AMERICANS FACE RISING MUSLIM THREAT ON HOME FRONT

Posted by thelastcrusade - December 7th, 2009



TERROR THREAT CLIMBS

YES, MUSLIMS WANT TO KILL US!

thelastcrusade.org

The Obama administration, faced with a sharp increase of recent Islamic terrorism cases on American soil, has concluded that the country confronts a rising threat from homegrown extremism.

So reports The Los Angeles Times.

Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims, driven by a wave of English-language online propaganda and reflected in trips of American jihadi wannabes to hot spots such as Pakistan and Somalia.

In recent years, Europe has become the front line, the target of successive attacks and major plots, while the U.S. has stayed relatively calm.

But the rise of recent U.S. cases suggests 2009 has been the most dangerous year domestically since 2001, anti-terrorism experts said:

* There were major arrests of Americans accused of plotting with Al Qaeda and its allies, including an Afghan American charged in a New York bomb plot described as the most serious threat in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.

* Authorities tracked other extremism suspects joining foreign networks, including Somali Americans going to the battlegrounds of their ancestral homeland and an Albanian American from Brooklyn who was arrested in Kosovo.

* The FBI rounded up homegrown terrorism suspects in Dallas, Detroit and Raleigh, N.C., saying that it had broken up plots targeting a synagogue, government buildings and military facilities.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued her strongest public comments yet on the homegrown threat.

“We’ve seen an increased number of arrests here in the U.S. of individuals suspected of plotting terrorist attacks, or supporting terror groups abroad such as Al Qaeda,” Napolitano said in a speech in New York. “Home-based terrorism is here. And, like violent extremism abroad, it will be part of the threat picture that we must now confront.”

“Radicalization is clearly happening in the U.S.,” said Mitchell Silber, director of analysis for the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department. “In years past, you couldn’t say that about the U.S. You could say it about Europe.”

Investigators have uncovered evidence of Americans who serve as operatives of Al Qaeda and its allies. Such operatives were trained overseas and, in several cases, allegedly conspired with top terrorism bosses. They include a convert from Long Island, N.Y, who was captured in Pakistan late last year; a Chicago businessman accused of scouting foreign targets for a Pakistani network; and at least 15 Somali American youths from Minneapolis who returned to fight in their ancestral homeland.

“A larger trend has emerged that is not surprising, but is disturbing,” Chertoff said. “You are beginning to see the fruits of the pipeline that Al Qaeda built to train Westerners and send them back to their homelands. . . . This underscores the central significance of disrupting the pipeline at its source.”

A campaign of U.S. airstrikes launched last year has pounded Al Qaeda hide-outs in Pakistan. But the flow of trainees gathered momentum in 2007 when Pakistani security forces ceded turf to militant groups, officials said. The suspect in the New York plot, Najibullah Zazi, and the Long Island convert, Bryant Neal Vinas, met in Pakistan in 2008 to discuss attacks on U.S. targets with Al Qaeda chiefs.

Vinas and Zazi represent the first Americans to be accused of serving as agents of Al Qaeda in several years.

“People focused on the idea that we’re different, we’re better at integrating Muslims than Europe is,” said Zeyno Baran, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. “But there’s radicalization — especially among converts [and] newcomers, such as the Somali case shows. I think young U.S. Muslims today are as prone to radicalization as Muslims in Europe.”

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