AMERICAN HOMEGROWN TERRORISM

*** Something is just not working: first it was brown bearded types - so they lost their beards. Then it was just the brown types - so they got white guys (some with beards some without). Then it was women - white women. Now do you still think grandma cannot be the next terrorist? Think again. They will adapt and devise new tactics, new strategies. COUNTER tactics, folks, COUNTER strategies. MS ***

FROM: http://www.newsweek.com/id/238296?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader


In the years following the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials were focused primarily on tracking down terrorists abroad. But in recent years their targets have been increasingly closer to home. At least 25 American citizens—both born and naturalized—have been charged with serious federal terrorism violations since the beginning of 2009, according to information compiled by federal authorities.

The list of 25 U.S. citizens who have been charged with such offenses in the last 18 months was compiled and provided to NEWSWEEK by a U.S. law-enforcement official, who requested not to be identified because it is not an official government publication and is not meant to be exhaustive. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born Americans and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause. It's not an encouraging trend," said a Justice Department official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.

The official who provided the recent information said he did not have such statistics broken down by citizenship for terrorism prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, and a search of government and academic sources did not turn up comparable figures. By one comparison, in the 18 months before Barack Obama took office, the Department of Justice prosecuted 35 terrorism cases against all suspects—both American citizens and foreign nationals—according to DOJ information released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (PDF).

Earlier this year the Justice Department published a comprehensive listing (PDF) of more than 400 federal-court convictions on terror charges since September 11, 2001, but it did not provide the citizenship of the defendants. Over the years the Justice Department has also issued periodic summaries of terror prosecutions, such as this one and this one, which do mention earlier, well-known cases involving U.S. citizens, including those of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six" (a group of men from the Buffalo, N.Y., area who were arrested in 2002 for training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before 9/11), and a Virginia imam convicted in 2005 for encouraging others to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. But at the time these cases surfaced, they appeared relatively isolated and not part of the kind of extended pattern that the latest statistics appear to show.

Counterterrorism experts from the Bush era say that the new cases represent an increased involvement by Americans in militant jihadism that began before Obama took office but has accelerated since then. The experts attribute the alarming trend both to increasing alienation among young American Muslims and to more effective enforcement and intelligence collection activities by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.

To be sure, there are many different kinds of people, motivations, and actions represented on this list, and not every example can be attributed solely to radicalization of American Muslims. Also, the criminal cases are all at various stages, with some having pleaded not guilty. Marc Sageman, an independent terrorism expert who worked for the CIA during the 1980s, notes that some of the recent cases on the list—such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot and the case of the man who wanted to bomb an Illinois courthouse—are less significant than others because they were the products of FBI "sting" operations and thus constitute what Sageman considers to be "entrapment," meaning a heavy government role in luring the suspects into what they thought was jihad. Also, said Sageman, a North Carolina case whose defendants are included on the list mainly involved plans to get involved in jihadist fighting overseas, not inside the U.S.

Still, the increase is troubling. The official who provided the list of 25 charged Americans emphasized that it was not necessarily comprehensive and features mainly high-profile cases involving serious charges. The list includes:

*Faisal Shahzad, the accused perpetrator of the recent failed Times Square car bombing.

*David Headley, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to charges that included helping a Pakistan-based terror group gather intelligence for November 2008 terror attacks against commercial targets in Mumbai.

*Two American women, known as "Jihad Jane" and "Jihad Jamie," who are facing charges in Philadelphia for their roles in an alleged Internet-based conspiracy to attack a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

Also on the list are Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, naturalized Americans born in Afghanistan and Bosnia, respectively, who allegedly conspired with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born permanent resident of the U.S. in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system last September. Zazi, the alleged mastermind, is not listed as one of the 25 American citizens arrested for terrorism in the last 18 months. (Zazi and Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty in the subway bombing plot; charges against Medunjanin are still pending).

The 25 U.S. citizens on the list may be only a cross-section of a larger problem, however, officials say. The "Northern Virginia Five," a group of Americans who are currently being detained by authorities in Pakistan, are not on the list, nor is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychologist accused—in the U.S. military-justice system—of killing 13 fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last November.

The official who provided the list noted that it does not include any of the estimated 20 Americans or U.S. residents who are alleged or reported to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Qaeda affiliates or other jihadist factions operating there. Also not on the list are a number of Americans who are believed to have gone to Yemen in recent years for suspected jihadist training. Most estimates by law-enforcement and intelligence officials put the number of Americans who may now be undergoing such training in Yemen at about a dozen, though this report (PDF) issued in January by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that "36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic"—a figure that other U.S. officials suggest is an overestimate.

