Home-Grown Terrorists Gaining Foothold

In the Obama newspeak, war on terror becomes “overseas contingency operation,” and terrorist attacks are now “man-caused disasters.”

What, then, are Islamist terrorists?

Perhaps they are “misguided victims of Western oppression seeking a level playing field.” And what of the home-grown variety of Islamist terrorists? The dirty little secret of intelligence agencies operating in Western countries is that home-grown terrorists are assembling a new Trojan horse.

Home grown (meaning native or naturalized) includes first- and second-generation males and females, who have succumbed to the Islamist terrorist ideology. The Muslim transformation (discovery or re-birth of faith) or conversion to the faith targets teenagers.

This change can produce fanatics, and terrorist actions often follow within months rather than years of transformation/conversion. The home-grown terrorist has a passport, and knows the culture, language, the slang, the political climate, the laws, and the local geography and terrain, allowing free movement within a country. By accepting the Islamist goal of a world Shariah (Islamic law), young men and women commit to imposing their new-learned lessons upon the West. European nations as well as the United States are experiencing terrorist attacks and threats of attacks, as the following examples attest.

Germany

Germany is realizing that it has a home-grown terrorist group prepared to die for Allah and jihad. A growing number of German nationals (citizens) are immigrants or children of immigrants from Islamic countries, who bring jihad with them. Germany has become a breeding ground for foreign and domestic terrorists, among them the 9/11 bombers.

A car bomb planted outside the German Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 17, 2009, was detonated by Bekkay Harrach, whose family had migrated from Morocco to Germany. He became a German national in 1997, and his radical Islamist beliefs hardened during studies at the King Fahd Academy, a known center for anti-West sentiment. Harrach has declared, “Our nuclear bomb is a car bomb, every Muslim has one.”

Counterterrorist squads of German national and local police know the threat posed by home-grown Islamists but are restrained from taking action because of European secularism and multiculturalism.

Great Britain

On July 7, 2005, Islamist suicide bombers attacked London transport facilities, killing 52 people and wounding more than 1,000. Although the British counter-intelligence service (MI 5) may have known several of the bombers from prior surveillances, a form of political correctness prevented follow-up. A subsequent investigation found links between the bombers and al-Qaida terrorist training camps in Britain as well as in Pakistan.

Omar Bakri Muhammad moved from Syria to Britain in 1986, where he became known as the “Tottenham Ayatollah.” He and his followers were responsible for suicide bombings in and outside Britain. In 2004, predicting as terrorist attacks on London as “inevitable, he noted, “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.” After 7/7, Bakri escaped to Lebanon. In 2008, he used live video feed to urge his British disciples to fight and die for Islam.

In 2006, the British Counter-intelligence and Security Service Section was monitoring at least 2,000 British potential terrorists with recruits as young as 15 years old and estimated that 400,000 extremist sympathizers were living in Britain; that number has since quadrupled. Shariah has gained standing in British courts and English Common law (the basis of U.S. law).

In July 2008, the Portsmouth City Council refused to back a military charity caring for wounded military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, stating that it could not offend ethnic minorities, i.e., Muslims. In March 2009, Muslims protested the parade of Royal Anglian Regiment troops returning from Iraq. The demonstrators shouted hate language and waved banners that read, “Anglian soldiers: cowards, killers, murderers.”

France

Like Britain, France gave carte-blanch entry to those from former colonies and is suffering the consequences of its laissez-faire immigration policy. Airplane hijackings and car bombings, the hallmark of Islamist terrorists, are being replaced by youth-oriented riots. In 2001, more than 5 million Muslims lived in France. The following year, the French people learned from street riots that Islam is not so peaceful, and 10 (or more) radical imans were deported/expelled. Today the Muslim population of France is estimated at 9 million (10 percent of the total population).

The number of radical Islamist sympathizers in France exceeds 4.5 million. French counterterrorist officials use the analogy of a spider web growing year by year to describe 21st century home-grown terrorists. The French National Anti-Terrorist Division sees local Islamist terrorists becoming more sophisticated, ideological, and educated, with more understanding of French culture and mores, and increasingly part of worldwide Islamist terror networks.

The United States

As the Obama administration embraces European-style secular socialism, U.S. homeland security is threatened.

Call it political correctness, multiculturalism, globalism, or secular socialism, but the Obama administration, by executive fiat aided and abetted by a pliant Congress, is relaxing the homeland guard.

Take Minnesota for example. Minneapolis/St. Paul, with a large Somali-Muslim population, has become fertile ground for recruiting Islamist terrorists. Recruits are sent to Somalia and other Muslim countries for training. Unknown numbers of Somalis from the United States are now training in Pakistan and Somalia as part of the Al-Shabaab (Arabic for “young guys”). Al-Shabaab was placed on the U.S. foreign terrorist organization list in February 2008; and in October 2008, Shirwa Ahmed, a Minnesota Somali, carried out a suicide bombing at a U.N compound in northern Somalia.

U.S. Homeland Security units are increasingly reticent to track radical Muslim groups, fearing condemnation by the Obama administration. Homeland Security agents acting to enforce U.S. laws are being subjected to harassment and dismissal.

The FBI, concerned that home-grown radicals are future homeland terrorists, points to Minneapolis/St. Paul and at least six other cities with large Somali populations as areas of concern.

Local law enforcement officers have informed federal agencies of at least 35 Islamist terrorist guerilla training camps in the United States. Training videos have been found that teach carjacking, weapons use, identity disguise, kidnapping, money laundering, public relations, and newsmedia manipulation. In 2008, the FBI identified a U.S. Department of Defense driver linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and in a position to “influence operations” against the United States. The Obama administration downplays such information; but perhaps in national security meetings, President Barack Obama recognizes and prepares for the new Trojan horse looming within the United States.

The author is a former federal prosecutor.