The lone wolf scenario is so frightening because all of the usual windows of opportunity for security and intelligence officials to become of aware of and interdict the plot are smaller in scope and narrower in time span.

Consider the timeline of a “normal” Islamist terror attack. Muslims sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s cause are radicalized and are encouraged or take it upon themselves to travel to areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or other places where AQ has successfully established training camps. Over a period of months the subjects receive intensive indoctrination in Islamist ideology, weapons training, bomb-making, terror tactics and other important terrorist skills.  When their training is completed they are released back into the world. New identities or travel papers may have been prepared for travel to their target countries. Reconnaissance may begin on selected targets and money may be transferred to the terrorists to keep them operational. The weapons for the attack must be acquired, prepared and  possibly tested before the terror attack can begin.

A good example of this sort of timeline is the attempt to bomb the New York City subway by Najibullah Zazi. Zazi traveled to Pakistan will several fellow Muslims in August of 2008 with the intention of joining the Taliban but was instead recruited by Al Qaeda and trained for U.S. operations. He returned to the United States in mid-January of the following year. Zazi became a member of an active cell of terrorist operatives and communicated with them — communications which U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials were able to intercept. Zazi began researching bomb-making materials in June and began purchasing critical materials in August. He conducted tests in late August and early September. Then he drove to New York City where he became aware of FBI and police surveillance.  In a panic, he fled back to his home in Denver and was arrested. From recruitment to (failed) execution took slightly more than a year.

Consider in comparison the case of the 1993 shooting outside the Langley offices of the CIA, when Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani native, opened fire on a line of parked cars waiting to enter America’s intelligence headquarters. Kansi quickly killed two people and wounded three others before fleeing to Pakistan.  Kansi had resided in the United States since 1991. He had acquired the AK-47 automatic rifle with which he committed the crime through an ordinary gun store only three days prior to the shooting. The gun store owner later said that Kansi appeared unfamiliar with the weapon and had to be instructed how to assemble and disassemble it. It is unclear when exactly Kansi was radicalized, but when he was finally arrested in Pakistan in 2002, he claimed to have had “friends among the Taliban” and to have shaken hands with Osama Bin Laden. He told investigators that he wanted to strike at the United States for its “Pro-Israel, Anti-Muslim” policies.

With an unclear period of radicalization and only three days from acquiring the weapon to the attack, the time frame for law enforcement to discover and capture a “lone wolf” like Mir Aimal Kansi is too short.  Law enforcement had only two very brief chances to become aware of the lone wolf. Early during his radicalization before he had, in fact, committed any crime and during the time he acquired the weapon. In fact, Kansi had committed a crime by illegally purchasing a firearm since Kansi was not an American citizen and was thus prohibited from purchasing a firearm.  Still that crime took place only three days before the attack.

Not much to go on.

Even less so, in the North Carolina case of Reza Taheri-azar, a UNC-Chapel Hill student and Iranian immigrant who ran over 9 people in a rented sports utility vehicle selected for that deadly purpose. Fortunately no one was killed. Taheri-azar later told police that he wanted to, “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world,” and told the judge during his trial that he was “thankful you’re here to give me this trial and to learn more about the will of Allah.” Up until the point Taheri-azar put his foot on the gas pedal instead of the brake he had committed no crime. What chance did law enforcement have of interdicting such an attempt?

Only during radicalization, when the attacker has been exposed to and internalized an Islamist worldview which encourages violent and murderous jihad, is there any chance to intercept such a plot before it is executed.

Perhaps a strategy which educated law enforcement and security officials on the nature of the Islamist ideology, its language, heroes and ideologues and its history and methods might prove a worthwhile endeavor. For instance, if that had been done, perhaps more attention would have been paid to Dr. Nidal Malik Hassan.  The Fort Hood shooter killed thirteen and wounded almost thirty more in a shooting rampage but not before he conducted a PowerPoint slide presentation for senior army doctors entitled, “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military,” which included Islamic justifications for suicide bombings and featured the common Islamist slogan, “We love death more than you love life.” In a Political Correctness-laden report, The Department of Defense’s follow up report on the attack made no mention of Islam or Nidal Hassan’s ideological motivations.