Frances Fragos Townsend, White House counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says her recollection is that the involvement of American citizens or residents in terror plots actually began to grow while she still worked in government, with cases like that of the mainly Balkan expatriates (some of whom were illegal aliens) from Philadelphia's New Jersey suburbs who plotted to shoot up soldiers at the Fort Dix Army training base, and a 2007 domestically hatched plot (with alleged connections to Trinidad and possibly Iran) to blow up fuel lines leading to New York’s JFK airport. She says the raw statistics charting American citizens' involvement in serious terror plots is not just a "sudden spike" but rather a trend that has been tilting "precipitously up" for the last few years.

Sageman says there is still evidence of what he describes as a "very serious uptick" in American citizens' interest and involvement in jihadist activities in recent years. He attributes this alarming trend to three factors. First, he says, now that memories of 9/11 have faded, American Muslims are feeling more alarmed by growing manifestations of Islamophobia among non–Muslim Americans, and this is frightening and alienating Muslim-American youth. Second, Sageman agrees that a very important factor in drawing Americans into jihad is the increasing availability of radical Islamic messages in English on the Internet, particularly from Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery imam associated with Hasan and Christmas Day "underpants bomber" Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Abdullah al-Faisal, a deeply anti-Western and anti-Semitic Jamaican-born imam who was imprisoned for a time in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Before 2005, Sageman says, the main jihadist messages were available on the Web only in Arabic, but since that time, English-language militant Web sites, carrying messages from religiously credentialed figures like Awlaki, have proliferated.

Finally, Sageman says, some disillusioned young people have found themselves turning to violence when other, less violent forms of countercultural protest have proved ineffective. But as their estrangement from organized protest movements becomes deeper, Sageman says, such angry young people tend to withdraw into themselves or into very small groups, and pursue simple plots, rather than complex schemes like the 9/11 attacks. Eventually, Sageman hopes, unless the U.S. creates new grievances in the Muslim world through unwise foreign-policy moves, this proliferating but fragmented domestic jihadist trend might well burn itself out.

DECENTRALIZED JIHAD - A MOVING TARGET

*** The Conservative government is not interested in helping to provide a counter narrative and frankly, that makes us less safe. This should not be a partisan issue driven by political ideology but a Canadian issue driven by common sense. MS ***

FROM: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/809560--decentralized-jihad-a-moving-target-in-wake-of-terror-attempts

When a young African man was caught trying to blow up an airliner last December with underwear-borne explosives, the official response was swift, far-reaching and not altogether coherent.

Knee-jerk airport security measures forced Toronto passengers to rub their hands in their pockets, then extend palms up for an explosives test before boarding.

Washington probed why Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did not appear on no-fly lists when his own father had alerted authorities.

And focus turned sharply to Yemen, where the suspect allegedly trained.

Soon after, the Obama administration authorized the first sanctioned killing of an American citizen hiding there — online radical orator Anwar al-Awlaki.

Reaction to this month’s failed bombing attempt in New York’s Times Square has been more nuanced — but may pose more troubling questions.

Pakistan, where suspect Faisal Shahzad allegedly received rudimentary explosives training, was already at the centre of Washington’s counter-terrorism efforts and a vital partner in the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The U.S. administration has sent mixed messages — first criticizing and then praising Pakistan’s ability to root out what Obama called Wednesday the “cancer in their midst.”

It is still uncertain what ties Shahzad to the Pakistani wing of the Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), but on Tuesday, U.S. drones rained down on the group’s stronghold in North Waziristan, killing 14.

More troubling is that Shahzad himself was unremarkable in many ways — no obvious warnings were missed.

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus suggested last weekend that Shahzad was a “lone wolf” with questionable ties to Pakistan.

The lone wolf scenario is what worries intelligence agencies, because individuals are difficult to detect. Another concern is the prevalence of what have been dubbed “homegrown groups,” such as the so-called case of the Toronto 18 who plotted to bomb Canadian targets in 2006.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director Richard Fadden told Parliament this week that the spy service is tracking more than 200 Canadians for possible terrorist links.

“They are usually second- or third-generation Canadians who are in some ways relatively well-integrated into Canada, economically and socially,” Fadden said.

But the problem with Shahzad’s case is that he doesn’t neatly fit into one category, and looking for clues to combat future threats provides scant material.

