The Making of a Homegrown Terrorist

08/16/2007

The real threat to the West is not from foreign jihadis but from ‘unremarkable’ civilians within our societies, says an insightful new report from the New York Police Department.


By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek | Aug 15, 2007


What happens when politics and politicians, legislation and regulations fail to address the real and continuing threat that terrorists pose to our homes, families and businesses? Do we pretend that the fundamental laws we’ve got in the United States, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights, need not apply? Or should we declare war half a world away, imagining that with shock and awe and open-ended military occupation we can terrorize the terrorists? No. We’ve been there, done that, and there’s every indication the threat is not only growing but growing closer to home. Maybe as close as next door.

Fortunately, a study published Wednesday by the New York City police department’s Intelligence Division, which is run by former CIA deputy director of operations David Cohen, provides a clear-eyed assessment of the risks that are real, rather than imagined, and opens the way for solutions that support the enforcement of the laws we’ve got in the war of ideas that is at hand. The terrorists’ ideology, it warns, “is proliferating in Western democracies at a logarithmic rate.” And the police can only do so much to counter this fact. Communities have to understand it as well.

“Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” which I read in draft form several weeks ago and just reread on the Web, provides the most succinct and pragmatic analysis of recent terrorist trends I have seen anywhere. Its conclusions are based on a close study of 11 cases, from London, England, to Lackawanna, New York; Sydney, Australia, to Portland, Oregon; Madrid, Spain, to Herald Square in the heart of Manhattan, with some revealing insights into the September 11, 2001, plot as well.

The authors, Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, work mainly out of the NYPD’s intelligence headquarters in a fashionable (and officially unspecified) corner of Manhattan, but they were able to call on firsthand reporting by NYPD detectives and analysts deployed around the globe. They also had input from outside consultants, including influential French criminologist Alain Bauer.

The conclusion: in the six years since 9/11, the real threat to the West that has taken shape is not from abroad but from within, and most of the plotters are what NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly calls “unremarkable” people with unremarkable jobs and educations. “Direct command and control by al-Qaeda has been the exception, rather than the rule,” the report concludes. Radicalization of young Muslims takes place not in spite of a Western environment but, in many cases, because of it. Communities that feel like Muslim ghettoes, isolated from the Western society and values around them, are especially vulnerable to extremism, says the report

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