Recently the Obama Administration released its strategy to deal with the lone wolf threat.  Predictably, it proposed the exact opposite of what is needed. Instead, the recent Administration report, incomprehensibly and meaninglessly entitled, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, is a 4,600 word whitewash completely devoid of meaning or educational potential.  As Professor Daniel Pipes sums up the report:

Nature of the problem? “Neo-Nazis and other anti-Semitic hate groups, racial supremacists, and international and domestic terrorist groups.”

Name of the enemy? The paper itself never mentions Islam or even radical Islam. In fact the report’s title, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, avoids the mention of the word “terrorism.”

Appropriate Federal law enforcement response? “Just as we respond to community safety issues [such as gang violence, school shootings, drugs, and hate crimes] through partnerships and networks of government officials, Mayor’s offices, law enforcement, community organizations, and private sector actors, so must we address radicalization to violence and terrorist recruitment through similar relationships and by leveraging some of the same tools and solutions.”

A decade after the attacks on 9/11, rather than create a policy that come to grips with the evolving tactics of the fanatical ideological enemy we are fighting, we now have a counterterrorism policy that refuses to even use the word “terrorism,” and treats perpetrators of terror attacks in the same vein as perpetrators of gang violence.

More than just incompetence is at work here.

While Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States was released in early August, its faulty assumptions read identically to those published by the Homeland Security Advisory Council in a report titled,  “Countering Violent Extremism Working Group” and published at about the same time last year.  Both reports are so similar that they utilize the same comparison between terrorism and gang violence and propose using community-policing to “stop violent behavior regardless of the motivation.”

Included, in that working group was the president of at least one Muslim Brotherhood front group, Imam Mohamed Maghid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (although he is not recognized in that capacity in the PowerPoint slide describing the working group’s members) and Mohamed Elibiary, who once shared the platform during a “tribute to the great Islamic visionary” the Ayatollah Khomeini, and who argued against describing the preeminent  radical Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, the late Sayyid Qutb, as either radical or dangerous.

In other words, the government has asked the very proponents of the ideologies that have radicalized  Western Muslims as well as leaders of organizations which have been named as unindicted co-conspirators for the funding of terrorism, to propose government policy for countering the inevitable “violent extremism” that results from the ideological beliefs which these people themselves apparently hold.

So deeply has our government involved our ideological enemy in our OODA loop that they are now effectively in control of nearly every stage of our decision-making process regarding counterterrorism. They are the advisors to whom our national authorities look for advice and direction in forming our national strategy. They are, according to a former FBI agent, inside members of the executive branch department responsible for implementing U.S. anti-terrorist policy. They encourage our security and law enforcement officials to work alongside community organizations — which they themselves control. And they control the public relations organizations and “civil rights” groups which then heaps praise upon the Administration for following their advice.

The lone wolf threat helps to encapsulate the reality that the greatest threat is not from bombs or guns or rented sports-utility vehicles.  It is a threat springing from a violent belief system — a radical ideology. Our law enforcement and intelligence officials must be given the tools to recognize the signs of that belief system as it manifests itself in human actors. That is the only counter-terror strategy with a hope of success against a lone wolf or against any terror attack. This system can be analyzed and understood. The violent Koranic citations, the hadiths and Sharia jurisprudence which forms the foundation upon which ideologues like Sayyid Qutb and Anwar al-Awlaki build, can be read and understood. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission Report did exactly that, albeit in a limited and imperfect way.

The tragic question many asked that fateful day on 9/11 was, “Why did they do this to us?” A decade later, thanks to our government’s inability to name our adversaries or call out their ideology, the wolves in sheep’s clothing within our own government have us moving even further away from an answer.

Unfortunately, that is not how it works in today’s politicized world of homeland security and defense.

Take for instance the case of Abdel Rahman al-Amoudi. Al-Amoudi is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (M.B.), and was identified as such in the Holy Land Foundation trial documents. He was the founder of the American Muslim Council, an Islamic advisor to the Clinton White House, a Democratic and Republican fundraiser and a State Department lecturer.  As an advisor to the Department of Defense, the Muslim Brotherhood through the organization he founded was given the responsibility for training our Muslim military chaplains. Al-Amoudi donated $20,000 dollars to help conservative activist Grover Norquist establish the Islamic Institute. In addition, Al-Amoudi worked with Sami-al-Arian, another M.B. member, to get then Presidential Candidate George W. Bush to commit to ending the use of secret intelligence evidence at deportation proceedings.