Born into privilege in Pakistan, he came to the U.S. a decade ago and attended school both in Washington and Connecticut. Married, with two kids, he liked Red Lobster and Wal-Mart, was on Facebook, and had financial problems.

He does not appear to be tied to any one mosque or extremist imam, which has sometimes been a factor in past cases. Reports say he was inspired by Awlaki’s online lectures, but that there was no direct contact.

His travels to Pakistan may prove important if reports that he had direct support, training and financing from Pakistan’s Taliban are true. This would counter Petraeus’s description of Shahzad as the lone wolf — akin to Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. army major who killed 13 in a November shooting rampage at his Fort Hood base.

But even if ties to Pakistan become an important part of the equation, they cannot be the sole focus, argues Sahebzada Khan, Toronto’s Consul General of Pakistan in Toronto.

“We will not be forced to accept collective guilt,” Khan said in an interview this week.

“Whether he was a lone wolf or linked to some Taliban organization, this was the work of a twisted mind, motivated by the Al Qaeda narrative.”

A belief in that narrative — that the West has launched a war on Islam — may be the only commonality among Shahzad and other terrorism suspects.

And combating that belief cannot be accomplished with drone attacks or making people take off their shoes at the airport. In fact, security experts fear that misguided drone attacks that kill civilians and the profiling of innocent Muslims only feed the narrative.

Since 9/11, analysts have tried to compile the portrait of a local terrorist or, at the very least, detect a pattern among those who target the West in the name of Al Qaeda or its affiliates.

Al Qaeda before 9/11 was in many ways easier to define and track. The organization was based in Afghanistan, and it had a hierarchy, structure and members who pledged allegiance, or declared a bayat, to leader Osama bin Laden.

Today, what’s left of bin Laden’s group is commonly referred to as Al Qaeda Central. Al Qaeda’s ideology, however, has spread to local groups in Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, Iraq and Pakistan, who have expanded their regional wars to adopt bin Laden’s global fight.

In the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other Western nations, there’s a counterculture protest movement in which, for lack of a better term, jihad becomes cool and Internet chat groups provide fuel for the fire.

Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer in Pakistan in the late 1980s, during the Soviet’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, coined this movement the “blob.”

The author of Leaderless Jihad argues that members come and go and make loose connections, united by the perception that Muslims are being persecuted.

“This is a legal set of activities in a liberal democracy — words are protected by freedom of expression,” Sageman said in an interview this week.

“What keeps it alive usually is government action.”

But when the “blob” is discounted as ineffective and members turn to violence, then comes the dangerous transformation from protestor to terrorist, says Sageman.

Mubin Shaikh, an RCMP police agent who testified as one of the government’s star witnesses against the ring leaders of the Toronto 18 group, says he often hears Muslim youths rage against a war on Islam.

Shaikh knew one of the young Toronto men who travelled to Somalia to fight for the local Al Qaeda-affiliated group and was reportedly killed. He said he was not surprised when a video surfaced that praised Mohammed Elmi Ibrahim, known as “Canlish,” as a martyr and encouraged others to “follow his footsteps.”

“There’s a confluence of factors in these cases,” said Shaikh. “But the feeling that Islam is under attack is how they justify their actions.

“You need to have a counter-narrative.”

MC LADEN : FRANCHISED TERRORISM

*** This is no way suggests McDonalds (all rights reserved) is a terrorist organization - the "MC-something" makes for great writing. :) MS ***

FROM: http://www.kelowna.com/2010/02/02/marketing-the-al-qaida-brand-the-evolution-of-franchised-terrorism-under-osama-bin-laden-column/

Canwest News Service

It's a bleak commentary on how this conflict with the al-Qaida terrorism network has been managed that over eight and approaching nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington there is considerable dissent among western intelligence analysts and military leaders about the importance of Osama bin Laden.

Some say killing or capturing bin Laden would be the trigger that leads to the swift collapse of the international terror network he created and the various insurgencies that have spun off from it. (MS: This is totally false.)

This view is suggested by a United States Senate report published in November that looked in detail at the failure to catch bin Laden and the top al- Qaida leaders when U.S. forces led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

"The failure to finish the job" – that is to neutralize bin Laden – "represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," said the report.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sees bin Laden as a potent symbol whose survival "emboldens al-Qaida. I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until he is captured or killed," he told a Senate committee last month.

