焦慮忐忑很快迎刃而解　畢竟考驗不會在一開始就出現
早上經常和一群生猛海鮮一同搭電梯
晚上和酒足飯飽的人客一同出大廈

感受最深的在於身份終於趕上外表　
梅莉阿姨說她從八歲起便有中年的靈魂
到了四十歲一切才終於對了
有些少女特質於我是從不存在　
我有短缺貧乏的一塊　也有洋溢富麗的另一塊

有時候結識了一些人　他們會為你開啟一扇窗　同時也為你關上一扇門
與他人來往目的不在向外拓展而是向內深耕　
而後種出一張濾篩　搖個幾句就足以辨別斤兩良莠　
其餘給陌生人的微笑誰說不誠懇　只可惜總是越笑越僵
我會有一種感覺　那是希望被理解而不是被接近
我不要有誰與我太親近　我自以為可以把精神和身體分切
我只想規避麻煩瑣事　都是我的選擇　
ｔａｋｅ　ｉｔ　ｏｒ　ｌｅａｖｅ　ｉｔ　
沒什麼好說　也都沒有那麼重要

上聯:摸透C語言摸不到C罩杯.....

下聯:推導出方程式推不倒任何妹.....

橫批: 理 工 學 院

媽壓～太搞笑了！

希望我倆是220 和284，因為
220 除了本身以外的因數們：1 2 4 5 10 11 20 22 44 55 110 加起來等於284
284 除了本身以外的因數們：1 2 4 71 142 加起來等於220
換句話說
這兩個數，都用全部的生命去成全對方

-----摘自 《費馬最後定理》-----

狗與貓的想法

雅夫：為什麼這個人每天都會給我食物，還會幫我清大小便、洗澡？難道，他是神？
加菲：為什麼這個人每天都會給我食物，還會幫我清大小便、洗澡？難道，我是神？

有一個人無意中找到一個蝴蝶蛹。

幾天後，他留意到蛹出現了一個小孔，他就停下來觀察它。
過了幾個小時，他見到裡面的蝴蝶，用它細小的身體掙扎從小孔出來。
看來很久也沒有一些進度，小蝴蝶好像盡了最大努力也沒有辦法出來。
這個人於是決定幫它一把，找來一雙剪刀將蛹的儘頭剪開。
蝴蝶這樣就很容易出來。

但是這蝴蝶的形態有一點特別，它的身體肥腫，翅膀又細又弱。
這人繼續觀察蝴蝶，因為他相信翅膀會漸漸變大，而它的身體會越來越小。
這沒有發生。

小蝴蝶餘生只是托著肥腫的身體和細弱的翅膀，在地上爬著走。
它永遠也不會飛行。

這個善良的人不了解，蝴蝶必需用它細小的身體掙扎從小孔出來，
它必需經過這個過程，蝴蝶才可以將身體裡的體液，壓進它的翅膀裡。
大自然在此有一個很奇妙的設計，就是蝴蝶從蛹中掙扎出來，
是為著預備它將來飛行需要的裝備。

生命裡面的掙扎是我們必需有的。
如果老天允許我們順利地過一生，我們也許就此不會變得堅強。

將"愛,LOVE"字拆開來看----
   L,代表"listen"        (傾聽)--愛就是要無條件,無偏見的,細心聽聽另一半的需求.
   O,代表"overlook"  (寬恕)--愛就是仁慈的對待,寬恕對方的缺點與錯誤,並找出對方的優點與長處.
   V,代表"voice"         (聲音)--愛就是要經常表達欣賞與感激,真誠的鼓勵,悅耳的讚美.
   E,代表"effort"         (努力)--愛就是要努力的將L,O,V之前3點都努力實踐做好.

愛因斯坦在20世紀初出的這個謎語。他說世界上有98％的人答不出來。
某家公司在面試應聘者時借用了愛因斯坦的這個IQ題，考查應聘者的IQ，
現在我們暫且不去討論這個公司用這樣的題目來考查應聘者的IQ有多“變態”，
如果是你，拿到了這樣的筆試題目，你能做得出來嗎？

　　1、在一條街上，有5座房子，噴了5種顏色。
　　2、每個房裏住著不同國籍的人
　　3、每個人喝不同的飲料，抽不同品牌的香煙，養不同的寵物

　　問題是：誰養魚？

　　提示：

　　01、英國人住紅色房子
　　02、瑞典人養狗
　　03、丹麥人喝茶
　　04、綠色房子在白色房子左面
　　05、綠色房子主人喝咖啡
　　06、抽Pall Mall 香煙的人養鳥
　　07、黃色房子主人抽Dunhill 香煙
　　08、住在中間房子的人喝牛嬭
　　09、 挪威人住第一間房　　
     10、抽Blends香煙的人住在養貓的人隔壁
　　11、養馬的人住抽Dunhill 香煙的人隔壁
　　12、抽Blue Master的人喝啤酒
　　13、德國人抽Prince香煙
　　14、挪威人住藍色房子隔壁
　　15、抽Blends香煙的人有一個喝水的鄰居

　　以上是愛因斯坦在20世紀初出的這個謎語。他說世界上有98％的人答不出來。