The surge in American jihadis

NY Times:

As the years passed after Sept. 11, 2001, without another major attack on American soil and no sign of hidden terrorist cells, many counterterrorism specialists reached a comforting conclusion: Muslims in the United States were not very vulnerable to radicalization.

American Muslims, the reasoning went, were well assimilated in diverse communities with room for advancement. They showed little of the alienation often on display among their European counterparts, let alone attraction to extremist violence.

But with a rash of recent cases in which Americans have been accused of being drawn into terrorist scheming, the rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., last month and now the alarming account of five young Virginia men who went to Pakistan and are suspected of seeking jihad, the notion that the United States has some immunity against homegrown terrorists is coming under new scrutiny.

It is a concern that President Obama noted in passing in his address on the decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, and one that has grown as the Afghan war and the hunt for Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan intensifies.

“These events certainly call the consensus into question,” said Robert S. Leiken, who studies terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington and wrote the forthcoming book “Europe’s Angry Muslims.”

“The notion of a difference between Europe and United States remains relevant,” Mr. Leiken said. But the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American operations like drone strikes in Pakistan, are fueling radicalization at home, he said. “Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react.”

Concern over the recent cases has profoundly affected Muslim organizations in the United States, which have renewed pledges to campaign against extremist thinking.

...

The detention of the Virginia men — ranging in age from late teens to mid-20s — would have prompted soul-searching no matter when it occurred. But it comes after a series of disturbing cases that already had terror experts speculating about a trend.

There were the November shootings that took 13 lives at Fort Hood, with murder charges pending against Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Muslim and an Army psychiatrist.

There was the arrest of Najibullah Zazi, born in Afghanistan but the seeming model of the striving immigrant as a popular coffee vendor in Manhattan, accused of going to Pakistan for explosives training with the intent of an attack in the United States.

There was David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American living in Chicago, accused of helping plan the killing spree in Mumbai, India, last year as well as plotting attacks in Denmark.

...

I am not sure whether they put the Lackawanna six in a different category, but there have been other jihadi events under the Bush administration including the dirty bomber case and the guy who wanted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. But even with these latest cases the Muslim community in the US is not as viral as that in the UK. US law enforcement has also been much more effective in dealing with the miscreants than that in the UK.

The Washington Post also looks at the home grown jihadi problem.