An even firmer picture of bin Laden as the essential, central ingredient for al-Qaida's survival comes from Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism who interviewed bin Laden in 1997. "Al-Qaida is bin Laden's idea, it is his baby and 9/11 was his operation and it would psychologically be a victory for the civilized world if he was killed or captured," Bergen told the Financial Times newspaper last month. (MS: Not correct. AQ is an idea that uses long-standing Muslim desires for a utopian Islamic state. If OBL goes, another 100 are already waiting to replace him.)

The U.S. attacks with missile-armed drone aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership are believed to be hiding, has eliminated a large number of the organization's leaders, Bergen said. "There is nobody who could replace him as head of this network," Bergen said.

I could continue quoting people who believe killing or capturing bin Laden would be the key to defeating this wave of radical Islamic terrorism. But it is far from being a universal view. There is a significant school of thought that argues that Islamic terrorism is no longer a monopoly of al-Qaida core leaders and bin Laden. Indeed, major terrorist attacks may not even be under their control and direction.

David Livingstone, a security expert at Chatham House, Britain's premier think-tank on international affairs, said recently he doesn't believe removing bin Laden from the equation will have much effect because al-Qaida has become a brand name. The al-Qaida product of Islamic terrorism is now so well established it will survive with or without bin Laden.

The most persistent and in many ways the most persuasive proponent of this view is Marc Sageman. Sageman is an interesting man whose qualifications make it clear he is well worth listening to. Sageman has a doctorate in political sociology and is a practising psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. In the late 1980s he was based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, liaising with the Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In 2004, Sageman produced an important book called Understanding Terrorism, which was based on detailed dissection of the lives of the approximately 400 al- Qaida members then in captivity. It is a book full of fascinating and significant information – for example, that about half the known al-Qaida terrorists attended only 20 mosques worldwide and that most of them were intelligent and privileged middle class young men, not brainwashed, ill- educated cannon fodder.

In his latest book published in 2008, Leaderless Jihad, Sageman argues that al-Qaida is not an organization that can be systematically destroyed, because it has evolved into a social network that has to be disrupted by undermining the relationships that sustain it. This is what he says:

"The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaida masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These homegrown wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad."

Sageman argues that al-Qaida has ceased to exist as an organizational entity and that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, he says, the main terrorism threat today is from low-level groups that are self-recruiting and have adopted the al-Qaida brand, largely from the Internet.

This analysis, as you can imagine, is at some odds with the official view in Washington. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell is an example. In the publicly released portions of his evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he said:

"[Al-Qaida] is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni [Muslim] communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities."

More recently in Senate evidence McConnell said that while al-Qaida "has lost many of its senior operational planners of the years, the group's adaptable decision-making process and bench of skilled operatives have enabled it to identify effective replacements."

This characterization of al-Qaida as a resourceful adversary that is highly disciplined and in full control of its network is dramatically different from the amorphous and fluid picture of al-Qaida presented by Sageman and others who view this terror campaign more as a social phenomenon than an evil conspiracy. But such a characterization has few appeals to politicians and administrations that much prefer to be able to draw the threats facing their citizens with clear and distinct lines. The enemy must have a face.

While I do not buy Sageman's arguments entirely, I think that what he has identified is an aspect of the insurgencies and terrorist campaign that is new to the world. The Internet as a source of information, a provider of instant communication and access among both associates and strangers, and a facilitator for the swift construction of global networks has undoubtedly sustained al- Qaida. And it is, of course, deeply ironic that an organization whose proclaimed aim is to gather the Middle East and, given a chance, the rest of the world under a regime of early medieval puritanical theocracy should be relying heavily on 21st century technological wizardry to do it.

Jihadi kit on Web

The full kit for becoming a jihadi is available on the Web. By some estimates there are tens of thousands of sites either aimed at, involving or somehow of benefit to people vulnerable to the call of militant Islam. At the most basic level is propaganda, which feeds and reinforces already well entrenched suspicions among very many Muslim people that the West in the broadest sense is out to destroy them. The pictures of American mistreatment of prisoners amounting to torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad must have been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida beyond bin Laden's dreams. If you want to get an idea of what's out there, influencing young Muslims every day, just go to Google Image and type in Abu Ghraib. I'm sure I don't need to warn you, many of the pictures were not printed in western media and are even more troubling than those that were.

The Abu Ghraib pictures are an extreme and lasting example of the kind of material that can and does inflame the passions of susceptible Muslims, especially in this context restless young men unsure of their own identity and purpose. But there's plenty more incitement and it's up there on the Internet on a daily basis. It may be pictures or video of the aftermath of attacks with missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft on houses or villages in Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan. Or the pictures may be of villages in Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Somalia and Yemen after attacks by drones or regular American bomber aircraft. I'm sure the Americans try to be as meticulous as they can be in assessing intelligence information before striking a house where a militant is believed to be staying. But there is no doubt a lot of wives, children and other innocent civilians get killed in these attacks.

