good Peter Bergen piece in Foreign Policy mag
here (the link doesn't always work), 'The Terrorists Among Us', plenty of interesting material, some excerpted below
'(Zazi had traveled to Pakistan in late August 2008, where by his own admission he was given training on explosives from al Qaeda members in the Pakistani tribal regions along the Afghan border.) ... Similarly, Bryant Neal Vinas, a 20-something Hispanic-American convert to Islam from Queens, New York, traveled to Pakistan's tribal areas in the summer of 2008, where he attended al Qaeda training courses on explosives and handling weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, lessons that he put to good use when he participated in a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan in September, 2008. Vinas was captured in Pakistan the same month and was turned over to the FBI. He told his interrogators that he had provided al Qaeda members details about the Long Island Rail Road commuter train system, which the terror group had some kind of at least notional plan to attack.
Surprisingly, even almost a decade after 9/11, a number of Americans bent on jihad managed to travel to al Qaeda's headquarters in the tribal regions of Pakistan. In addition to Zazi and Vinas, David Headley, an American of Pakistani descent living in Chicago -- who had legally changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, to avoid suspicion when he traveled abroad -- also allegedly had significant dealings with terrorists based in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Sometime in 2008, Headley hatched a plan to attack the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which three years earlier had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were deemed offensive by many Muslims. In a message to a Pakistan-based Yahoo group on Oct. 29, 2008, Headley wrote, "Call me old fashioned but I feel disposed toward violence for the offending parties." ...Following his trip to Denmark, Headley met with Ilyas Kashmiri in the Pakistani tribal regions to brief him on his findings. Kashmiri is one of the most prominent militant leaders in Pakistan and runs a terrorist organization, Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, closely tied to al Qaeda. Headley returned to Chicago in mid-June 2009 and was arrested there three months later as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan again. He told investigators that he was planning to kill Jyllands-Posten's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who had first commissioned the cartoons, as well as the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the one he found most offensive: The Prophet Mohammed with a bomb concealed in his turban.
Headley said that he had also cased a synagogue near the Jyllands-Posten newspaper headquarters at the direction of a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks...Indian authorities are presently examining if Headley also had any role in Lashkar-e-Taiba's 2008 massacre in Mumbai. Reportedly, Indian investigators have found that Headley visited a number of the Mumbai locations that were attacked, including the Chabad Jewish Center, which was a particular target of gunmen and would help further explain why Headley had the book about Jewish prayer rituals in his luggage at the time of his arrest...According to an as yet unpublished count by New York University's Center on Law & Security, 25 American citizens or residents have been charged with traveling to an overseas training camp or war zone since 9/11: Two who trained with the Taliban, seven who trained with al Qaeda, 10 who trained with the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, four with the Somali al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab, and three who trained with some unspecified jihadist outfit in Pakistan. (The actual number of Americans who have traveled overseas for jihad since 9/11 is significantly more than 25, as not everyone who does so ends up being charged or convicted of a crime.) ... Perhaps two dozen Somali-Americans, motivated by a combination of nationalist pride and religious zeal, traveled to Somalia in 2007 and 2008 to fight the Ethiopian occupation. Most of them associated themselves with Al Shabab -- "the youth" in Arabic -- the insurgent group that would later proclaim itself to be an al Qaeda affiliate.
Al Shabab managed to plant al Qaeda-like ideas into the heads of even its American recruits. One of them, Shirwa Ahmed, grew up in Portland and Minneapolis. After graduating from high school in 2003, he worked pushing airline passengers in wheelchairs at the Minneapolis airport and delivered packages for a medical supplies company. FBI director Robert Mueller said that some time during this period Ahmed was "radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota." The exact mechanisms of that radicalization are still murky. But in late 2007, Ahmed traveled to Somalia. A year later, on Oct. 29, 2008, Ahmed drove a car loaded with explosives toward a government compound in Puntland, northern Somalia, blowing himself up and killing as many as 30. He was the first American suicide attacker anywhere. It's possible that 18-year-old Omar Mohamud of Seattle was the second. On Sept. 17, 2009, two stolen United Nations vehicles loaded with bombs blew up at Mogadishu airport, killing more than a dozen African Union peacekeepers. The FBI is investigating if Mohamud was one of the bombers...The chances of getting killed in Somalia were quite high for the couple of dozen or so Americans who volunteered to fight there; in addition to the two men who conducted suicide operations, six other Somali-Americans aged between 18 and 30 were killed in Somalia between 2007 and 2009, as well as Ruben Shumpert, an African-American convert to Islam from Seattle.'
Bergen's conclusions are significant
Indeed, it is my assessment that the al Qaeda organization today no longer poses a direct national security threat to the United States itself, but rather poses a second-order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al Qaeda-trained or -inspired terrorist managing to pull off an attack on the scale of something in between the 1993 Trade Center attack, which killed six, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168. While this, of course, would be tragic, it would not constitute a mass-casualty attack sufficiently large in scale to reorient U.S. national security policy completely as the 9/11 attacks did.and this is important
That said, a key reason the United States escaped a serious terrorist attack has little to do with either the Bush or Obama administrations. In sharp contrast to Muslim populations in European countries like Britain -- where al Qaeda has found recruits for multiple serious terrorist plots -- the American Muslim community has largely rejected the ideological virus of militant Islam. The "American Dream" has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are both better-educated and wealthier than the average American. More than a third of Muslim Americans have a graduate degree or better, compared with less than 10 percent of the population as a whole.
For European Muslims there is no analogous "British Dream," "French Dream," or, needless to say, "EU Dream." None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the causes of terrorism in Europe -- only that such conditions may create favorable circumstances in which al Qaeda can recruit and feed into Bin Laden's master narrative that the infidel West is at war with Muslims in some shape or form all around the world. And, in the absence of those conditions, militant Islam has never gained much of a U.S. foothold -- largely sparing the United States from the scourge of homegrown terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism, not any action of the American government.
An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17 percent. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the U.S. Army after three weeks, and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs(point one from Bob
here should be read in conjunction w Bergen's above sentence that starts 'An important caveat:')
it's an obvious point to make but wrt usage of the term "Muslim" one must flash on
this Lancaster Unity post, which makes the clear-eyed point that
The two Sikhs' hostility to Islam is strong enough for them to overlook the contempt in which the BNP ultimately holds all racial minorities. Communities in Britain with links to the Indian subcontinent have, over time, seceded from their rich shared heritage and the assertive "Asian" banner under which they fought successfully for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Dispersed into the sectarian religious identities of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, they have all but forgotten how to mobilise together against the threat of an opportunistic ethnic majoritarianism that does not, ultimately, make fine distinctions among those it perceives as outsiders.
Generalising labels like "Asian" may have their drawbacks but, as Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations notes of Sunrise Radio's bizarre decision to drop "Asian" from its banner under sustained pressure from extremist groups like the World Hindu Council, the hope underlying such disaffiliation is that "racist whites could be persuaded to exclude Hindus and Sikhs from their hatred, and focus instead solely on Muslims". A 2006 Runnymede Trust survey claims that as many as 80% of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain wished to be seen as specifically distinct from Muslims. "Don't Freak, I'm a Sikh", urged T-shirts printed after the 7 July bombings.most importantly of all, and going back to FP magazine, Stephen Walt rightly criticises what sounds like a very bad Thomas Friedman column
here, warming to his theme that 'It is also striking to observe that virtually all of the Muslim deaths were the direct or indirect consequence of official U.S. government policy. By contrast, most of the Americans killed by Muslims were the victims of non-state terrorist groups such as al Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan'.
