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Dr. Walid Phares
Warning: The Jihadists are Mushrooming Inside
America
September 28, 2009
It is unprecedented in American counter
terrorism annals: in one day the nation was dealing with three separate
Jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside the
Homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by
the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of Terror
attempts breached the crossing line of US national security.
This week, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American
Jihadists:
▪ Michael C. Finton, a 29-year-old man who wished to follow the steps of
American-born Taliban John Walker Lindh, was arrested after trying to
detonate what he thought was a bomb inside a van outside a federal
courthouse in Springfield, Ill.
▪ Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian national was
arrested after placing what he believed was a bomb at a downtown Dallas
skyscraper.
▪ But perhaps the most troubling case is of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi
who set up shop in suburban Denver, scouting the Web and visiting beauty
supply stores in a hunt for chemicals needed to build bombs for Al
Qaeda. Sources called the alleged plot one of the most significant
terror threats to the U.S. since 9-11.
▪ Add to the list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Saifullah Boyd,
which was planning on attacking civilian and military targets across the
country.
The immediate question raised by an increasingly worried public is about
the connection between all these terror cases: are they all connected?
While law enforcement and certainly judicial authorities proceed in a
bottom up reasoning, that is to build the case for a global connection
between all what is happening with the help of legal evidence, analysts
in the field of counter terrorism and conflict are already realizing the
meaning of what is happening inside America.
In my book
Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006),
I clearly projected that Jihadists, individuals and cells will be
mushrooming and expanding inside the United States within a few years
from then and that they will precisely do what they are trying to do
now. I have also projected how large they will become, with time. It was
a simple deduction: if the Government doesn’t counter this ideological
growth, Jihadists will keep coming. And in fact they kept coming,
spreading crossing the barriers of ethnicities, races, nationalities and
geographical frontiers.
The Jihadists committed to harm the US, and based inside our borders,
are now by the hundreds. When I suggested this fact on CNN in 2006, and
reiterated it on Oprah’s show so that the public realizes what is to
come, I raised a few eyes brows. Now, unfortunately, we are meeting the
cells of Jihadism in our cities and little towns, and sadly the
expectation is that we will see more, and we may unfortunately not be
able to stop them all from reaching their goals.
The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt,
the Illinois case, added to the previous cases of the shooting of a
soldier in Arkansas, the precedent New York cells, Georgia’s young
Jihadists, all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network,
if anything gives us the genome of what is morphing inside the country
-- a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force -- the
Jihadi ideology.
The question thus is to find out who is propagating the doctrines of
Jihadism: who is funding it; who is protecting the indoctrination
operation which leads naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign
linked, lone wolves or packs of Jihadists, Terrorists. That is the real
question: where is the factory?
What should the US Government do? Well, it must first of all come to the
front of the threat and lead the nation against it. This is not a matter
of only local police or law enforcement efforts. President Obama and
congressional leaders from both parties must give this spreading plague
a top priority: for if one of these groups is successful, our national
economy will crumble again, or at least will be wounded even more
severely, let alone the human consequences of terror.
Americans are watching with great concerns, these terror plots being
revealed. They expect their elected officials to address these fears
before the worse happens.
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