Then, of course, there are the pictures and videos from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Israel responds, often with a heavy hand, to attacks by the followers of Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This daily diet of pictures of the ruins and the dead reinforces the feeling among some young Muslims that they are powerless against what they see as the hatred of the West and instant death from the skies.

For many young Muslims, even the most angry, that is where the trail ends. Indeed, some try to turn their anger into a positive force to attack the problems within their own societies or to come to grips with the divisions between Islam and West. But some, a few, have the misfortune to be spotted by the lurking recruiters for al-Qaida.

Others are self-recruiting. A good example is the five young American Muslims from West Virginia now under arrest in Pakistan. From sites they found on the Internet they adopted radical Islamic views and decided they wanted to go to fight with the Taliban against their countrymen in Afghanistan. They had some sort of preliminary contact with people in Pakistan claiming to be radicals. But from what we know now, the real radicals were suspicious of them and Pakistani police arrested them soon after their arrival.

But any diligent search of the Web can reveal enough training information on how to be a jihadi, from religious justification of terrorism to making car bombs with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Most of those thousands of websites useful to the would-be jihadi are in Arabic, but I think of particular interest to us are the Canadian, American, British or other western young men of Muslim heritage who have tried, some successfully, to become terrorists.

Men lured to terrorism

Only this week, for example, we have had the sentencing of some members of the so-called Toronto 18 who planned in 2004 to make massive truck bombs and attack the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.

Their families came from Somalia, Egypt and Jamaica, but to any casual observer they were normal immigrant Canadian kids.

The young men who launched the July 2005 attack on the London Underground subway system were even more acclimatized. They were Britishborn.

In both cases the groups first got involved in radical Muslim online chat rooms, which are watched by fundamentalist Muslim imams for potential recruits. The process of luring these young men towards terrorism is not unlike the way pedophiles lure young girls or boys towards meetings.

In the case of both the Toronto 18 and the London subway bombers there was one main radical Muslim cleric who latched on to them and changed them from being the awkward, unsure and emotional youths, of which we've all had experience, into dedicated killers.

That cleric's name is Anwar al Awlaki and he's an American of Yemeni background. Awlaki was involved with two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Toronto and London groups. There's evidence he radicalized Major Nidal Hasan, the American army psychiatrist who massacred 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last year, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, the young Nigerian who nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.

Awlaki was born in New Mexico 38 years ago, but his family returned to Yemen with him when he was young. He came back to the United States in 1991 to attend Colorado State University, received his master's degree in education at San Diego and later enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University. Awlaki has been an active Muslim cleric since his postgraduate years when he was an imam at San Diego's Rabat mosque. Then he was a Muslim chaplain at the Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia outside Washington. Somewhere along the way he became a radical and turned up on the FBI's radar following the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was interviewed then about his association with two of the hijackers and has been high on the FBI and CIA's lists of persons of interest ever since.

Doubtless fearing pursuers on his trail, in 2002 he moved to London and two years later he returned to Yemen, where he has been ever since, so far as is known.

He has spent some time in prison in Yemen for unspecified crimes and since then he has become more radical and more of a presence on the Internet both on his own Web page and as a blogger. In December, for example, he wrote a blog praising al Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qaida in neighbouring Somalia, for the rape and stoning to death of a young woman accused of theft. Al Shabaab, Awlaki said, should take no notice of malicious stories in the western press that the girl was only 13 years old. Well, I can tell you that those stories in the western press were true.

Awlaki has now found his calling as an online preacher of hatred and terrorism. You can find his sermons easily on You-Tube. His value to al-Qaida is that he is, of course, fluent in English, has an undeniable understanding of American and contemporary youth culture, and has an engaging sense of humour. His Facebook page has nearly 5,000 fans.

But like all good salesmen and con artists, Awlaki's most important talent is that he can take very complex ideological and religious thoughts and make them very simple. He has the ability to make impressionable young men believe that slaughtering as many people as possible is not only an affirmative political statement, but is a religious duty. If you look at his YouTube sermons you'll see he has the glib ability to construct verbal fantasy worlds and make his young acolytes believe them.

And once he has cast his spell over his targets it seems that he constantly reinforces the indoctrination. We know, for example, that he kept buttressing the resolve of the two 9/11 hijackers he knew right up to the moment they set out on their mission.

