Global jihad comes home to America

It is unprecedented in American counterterrorism annals: in one day the nation was dealing with three separate Jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside our homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of terror attempts has breached the line of U.S. national security.

In recent days, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American Jihadists: Michael C. Finton, a 29-year-old man, who wished to follow the steps of American-born Talibani 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 and began 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 that list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Saifullah Boyd, which was planning to attack 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 that 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.

Years ago, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006) projected that Jihadists—individuals and cells—would mushroom inside the United States within few years, that they would do what they are trying to do now, and how large they would 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 U.S., and there are now hundreds based inside our borders. These predictions, made on CNN and Oprah’s show in 2006, raised a few eyes brows. Now unfortunately, we are meeting the cells of Jihadism in our cities and towns; and sadly, the expectation is that we will see more and may not be able to stop them all from achieving their goals.

The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt, the Illinois case, the shooting of a soldier in Arkansas, the New York cells, Georgia’s young Jihadists, all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network: these incidents give us the genome of what is developing inside this country. It is a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force: the Jihadi ideology. The questions are: Who is propagating the doctrines of Jihadism? Who is funding it? Who is protecting the indoctrination operation? The programs lead naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign-linked lone wolves or packs of Jihadists, of terrorists. That is the real question: Where is the factory?

What should the U.S. Government do? It must, first of all, confront 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. If one of these groups is successful, our national economy will crumble again, or will be wounded more severely, let alone the human consequences of terror. Americans are watching these terror plots being revealed with great concerns. They expect their elected officials to address these fears before the worst happens. 

Walid Phares writes on terrorism for The Cutting Edge News and is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.