Then, in 2003  the lights came on.

Al-Amoudi was arrested in 2003 at Heathrow Airport with hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by Libyan President Moammar Qaddafi. He was caught on audiotape calling for acts of terrorism and claiming to support the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas. In court, he pled guilty to financing terrorism (including funding Al Qaeda) and of conspiring with Libya to assassinate the Saudi Crown Prince (they failed). The court sentenced him to 23 years in prison.

In another dramatic 2003 arrest, Sami al-Arian was also caught and charged. He pled guilty in 2006 to conspiring to assist the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a specially designated global terrorist.

In 2007, federal prosecutors filed charges against the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas based Muslim charity and front for the terror group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. During the trial, prosecutors released hundreds of pages of documents; the entire archives of the North American Muslim Brotherhood. It included the lists of names and phone numbers of Brotherhood members in the U.S. There were organizational charts and a full strategic memorandum calling for a “Civilization-Jihad process,” in addition to plans for a “Grand Jihad” to sabotage America from within. Documents listed member organizations, including some of the most influential Muslim organizations in America, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).  After an initial mistrial, the Federal government won its case in late November 2008.

But then, nothing happened.

The exposed agents of Grand Jihad did not run for cover when the lights came on. With a few exceptions, their American government contacts did not cut them off or treat them as pariahs even though they had been thoroughly tainted with terrorist associations, with plots for sedition against the United States and to establish a global caliphate. Secondary prosecutions that had been planned were suddenly scuttled to avoid political embarrassment. Major news organizations continued to call on the members of known Muslim Brotherhood organizations to get their opinion on all things Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood still provides the FBI with Muslim outreach and the DOD is still provided with Muslim Chaplains through ISNA.

Even more astounding, last week the Department of Justice filed papers to cut short al-Amoudi’s 23 year sentence. Why? Since the documents are under seal, we do not know. The judge in the case canceled a hearing scheduled for last Friday, deciding instead to make the determination based solely on already filed paperwork. In order to get a shortened sentence, the filing would require that al-Amoudi had already provided substantial assistance to the prosecutor’s office.  But it’s difficult to say what such assistance could have consisted of.  With the revelations available in the Holy Land Foundation documents, and considering that Al-Amoudi has been in prison for the past nine years, it’s questionable what cooperation he might have been able to provide at this juncture which would motivate prosecutors to release him.

This raises the very serious question of whether his release may not be political. This is especially true as the Obama administration in recent months has expressed increased acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad, including Secretary Hiliary Clinton’s assurance earlier this month that the U.S. now “welcomes dialogue” with the Brotherhood.

If al-Amoudi is indeed released, it would represent a tremendous success for the Brotherhood. They will have successfully survived the aftermath of al-Amoudi’s arrest and the revelations of the Holy Land Foundation trial. Their operation to penetrate and influence the United States will have been so successful that they will have quashed the proposed secondary prosecutions expected from the Holy Land Foundation and also extricated a major M.B. organizer from prison — despite his crimes. This will certainly embolden them to attempt to free others, including Sami al-Arian, who has long been a cause célèbre for the M.B. and their fellow travelers on the radical left. With the Obama administration having now legitimized the Muslim Brotherhood as acceptable partners abroad, it has made them acceptable partners domestically as well — their call for “Grand Jihad” notwithstanding.

What can be done?

As President Ronald Reagan once reportedly said, “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.”

If our intelligence and security agencies and the media refuse to see the danger and will not make Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated persons and organizations persona non grata, then the American people will be forced to do it for them. When television news shows and newspapers give face time or column space to M.B. fronts like CAIR, these TV networks and newspapers must hear from their audience.  Legislators willing to hold hearings and draw attention to the danger of the Muslim Brotherhood should be publically praised, as for instance Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who this week has announced a third set of hearings on Muslim radicalization in the U.S.  Those who hold hands with M.B. fronts however, and defend them, must have it known that their disdain for American security will be made an issue when they face election challenges. We must then keep the pressure on our legislators to insure that they also hold the unelected bureaucrats accountable.

Unfortunately, in dealing with “influence” operations of the size and scope of the one being run by the Muslim Brotherhood, there is no easy answer. When exposed, their response is not to flee, but to counter-accuse, to manipulate, and burrow deeper and to use our American process against itself.

