The Homegrown-Terrorist Threat
If 2001 was the year when international terrorism hit American soil, then 2009 was the year when Americans became the targets of domestic terrorism. In November, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, born in Virginia to Palestinian Muslim parents, killed 13 and wounded 30 in his one-man attack on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas. The massacre, which Senator Joseph Lieberman properly labeled "the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11," capped a year of terrorist plots or conspiracies inside the United States, most of which were stopped by law enforcement in their planning stages. The notable fact about all these cases is that they are examples of so-called homegrown terrorism—meaning that they were planned by individuals either born or raised in the United States and executed without significant assistance from overseas networks.
In October, the American-born David Coleman Headley, who had changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani to disguise his half-Pakistani origins, was arrested for planning an attack on the Danish newspaper that published cartoons depicting Muhammad in 2006 and for providing assistance to the Pakistan-based terrorist group that carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 170 were killed. Two days after Headley was charged, Pakistani authorities arrested five Muslim men born and raised in and around Washington, D.C., for planning to take up arms against coalition forces in Afghanistan. The Washington Five were all college students, "fun-loving, career-focused children that had a bright future for themselves," in the words of a youth coordinator who knew them.
On June 1, 2009, a 23-year-old Army recruiter in Little Rock was shot and killed by an African-American convert to Islam who, upon his arrest, began complaining about American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. A week before that, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which coordinates some 40 local and federal law-enforcement agencies, arrested four men for attempting to shoot down military planes based at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and detonate bombs at two synagogues in the Bronx.
Of the 30-odd attempted terrorist plots against the United States or American installations abroad that have been foiled since 9/11, roughly a third have been uncovered in the past year alone. What is new, and particularly frightening, about these recent attempts is that the budding perpetrators were initially indoctrinated inside the United States, with help from extremist websites or Islamic preachers. It was only after they had been brought some ways along the road to holy war that at least some of these would-be jihadists sought training and logistical support from al-Qaeda and others overseas.
This development has come as a surprise. It had become accepted wisdom that the openness of the United States and its acceptance of minority faiths and communities had helped to prevent the spread of the kind of Islamic radicalism that has gripped Western Europe over the past decade. Whereas European Muslims, many of them descendants of manual laborers imported from North Africa and the Middle East, comprise a ghettoized underclass and face great difficulty adapting to the rigid notions of European national identities, Muslims in the United States are, on average, better educated than most Americans and earn about the same amount.
In 2005, Spencer Ackermanof the New Republic trumpeted the seeming inoculation of American Muslims to jihadist enticement, concluding that "if the United States is looking for a way to win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide, it ought to first look at what it has accomplished at home." Five years ago, Ackerman's assessment seemed accurate. Today it seems complacent. Radicalization, we now know for a certainty, is happening here.
Indeed, it is happening here among those who would theoretically provide the evidence for Ackerman's claim—Muslims born abroad who make their home in the United States. In September, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old native of Afghanistan and legal resident, was charged with plotting to set off explosives against high-profile targets in New York City. Both Zazi and Betim Kaziu, a Kosovar Albanian who became a U.S. citizen and was indicted in September for conspiracy to commit murder abroad and provide material support to terrorists, turned to jihadism on American soil.
_____________
In August 2007, the New York City Police Department released a report on the process of radicalization that leads to terrorist attacks. The study described an intricate four-step progression by which individuals, most likely to be Muslim men between the ages of 15 and 35, are led from their status as "unremarkable" citizens to would-be perpetrators of atrocities.
The process begins at a stage of "pre-radicalization" during which they are initially exposed to Salafism, an extremist form of Sunni Islam that commits its followers to the murder of infidels or those Muslims deemed insufficiently devout (Shiites, for example).
Next follows "self-identification," a period in which the potential terrorist, usually catalyzed by a specific event, begins to disavow previously held worldviews and embraces the legitimacy of violent jihad. The third step is "indoctrination," when, with the support of radicals in his ambit (usually imams or extremist peers), the individual becomes estranged from his former life and fully accepts Salafist ideology as his guiding purpose. Finally comes "Jihadization," the operational phase of the process, when the budding terrorist takes part in training activities and the actual planning of terrorist attacks against specific targets. An Islamic upbringing or even prior knowledge of Islam is not necessary; indeed, most terrorists begin their lives with next to no Islamic identity whatsoever. In testimony late last year to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the NYPD's director of intelligence analysis, Mitchell D. Silber, stated that "the vast majority of individuals who end up radicalizing to violence do not start out as religiously observant or knowledgeable."
At the time the 2007 report was released, the kind of homegrown terrorist plots that would surface with a vengeance in 2009 were few and far between—six men convicted of a plot in Lackawanna, New York, in 2002; another six outside Portland, Oregon, that same year; and the seven who sought to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007 most prominent among them. The 2007 NYPD report focused on attacks that had taken place in Europe, where homegrown terrorists committed mass atrocities on the Madrid and London commuter systems and murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.
In this sense, America's homegrown terrorists resemble Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian-born cleric widely credited as the leading intellectual founder of contemporary political Islam and a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb, who gained prominence in the 1950s and was executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime in 1966, was radicalized not by his childhood experiences or encounters with American imperialism but rather by a two-year visit to the United States that commenced in 1948. It was there that he developed a hatred for what he considered to be the unparalleled materialism and licentiousness of American culture; he was particularly scandalized by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado. "Jazz," Qutb wrote of the prototypical American, "is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires."
The Homegrown-Terrorist Threat (20 February 2010)
commentarymagazine.com |