Killer praised as a hero

The same happened with Hasan at Fort Hood with whom Awlaki kept up an e-mail correspondence intended to sustain the major's resolve. Among those 21 e-mails are several instances of Hasan asking for religious validation for what he was about to do, and Awlaki replied with comforting interpretations of Islam.

Soon after the attack Awlaki praised Hasan as a hero. On his website he reacted angrily to condemnation of Hasan by U.S. Muslim groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Their rejection of Hasan's killings was, he said, treason against the Muslim community.

It was also, of course, a significant political blow at Awlaki, which soiled his reputation among American Muslims. Manipulating Abdulmutalab and sending him off as a plane bomber seems, by some perverted logic, to have been an attempt to re-establish Awlaki's reputation as the indispensable mentor for English-speaking would-be jihadis.

And by late December last year Awlaki had a personal reason for wanting to down an American airliner. Shortly before the attempted Christmas Day attack, an American drone made a missile attack on a compound in Yemen where several local al-Qaida leaders, including Awlaki, were believed to be staying. It seems Awlaki missed retribution that time, but I suspect he is a man with a very short life expectancy. Indeed, he seems to have been a target of another air attack in Yemen earlier this week.

But we need to constantly remind ourselves that Awlaki, bin Laden and al- Qaida are not superhuman evil geniuses. Far from it. Bin Laden's objective was to inspire and lead a spreading revolution that would recreate the old Middle Eastern caliphate, bringing Muslim people under the administration of a state governed by purist and puritan Shariah law. Instead, 12 years after bin Laden began his campaign with the truck bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a decade after his followup attack on the USS Cole while it was anchored in Aden Port in Yemen, he and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding out somewhere along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. Or they might be in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, or perhaps Somalia or even bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen.

At any rate, they have only a few dozen hard core supporters left with them and the worldwide army of true believers is no more than a few thousand. Al- Qaida in Iraq, which once had the U.S. military tied up in knots, has ceased to exist. Bin Laden's relations with the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are far from secure. He has achieved no sound political base as has been done by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and even Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, all the indications are that more and more of the world's 112 billion Muslims are increasingly disgusted by his strategy of murdering civilians of any race, creed or religion, as well as with his puritanical and brutal interpretations of Islam.

That said, al-Qaida is not yet defeated and it or its adherents – self- recruited from the Internet or otherwise -will doubtless be a danger for some years to come.

But I always think one is approaching a breaking point of some kind when history starts getting played as farce.

And with al-Qaida, we are now in the realms of Monty Python. For even among the most troubled and impressionable would-be jihadis there must be a very limited supply of young men willing to believe there will be 47 virgins waiting in Paradise for a willing martyr who goes into battle armed only with a pair of exploding underpants.

RADICALIZATION OR ISLAMOPHOBIA?

FROM: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reem-salahi/muslim-youth-radicalizati_b_405055.html

*** Just another Muslim pundit in serious denial of the facts. The author says, "But I refuse to believe that these websites could lead a normal, integrated Muslim teen to radicalization".

You REFUSE to believe eh? Its not all Orientalism and Xenophobia (not without merit mind you) but to REFUSE to believe shows that the author has dismissed a priori the fact of radicalization through the internet. MS ***

---

A few weeks ago, five young Muslim men were arrested in Pakistan for allegedly seeking to join militant groups. The boys' sudden disappearance coupled by a "farewell" video reignited the media's obsession with homegrown terrorism and radicalization. Yet this time, the media was joined by an unlikely ally; some Muslim American organizations and their leadership. Rather than critically question the media's premise of radicalization, Muslim organizations and their leaders jumped on the bandwagon and now seek to put an end to "Muslim youth radicalization," whatever that means. (MS: It means kids going overseas to fight or to train and then come back to fight - a little research would help instead of jumping on the its-all-racism bandwagon.)

But seriously, what does that mean? House Resolution 1955 defined violent radicalization as "the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change." In other words, the (unexplained notion of) adopting or promoting an (undefined) extremist belief, which could potentially facilitate (in unclear terms) ideologically based violence is violent radicalization. Now if that doesn't clarify radicalization, I don't know what does. According to my reading, this definition of radicalization could encompass everything from violent acts to civil disobedience to even voicing an unpopular stance.