We must also double our efforts and know that there will never be a silver bullet for the Muslim Brotherhood’s “civilization-Jihad” or for radical Islam in general. It forces us to always remain vigilant. Perhaps this administration will succeed in freeing al-Amoudi, but we must not allow such a setback to keep us from identifying, exposing, and arresting the next al-Amoudi.

This is in keeping with the religious principles of Judaism. It says in the Talmud that “We are to respect the law of the land”. In our synagogue, as in most others throughout the United States, before we say the prayer for the survival of Israel, we say a prayer for the survival of the United States.

We would like to believe that all religions are equal, that they all want peace, and that no true believer wants religious hegemony, or would ever kill in the name of G-d.

However, the facts necessitate us to conclude differently.

Nina Shea, of the Center for Religious Freedom conducted a study in 2006,  replicated in 2008, where she  went into fifteen randomly selected Islamic schools on our shores, stemming from New York to California, and found that they all had a Wahhabaist curriculum.

Among the alarming findings were  that Jews are discussed in violent terms, blaming them for virtually all the “sedition” and wars of the modern world; the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is taught as historical fact, and all current events are related back to that as the root cause; the instruction selectively highlights violence against Jews, while the selections of the Koran and hadiths, (sections that explain Muhammad’s life) that counsel tolerance are  ignored; the teaching that Jews and Christians are the enemies of “true”  believers.

Jihad is defined as a “religious obligation”, and as “wrestling with the infidels by calling them to faith and battling against them.”

It is no wonder that a Valedictorian of the Islamic Academy of Northern Virginia sent President George  Bush a note, threatening his life.  He obviously had learned his lessons well.

Last May, Attorney General  Holder was asked at a House Judiciary Committee about three recent terrorist attacks: The Fort Hood Shooting in November 2009, by Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major of Palestinian descent who opened fire on his fellow serviceman , killing 13 and wounding 29 others;  the Underwear Bomber, Omar Farouk Abdulmattalub, a Nigerian who boarded a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009, attempting to blow it up by hiding explosives in his underwear, and the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shazad, who had attempted  to detonate a bomb in the middle of Times Square,  in the middle of the Christmas season.

Unfortunately, we did not hear cries of outrage from imams across the world when these atrocities had been attempted. Why is that?

Moreover:  When asked if these actions night have been the result of incitement within radical Islam, Mr. Holder, replied, “There are a variety of  reasons why I think these people have taken these actions.”

Obfuscating, whitewashing and sweeping the obvious under the rug will not keep American citizens safe. This is the very reason why we have a Homeland Security Committee, which was created shortly after September 11.

Chairman King is serving the American people well  by holding hearings on this issue. We assume that all immigrant populations come here with respect for the values of this great nation.

Some, however use our constitutional freedoms as a smokescreen behind which to hide. They actually have contempt for American civilization, feel that our freedoms have made us an immoral and corrupt civilization. Many Islamist believers truly believe that they are here to help create a world-wide Islamic caliphate. They see their role here as “dawa”(conversion to Islam).

It is also extremely important for Westerners to understand the concept of “Takia”, within Islam, which means the ends justify the means. It is considered not only acceptable, but actually a good deed, within Islam to lie for the sake of Allah.

As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, “We in the West make a great mistake when we transpose our values onto the rest of the world.”

Thank You, Peter King.

The bombs were found only after two cargo planes had been intercepted, one in Dubai and one in England, and after additional planes were searched at Newark, Philadelphia, Maine, and San Francisco.  At first, U.S. authorities told us that there was no threat and that the act was most likely a “dry run.” Later, President Obama confirmed that there had been real explosives aboard at least some of the planes.

Now, we are told by authorities in Europe that at least one of the explosives may have been only 17 minutes from detonation.

Similarly, we were initially informed that the target destinations for these packages were Chicago-area synagogues and Jewish institutions — yet, shockingly, Department of Homeland Security officials did not raise the security level of just the targeted synagogue or even all Chicago-area synagogues. Instead they felt it necessary to send out a vague security alarm to all religious institutions, including churches and even mosques. Apparently, one mustn’t discriminate against religious institutions, even when responding to terrorism threats in which seconds literally count.

The attempted attacks once again brings into focus Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its most prominent member, Imam Anwar Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni cleric, who once ministered to the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia.

