HUMAN EVENTS: Last October, Shirwa Ahmed blew himself up in a homicide bombing in Somalia. What distinguished Ahmed from other jihadists is that he was a 27-year old college student from Minneapolis and a naturalized American citizen, which made him the first U.S. citizen to become an Islamic homicide bomber.
Ahmed’s unusual path to martyrdom got the attention of American counterterrorism officials, who now report that more than a dozen Somali-American youths have disappeared so far this year. They are suspected to have returned to Somalia to wage jihad. Concerned about the radicalization of Muslim youths in America, the FBI is running active investigations in at least five major American cities.
These developments beg the question: If terrorist organizations can recruit American Muslims to travel to Africa to wage jihad, what’s stopping them from recruiting American Muslims to wage jihad in America? As Moar Jamal, Executive Director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, put it, “That kid that blew himself up in Somalia could have done it here in Minneapolis.”
With an Obama administration increasingly distracted by matters both petty (the Rush Limbaugh flap) and precarious (the economic crisis), and with what we are learning about Jihadist recruitment here, it is becoming increasingly clear that America is a country ripe for jihad.
A culture of Islamic radicalization already exists in America. But most Americans do not know about it because it’s happening in places most of us do not go -- our prisons. Prison Ministries Founder Chuck Colson has been a leader in highlighting the problem of radicalization in our prison system, and former FBI Director Robert Mueller has called America’s prisons “fertile ground for extremists.” A 2006 study called “Out of the Shadows” found that “tight knit communities of Muslims in prison are ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells.” >>> By Gary Bauer | Friday, March 13, 2009
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