More problematic than this open-ended definition of radicalization is the supposed source of radicalization: the World Wide Web. As someone who frequents the internet most of my waking hours, I do not deny that there are many bad websites and posts on the internet. But I refuse to believe that these websites could lead a normal, integrated Muslim teen to "radicalization." Yet according to the media and to governmental reports, the internet is that powerful. Without providing any contextual background or analysis, the media, the government, and now some Muslim organizations have simplified Muslim youth into a two-part cause and effect: since Muslim youth are intrinsically prone to radicalization, then the most simplistic of triggers such as the internet will change a law-abiding Muslim youth to Osama bin Laden's prodigy.

(MS: You can refuse to believe all you want - I personally sat with some of these guys and went through these websites you claim do not radicalize.)

While I cannot speak to the psychological deficiencies of this cause and effect analysis, I can speak to its fundamentally racist and Islamophobic origins and its misguided premises. In recent years, the concept of homegrown terrorism and radicalization has been codified into the public psyche by a number of reports and a proposed legislation. Interestingly, the individuals fueling this policy analysis include none other than the four self-described experts on Islam and counterterrorism: Daniel Pipes, Stephen Emerson, Marc Sageman, and Bruce Hoffman. These men are known for "mainstreaming" Islamophobia and lack the academic and research credentials to even assert an opinion on the matters of Islam and Muslims, much less influence policy and discourse. Yet rather than marginalize these men's work, mainstream media, governmental bodies, and even some Muslim organizations have capitalized on their flawed and sloppy theories and writings.

(MS: Flawed and sloppy?! While I am no fan of the right-wing leanings of some, Sageman and Hoffman are right on point with their assessments for the most part.)
In 2007, the New York Police Department engaged in a study of homegrown terrorism. While the study was broadly titled "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat," the NYPD often interchanged the term "homegrown terrorism" with "Islamic-based terrorism." Thus, homegrown terrorists were exclusively Muslim. In attempting to understand homegrown terrorists, the NYPD analyzed the psyche of local Muslim residents/citizens who went from being "unremarkable" to Al-Qaeda wannabes. In doing so, it developed a four-phased radicalization process with the internet acting as the enabler for the process of radicalization. Despite wide criticism of the report and its faulty underlying assumption that "unremarkable" Muslims can spontaneously, autonomously, and unconnectedly transform into terrorists through the aid of the internet, the report became the trailblazer on the question of homegrown terrorism and radicalization.

(MS: The report was one of a kind and specifically looked at Islamist homegrown terrorism. If you don't think that "unremarkables can become Al Qaeda wannabes" then you don't know the first thing about radicalization: motivation (thought) leads to action.)

In late 2007, Jane Harman introduced House Resolution 1955, titled the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," which sought to create a national commission on the prevention of violent radicalization and ideologically based violence. After HR 1955 died a quiet death, Senator Lieberman in May 2008 re-energized the overly simplified and unsubstantiated discourse on homegrown terrorism and radicalization. Known for his hawkish military and security stances, Senator Lieberman (I-Conn) along with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) co-authored the report, "Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorism Threat," on behalf of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. The report reproduced much of the NYPD Report and claimed to have "fully identif[ied] the best way to combat" homegrown terrorism threats by outlining "the process by which individuals or groups of individuals are radicalized to become violent Islamist extremists." As evidence, the Committee report conveniently cited the NYPD report and the testimony of Marc Sageman.

(MS: So the author's solution is to say nothing, to not have discussions, to not have high level government discussions on the subject - I guess, deny deny deny is your answer?)

At the time of its release, the Muslim American leadership rose up and rejected the Committee's report and its findings. In a joint letter, a number of Muslim and Arab organizations stated, "Unfortunately, the Committee's report undermines fundamental American values (as well as its own stated recommendations) by encouraging alienating suspicion of several million Americans on the basis of their faith. Contrary to Secretary Chertoff's recommendations, it thus exacerbates the current climate of fear, suspicion and hate mongering of Islam and American Muslims." Rather than similarly standing up in critical opposition to the media's heightened discourse of radicalization following the capture of the five Virginian youth, many of these same organizations conceded that radicalization is a problem and the internet does pose a large threat. Such a simplified assertion ignores the complexities of the inaccurate comparison of the American Muslim populations with European Muslims, the FBI's role of entrapment, and the tremendous harm in the continued vilification and marginalization of the Muslim community.

(MS: I would like to know who these organizations representing the de-facto Muslim response to the deliberations. Being Canadian, I cannot comment much on the dynamic present there in detail. My only question is: what are they doing to counter the radical Islamist narrative?)