Dar Al-Hijrah is a mosque that is operated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded by 1928 by Hassan Al-Banna, is dedicated to establishing Islam as the ruling theology worldwide. The MB has dedicated itself to “Civilizational jihad” against America and the West, according to strategic documents acquired by the FBI. Four members of the mosque’s nine-member executive board are from Muslim Brotherhood front organizations as revealed by the Holy Land Foundation trial documents. Awlaki ministered to three of the 9/11 hijackers; the Fort Hood shooter; Nidal Malik Hassan; and the Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Despite his connections to 9/11 hijackers, Awlaki also ministered to the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association, on Capitol Hill, and was invited to a luncheon at the Pentagon in the months after 9/11.

Now he is subject to a kill-or-capture order issued by President Obama. Awlaki is the first American to be so designated.

Awlaki is not the only AQAP member to be intimately familiar with what it takes to dupe the American security establishment into thinking you’re a moderate.

Indeed, most of the ranks of AQAP are made up of former Guantanamo detainees released back to their home countries of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.  They include such operational leaders as Said Ali Al-Shihri, AQAP’s number-two man; and Uthman Ghamdi, a close aide to Awlaki, both Guantanamo alumni.

Another American member of AQAP is Samir Khan, who once operated the radical Islamic Web site, Revolution Muslim, which became famous by issuing death threats to the creators of Comedy Central’s hit TV show South Park. The Web site was well known for years by private researchers and internet bloggers as a wellspring of homegrown jihadist sentiment.

Khan, a former North Carolina resident is now editor of AQAP’s online magazine Inspire whose September issue included a picture of the Chicago skyline just as, investigators say, AQAP was conducting dry runs in preparation for the cargo bomb attacks.

Much of AQAP’s recruitment and activity occurs on the Internet, utilizing the star power of Anwar Awlaki’s sermons, which are readily available. Just recently, the Google-owned video site began removing Awlaki videos. But the company has made a faulty distinction, removing only videos that “inspire violence” while leaving so-called “religious” videos online. In reality, all of Awlaki’s videos are meant to further shariah, the political and ideological component of traditional Islam, of which violence against nonbelievers remains an integral part.

The cargo bomb plot, attempted Christmas attack, Fort Hood shootings, and other Awlaki-linked attacks against America did not spur American officials to put pressure on YouTube to remove such dangerous videos. Only after a Muslim woman in Great Britain repeatedly stabbed a member of Parliament did British authorities apply pressure on the U.S. government to force YouTube to act. Even so, according to online researchers, thousands of Awlaki videos remain available for viewing.

With its war-torn landscape and its inept, if not complicit, officials, Yemen is an excellent headquarters for AQAP.  But the real, beating heart of Al-Qaeda exists not in Yemen, but globally. That includes America and other Western countries, since the West is more tolerant than many Middle Eastern countries, of the ideological groundwork of shariah,  and the indoctrination being conducted in mosques by the Muslim Brotherhood and on the Internet by radical Websites, such as Revolution Muslim.

If we are to emerge victorious from the present conflict, it will not be because we focus solely on the tactical considerations of this or that bomb plot. Instead, we must address the dangerous political blindness that causes our national security and policy elites to invite Al-Qaeda clerics as examples of moderate speech and that forces us to pretend that an Al-Qaeda bomb plot is equally likely to target a mosque, church, or synagogue without distinction.

Until we engage the enemy on the ideological front, we will always find ourselves surprised and off-balance — and just 17 minutes or less from the next potential disaster.

The law then goes on to clearly define just what “Qualitative Military Edge” is:  “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of  superior military means , possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communications, intelligence, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of other individual or possible coalition of non state actors.”

The Obama administration is on the verge of making the most expensive arms deal in the history of the United States to a foreign power- our “great moderate ally” of Saudi Arabia. The price tag for this treasure chest of killing mechanisms is an unprecedented $60 billion. The stash includes 84 top of the line F-15 fighter planes, as well as upgrades for 70 older ones, and almost 200 Apache, Long Bird and Black Hawk helicopters.

The flimsy premise that predicates this sale is the old Arab adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and that the Sunni Arab world will enter into a coalition against Iran, together with Israel.

If you believe this, there is a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.

Don’t hold your breath. If this is true, why are these Apache helicopters being sent to a base in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, which is a mere 150 miles away from Eilat, and clearly on the other side of Saudi Arabia from Iran?

