Hey, media! Basta on the incessant claims that “homegrown terrorism” is some “new” “phenomenon” in the U.S. For those who are Spanish-challenged, “basta” means “enough!” I recognize that in this nano-news cycle culture there is a tendency to sensationalize every event or development in order to attract the attention of an otherwise easily distracted audience that tires of the same old story within 20 minutes. A recent installment of this hype comes from ABC News and its direful headline last Thursday, “American-Bred Terrorists Causing Alarm for Law Enforcement.” Next I expect the startling story headlined, “Watch Out for Cigarettes: They May Be Unhealthy!”
Using “new” as a distinguishing adjective simply to garner attention is an advertising gimmick, not a journalistic technique. Regarding “phenomenon,” I of course cannot vouch for how it is used in the media, but I’ll assume for current purposes that the chosen meaning is “something that is impressive or extraordinary,” rather than the more mundane “fact, occurrence, or circumstance observed or observable.”
And there is absolutely nothing either “new” or “extraordinary” about U.S. citizens – including those who were born in the U.S. and who converted to Islam, and including those whose backgrounds growing up were without any connection to the Middle East, or even hummus, for that matter – joining the ranks of jihadists both overseas and in the U.S. itself. Nor is there anything new about them making and maintaining contact with terrorist groups overseas. In fact, the tradition predates 9/11 by quite some time.
For example, the prosecution of those charged with complicity in the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 included two people born in the U.S. Similarly, the subsequent prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman for that incident as well as a plot to attack other New York City locations included two U.S. citizens who converted to Islam – Victor Alvarez and Clement Rodney Hampton-El.
Likewise, the Embassy Bombings indictment returned in 1998 included two long-time U.S. citizens. Trial testimony included reference to Americans who had been affiliated with al Qaeda during the organization’s tenure in both Afghanistan and Sudan in the early 1990s, as well as in Pakistan. Other U.S. citizens and people who had spent considerable time in the U.S. were also among the alleged co-conspirators and al Qaeda operatives identified in the case.
The original Virginia Paintball case provides perhaps the most illustrative example. The allegations were that, prior to 9/11, a group of Muslims practiced paintball in the Virginia and Maryland woods as training for intended jihad overseas, mainly in Kashmir and Chechnya. For some, including Randall Royer, a U.S. military veteran and St. Louis native who converted to Islam after his service in Desert Storm (as did his co-defendant, Seifullah Chapman), their activism overseas dated back to Bosnia in the early 1990s. That case also included American converts to Islam and U.S. citizens from Pakistan, Korea, and Jordan.
Among the motivational sources for the group was Ali al-Timimi, a cleric and U.S. citizen (who was prosecuted separately in 2005). Some of the men had traveled overseas prior to 9/11 to train with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani group focused on Kashmir and operating in concert with Pakistani military and intelligence elements (and later responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attack), while others were impelled by 9/11 to make the journey.
Similarly, cases in Oregon and Washington were based on pre-9/11 training conducted in those states and subsequent travel overseas to fulfill the defendants’ vision of jihad, both before and after 9/11. The so-called “Lackawanna Six,” prosecuted in Buffalo, also included U.S. citizens who trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and returned to the U.S. prior to 9/11.
The frequency of U.S. natives and citizens charged in terrorism prosecutions has been just as prevalent since 9/11. Tarik Shah, a New York native, pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support in the form of martial arts training. The case in Lodi, California, involved a father and son who were both U.S. citizens. Ehsanul Sadequee, prosecuted in federal court in Georgia, is a U.S native, as was one of the defendants prosecuted in connection with the Herald Square bombing plot. Five of the Liberty Seven defendants were U.S. citizens. As well as enumerating similar and other pre-9/11 examples, Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security, points out in the June 10th issue of The New Republic that 131 of the 202 persons charged in the U.S. with serious terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 have been U.S. citizens, and more than one-third have been U.S. natives. Sorry, but that does not qualify recent cases as either “new” or a “phenomenon” by any legitimate criteria.
This review is simply a cursory canvass, yet it refutes any notion that jihadist activity by U.S. natives or citizens – or prosecutions of them by U.S. authorities – is somehow increasing. The point is not that it has stopped; in fact, it is continuing – but not at some greater pace. Indeed, all of the claims of a rise in “homegrown” terrorism are anecdotal and do not cite any figures that might buttress such assertions.
Perhaps more attention is being paid to such cases because of a dearth of other cases, or because of the debate regarding how terrorism defendants should be treated – whether they should be accorded constitutional rights, whether they should be transferred to military custody and prosecuted by military commission, and whether they should be charged at all or simply imprisoned indefinitely. Perhaps it is because Faisal Shahzad’s Times Square bombing plot came so close to fruition. Or maybe it is just because, since it is sure to raise the specter of the diabolical stranger next door, a pernicious and persistent theme running from the Alien and Sedition Acts through every war and crisis through the McCarthy era and beyond, it is a story that has legs even if it lacks a torso.
Sometimes, in their breathless pursuit of newly contrived dangers, reporters cannot even recognize the internal inconsistencies appearing in the same story. For example, the Wall Street Journal wrote ominously on June 22nd that Shahzad “is one of a number of home-grown U.S terrorists who have surfaced over the past two years, posing greater difficulties for antiterrorism officials to track than foreign-born suspects.” Yet, as the article acknowledges elsewhere, Mr. Shahzad is indeed “foreign-born.” The notion of “home-grown” terrorists, therefore, was purely gratuitous.
That non-sequitur is followed directly by another: “Mr. Shahzad had no history of support for jihad and had not appeared on the government’s radar, even though he received terror training in Pakistan late last year.” Sorry, dude. Terror training in Pakistan seems to qualify for “history of support for jihad.” Besides, if Shahzad wasn’t on the “government radar,” how could everyone be so sure that he had not harbored “support for jihad” even prior to his training (on which he certainly did not embark by accident)?
Whatever the reason for it, the hysteria should cease. Alarmist terminology such as “new” and “phenomenon” mean, for practical purposes, that we need to be doing something about the problem, and more than we’re doing already. That creates a mistaken impression, and can contribute to the imposition of additional unnecessary and counterproductive measures that would undoubtedly further reduce constitutional and traditional freedoms and further empower the national security scare apparatus that continues to dominate every facet of political decision-making. U.S. born, raised or generated jihadists are an old story that should be addressed the same old effective way that it has been for more than two decades now. Treating it as “new” and as a “phenomenon” only invites new and extraordinary governmental threats to our civil liberties.
Copyright © 2010 by Joshua L. Dratel
Fair enough, though it seems like the author should include Adam Chesser in that list. What the media seem to be expressing is not Americans’ fear that citizens, in the term’s proper usage, may undertake terrorist acts in the United States, but that the white kid next door will. Sure homegrown terrorism is nothing particularly new, but through a murky connection of Faisal Shahzad to Adam Chesser, you arrive at an extremely dangerous kid next door. Alarmist as that may be, it seems like the media are as much expressing popular feeling as they are fear-mongering. The real public fear is that simple teenage angst will motivate Islamic extremism. And that it will be carried out by people you’d never think to profile–white suburbanites.