Much of the discourse on homegrown terrorism and radicalization looks at European case studies. Yet the European experience hardly relates or compares to the American Muslim experience. Whether it is South Asians in the U.K. or Algerians in France, many of the Muslims in Europe are the product of colonization. They have been afforded minimal rights and prevented from even superficial integration, leading to their "ghettoization."

(MS: Not entirely untrue.)

On the other hand, American Muslims are 44% African-Americans, the descendants of slaves and as indigenous to the United States as the unhyphenated White American. The remaining "immigrant" Muslims lack the citizenship barriers of European Muslims and are overall more affluent and educated than their European counterparts. Hence, there is no equivalent ghettoization of Muslims here in the United States. In other words, by trying to understand why European Muslims might engage in violent acts, we in the U.S. are in no way closer to understanding why American Muslims have committed or sought to commit violent acts here.

Rather, if Senator Lieberman, Representative Harman, and the researchers at the NYPD, including Marc Sageman, were to have looked closely at many of the cited examples of so-called U.S. homegrown terrorism, they would have found a common thread connecting the majority of them: the manipulation of FBI informants and agent provocateurs. From Fort Dix to Lodi to Herald Square Subway to Newburgh, N.Y. to Rockford, Illinois, the U.S. government has spent millions of tax dollars on agent provocateurs who entrap Muslims to engage, or in some cases, threaten to engage, in illegal and violent acts. And while I do not condone the actions of the men in these scenarios, it is worth noting that entrapment is an affirmative defense, which if argued successfully, preempts criminal conviction.

(MS: Ah yes, it's all a setup and it's all a result of agent provocateurs. Smells familiar that trash.)

Yet even in cases where agent provocateurs were not employed, the reality is that the government and media have too long treated Islam and Muslims as a homogeneous, non-dynamic, suspect group. Whenever a Muslim engages in a criminal act, the individual is always qualified by his religious background. Very rarely do we see similar treatment of non-Muslims. For example, I have never read an article describing Timothy McVeigh as the Christian white man. But nearly every article on Nidal Hasan qualifies him as a Muslim and Palestinian within the first few sentences.

(MS: Maybe you should look at the articles condemning Christian Priests and the sexual abuse of children - there are many of them and they have not shied away from the faith in question. More boo-hooing in my humble opinion.)

As a consequence, Muslims are forced to account for the (negative) actions of a fourth of the world's population. Ironically, I have never been congratulated for the positive actions of other fellow Muslims. The acts of a few bad apples or even a few misguided youth become the norm and not the exceptions. Put differently, it would be like suspecting that every White high school student was prone to commit a massacre as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the killers at Columbine High School, did.

The reality is that the discourse on radicalization and homegrown terrorism is fundamentally racist and Islamophobic. It is based on seeing Muslims as the "other" and viewing our actions through an "orientalist" lens which frames any Muslim's questionable action as terrorism. Hence, a Muslim overstaying an immigration visa or improperly filing taxes or even paintballing becomes evidence of terrorism and radicalization, justifying the government's infiltration of our mosques, surveillance of our youth groups, and mapping of our populations. Maybe, just maybe, Muslims don't need to be understood by a different rubric than other populations. Further, by framing Muslims as terrorists and as the internal enemy within, the government and media have alienated and disenfranchised many law-abiding Muslims who seek nothing more than to actually live "unremarkable" lives.

(MS: Mosques are the House of God: if you believe in a God Who watches your every action, nay your every thought - why would you care about some government agents who are trying to keep the public safe from checking on what's happening therein? Strange understanding of Islam you have.)

Those in the media, in the government, and in Muslim organizations who have jumped on the bandwagon, you have missed the boat. Muslims and Muslim youth are not intrinsically prone to radicalization through the aid of the internet, just as White youth are not intrinsically prone to commit massacres or lynch ethnic minorities in solidarity with the KKK. Rather, the problem is the media and the government's continued vilification and the consequential disenfranchisement of the Muslim community. It is the government's infiltration of mosques and community centers with informants and agent provocateurs. It is the FBI's prolonged fishing expeditions and false prosecutions of many innocent Muslims. And it is an ever-worsening foreign policy that wastes away our tax dollars on killing innocent civilians throughout the world. So please stop parroting the misguided construct of homegrown terrorism and Islamic radicalization as the problem, when the real problem is xenophobia couched in politically correct terms.

(MS: I assure you, we have not missed any "boat" but it is YOU who has missed the forest for the trees. While I agree that Islamophobia plays a large part in all this, so too does the denial of facts and the skewed understanding that it's us VS them.)