The only thing that unites the fractious and self-destructive Arab and Islamic world is their hatred of Israel.

In fact, Foreign Policy, reports in its September 20^th issue that King Abdullah wants to wipe two states off the map: Israel and Iran. According to that respected journal:

On June 5, he, (King Abdullah), reportedly told French Defense Minister Hervé Morin that “There are two countries in the world that do not deserve to exist: Iran and Israel.”

The scoop comes from Georges Malbrunot, a French journalist with Le Figaro. Malbrunot, a respected Middle East correspondent who spent four months as a hostage of the Islamic Army in Iraq, goes on to report that two sources, from diplomatic and military circles, have confirmed the story.

This unprecedented arms sale is not only contrary to US legal code it is against America’s national security interests.

The Saudis have single handedly done more to spread Wahhabist Islam around the globe than any other nation. While they whine to the United States that they need these high tech weapons against their radical street, the Saudis have subcontracted the education of their youth to the Wahhabists, and have created generations of radical Islamists within their own nation.

They not only have done that, but they have exported this particularly stringent and virulent strain of Islam throughout the globe, including to our very own shores, here within the United States.

The Center for Security Policy, an excellent think tank in Washington DC, has just unveiled its “Team B II” analysis report of the advance of Shariah law in America and its threat to the U.S’ national security. The report elaborates in great detail on how the Muslim Brotherhood has worked to undermine the U.S Constitution and replace it with Shariah.Much of the work to advance the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States has been organized, and funded by the Saudis.

We, at EMET, are about to come out with a book early next year, detailing not only the Saudis’ deep infiltration into so many aspects of our American infrastructure, but the part that they have played in sponsoring and funding global terrorism.

The Saudis, with their vast oil soaked tentacles have literally, gotten away with murder.

Unfortunately, ever since AIPAC was burned in the 1980’s in the issue of the AWACS arms sale, they have never opposed any armed sale that they are not guaranteed a success for.

l had to learned this the hard way, when I had been a lobbyist with the ZOA and was working alone, on the Hill, trying to defeat an arms sale of Harpoon Block II missiles to Egypt.

The question is whether or not we have the opportunity and the time to rally and to successfully oppose this sale. Unfortunately, most frequently, by the time the administration reports this to Congress, contracts to defense manufacturers have already been issued.

This does not bode well for fighting a sale in Congress in a very deep recession, where American workers might be employed in several key congressional districts throughout the nation.

And the government in Israel is so paralyzed with fear about the impending Iranian nuclear bomb, they have hardly said a word.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is succeeding, in its policy of “appeasement through groveling”, which is the very antithesis of “peace through strength” in making the Middle East into a volatile and highly dangerous powder keg.

Nidal Malik Hassan is a psychiatrist nearing middle age, a Major in the United States Army, and a resident of Maryland. He murdered thirteen people in a shooting rampage on the Fort Hood army base.

Despite these divergent backgrounds both men have a great deal in common.

Both were indoctrinated, primarily via the internet, by Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born, Al-Qaeda-linked Muslim cleric currently residing in Yemen.

Both Abdelmutalib and Hassan were in close contact with Awlaki before they made their fateful decisions to embark upon Jihad. Nor were they alone. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) the New Mexico-born Alwaki’s preaching was described as inspiration for both the Fort Dix terror plot as well as the 7/7 Bus and train bombings in London , and Alwaki’s online sermons have been viewed nearly three million times, receiving a host of supportive comments from viewers around the world.

Neither Abdelmutalib nor Hasan were strangers to western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Abdelmutalib was apparently nicknamed “The Nigerian” by CIA and was already on a terror watch list. He was also on the radar screen of British intelligence, three years prior to the bombing attempt, because he appeared on wire tap surveillance being conducted of known UK jihadists. As for Hasan, the FBI had investigated remarks made by the psychiatrist turned gunmen to the radical imam Alwaki and bizarrely concluded they were, “consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center.”

If on September 11th, 2001 “the most important failure was one of imagination,” as the 9/11 Commission wrote, then these most recent attacks have been a “failure of realization,” a stubborn refusal to draw the appropriate conclusion from the available information. It is only by such failures that the Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano could possibly state, “the system works,” after a terrorist attack which was averted only by good fortune and a quick thinking Dutch tourist, despite abundant intelligence and law enforcement information.

