Floating the post-9/11 homegrown counterterrorism talking point
COMMENT: Just another salvo in the MIAC/Homeland Security reports classifying patriots, returning vets and Constitutionalists as terrorists alongside alleged ‘white-al-qaeda’ and Western-world-residing Muslim ‘extremists.’ How far gone is that line of truth and reasonable suspicion, when so much of the Islamic Extremist script is pure fiction?
Homegrown counterterrorism
Christian Century
January 25, 2010
Terrorism has a homegrown dimension. Many of the terrorist plots uncovered since 9/11 have involved U.S.-born or naturalized U.S. citizens.
[efoods]For example: A white American convert to Islam is suspected of plotting to attack U.S. military personnel in Virginia. A group of Somali-Americans from Minnesota were intercepted as they tried to join a radical Islamist group in Somalia. A Chicago man is accused of plotting the terrorist attack in Mumbai. Five Virginia men were taken into custody after they sought to contact al-Qaeda groups in Pakistan. An American-born, Palestinian-American army major is charged with the mass shooting at Fort Hood and is suspected of being radicalized at U.S. mosques.
Violent jihadist ideas not only circulate in this country, but occasionally take hold in the minds of Americans.
But a joint study by researchers at Duke and the University of North Carolina stresses that American Muslims are still less prone to extremism than Muslims in Europe and elsewhere. And the receptivity of U.S. society to Muslim immigrants serves as a bulwark against terrorism. One evidence of that, the study says, is the number of plots that have been thwarted with help of Muslim communities themselves.
Print this page.
Loading ...