It is the same stubborn rejection which allows President Obama to label Abdelmutalib a “lone extremist,” even as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula releases its post-attack celebratory video praising the “Mujahid from Nigeria.”

Nor are government officials the only one’s suffering from this failure. So too, for major media figures who asserted that “post-traumatic stress disorder,” may have led a man, who gave full length lectures (complete with power-point slides) on the Koranic pronouncements regarding beheading unbelievers, to kill thirteen of his fellow Americans.

When it comes to the Jihad against the West, there are no “lone extremists.” Whether trained and equipped in the deserts of Yemen by hardened Al Qaeda terrorists recently released from Gitmo, as was Abdelmutalib, or motivated by the online religious sermons of a cleric from the comforts of a Maryland living room like Major Hasan, jihadists everywhere are agents of the same violent political ideology.

Following the Christmas Day bombing attempt, authorities instituted a number of new procedures, limiting everything from when passengers may go to the airplane restrooms, to what they may lay across their laps during the flight. And while there may be some specific procedures of value in preventing a repeat of Abelmutalib’s bombing attempt, taken as a whole they are largely an effort by the security bureaucracy to appear busy. It is not as though Al Qaeda and its ideological fellow-travelers have declared a jihad against airliners as a means of transportation. No, their war is against America specifically, and the entire West more generally, no matter where they are.

The government will likely now spend millions on improving scanners in airports and other sensitive locations, which is fine. But we would be far better served, and exponentially safer, if the government spent more time trying to detect the real weapon, the jihadists themselves. It is the indoctrinated jihadist, who is the real danger; , not the mere tool with which he is equipped whether it is a bomb, gun, axe or knife. As it was put best in the Kubrick film, “Full Metal Jacket”, “It is a hard heart that kills.”

The real target of our efforts should be the heart-hardeners. The makers of human bombs. The ideologues like Anwar Al Awaki who indoctrinate and recruit on the internet, and throughout radical mosques all over the world.

So far the efforts to identify, expose, and pre-empt the internet clerics and the extremist preachers have been largely ignored by the government security establishment. Our security establishment finds itself institutionally incapable of coming to terms with the full extent of the Islamist ideology with which they are at war.

Instead it is private organizations that stand, like the little Dutch boy with their fingers in the dike, waiting for the government to wake up and relieve them. Research institutes like MEMRI, not the CIA documents the radical sermons and videos being spread throughout the Arab world. Networks of radical hate preachers and their associates are tracked, not by the FBI, but by non-profits like the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Terrorist websites and propaganda videos are deleted or shutdown not by court order, but by tireless grassroots projects with names like “Operation Youtube Smackdown.”

To secure the American people, the government must shift its focus. It must work to preempt jihadists, not moments before they board the plane with their explosives, or even days before they reach their Yemeni or Afghanistan training camps, but before they are indoctrinated into this deadly ideology. It is well past time that the government finally commits to winning the war of ideas.

At around 2:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan (alternately given as Nidal Malik Hasan) entered the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, and allegedly opened fire with two handguns killing thirteen, and wounding about thirty.

Around 4:33 pm Eastern Standard Time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation declared that terrorism was apparently not a factor.

Sometime after 5:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, ABC News announced Hasan as having been identified as the suspect, shot by a policewoman at the site of the rampage.

My TV was set to Fox News at the time. I watched, intensely interested, until almost 6:00pm, as the anchorman spoke in coded language, tip-toeing around a fact he was already aware of but was steadfastly refusing to share with his audience, the attacker’s name. He went so far as to say (and I paraphrase) that while he would not reveal the name of the attacker, revealing the name he said, “would be very significant.”

Indeed.

Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, a portrait has emerged of just who Malik Nidal Hasan was. It is known that he was born in Arlington, VA, but listed his nationality as “Palestinian,” for a program at a Silver Spring, MD Mosque he attended. It is known that he was once disciplined for inappropriately “proselytizing” among patients. It is known that he’d taken to wearing traditional Muslim attire, as shown on a convenience store surveillance video. It is known that six months prior to the attack, federal authorities were looking into an apparent internet web posting by a “NidalHasan” that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who jump on grenades to save the lives of their squadmates. It is reported by witnesses at the scene of the attack that Hasan yelled out “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is Great” while he opened fire. A former colleague of Hasan’s reported that Hasan had stated, “Muslims had a right to rise up and attack Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” According to NPR, Hasan allegedly had given a lecture during rounds in which he suggested that the Koran instructed that nonbelievers be beheaded.

What is NOT known, at least to most media outlets, is the “motive” of the attack. TIME magazine’s headline opines “For Hasan, Stresses at Fort Hood Were Likely Intense.” The Washington Post’s headline asks whether Hasan’s being in the military might have played a roll, with their headline, “Ft. Hood: Crime in the Military. What Motive?”
2+2=?

It is not that they don’t know, mind you. It’s that they simply refuse to state the truth. Which, from the available statements and facts, is that Major Malik Nidal Hasan, of Arlington, VA, was almost certainly a homegrown, self-radicalized jihadist.

The NYPD Intelligence Report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” suggests a four-stage process by which radicalization occurs: Pre-radicalization, Self-Identification, Indoctrination, and Jihadization.

The report suggests the candidates for radicalization are typically Muslim males, between the ages of 15 and 35, who are second or third generation residents of a Western country, well-educated, of middle-class background, with “ordinary” lives and jobs, and with little, if any, criminal history. With the exception of being slightly above the age range Malik Nidal Hasan’s background appears to fit this criteria.

Self-identification occurs when the candidate for radicalization makes the decision to explore Islamist (usually Salafist) ideology and redefines their identity, typically after some kind of crisis, whether the loss of a job or loved one or, in some cases, by being confronted by political conflicts, such as a growing awareness of international conflicts involving Muslims. Hasan’s growing agitation and statements regarding the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq would seem to fit this stage. During this stage, candidates for radicalization typically begin seeking out a more Salafist mosque. According to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, Hasan worshipped at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001. Dar al-Hijrah is notable as the same mosque attended by 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour.

It is not yet known how Hasan progressed from the indoctrination to the jihadization phase or whether he purchased the two firearms used in the attack only a short while before the attack or had owned them for some time. What does seem clear is that Hasan had certainly premeditated the attack, going so far as to give away personal items (including a Koran) to neighbors and leaving farewell voicemail messages.

As shocking and disturbing as the events at Fort Hood were, they should not be viewed in isolation. In 2003, Sgt. Hasan Karim Akbar attacked his own comrades and officers using grenades and his M4 carbine. After being arrested, he reportedly said, “You guys [the U.S Army] are coming into our countries, and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.” In 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq opened fire on a Seattle Jewish Federation shouting, “I’m a Muslim American; I’m angry at Israel,” killing one and injuring several. Also in 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar used a rented Jeep Cherokee in an attempt to run over as many UNC-Chapel Hill students as possible, injuring nine.
After the attack, he blamed the United States government’s actions against Muslims as his motivation.

Middle East expert Daniel Pipes calls these events, and those like them, “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” to describe lone wolf, homegrown acts of terrorism. In January of last year, a Texas Public Safety Department Bureau of Information Analysis report used this phrase to describe the phenomenon and added:

“Oftentimes, these attackers are dismissed as suffering from mental health issues, but their own words and writings reveal an affiliation with Islamic supremacy or an affinity for Islamic extremism,”. “As a result, law enforcement should not be too quick to judge their attacks as having no nexus to terrorism.”

Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated, within two hours of the event occurring and before the Texas army base had even been secured and searched, and the crime scene established, that Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s alleged actions had “no terrorism nexus.”

2+2=5.

The media has followed their lead. TV anchormen have discussed “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” as a possible cause. Hasan, however, has never been deployed to a combat zone, and would not have engaged in combat even if he had deployed to Afghanistan as intended, and so could not possibly be suffering from PTSD.

Denial of the reality that even within our tolerant, pluralist democracy there are homegrown, radicalized Jihadists who wish to do us harm serves no purpose. As any twelve-stepper will tell you, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Covering up the motivations of this terrorist does nothing to help law enforcement and intelligence officials learn from this tragedy and take steps to prevent future Fort Hoods. And it does nothing to help the small but active groups of moderate Muslims who work to expose and correct radicalization and extremism in their communities.

What is the value of this self-censorship then? The refusal to state facts that would be “very significant,” the search for alternative motives while ignoring the obvious one? Whether it is out of the desire to be politically correct, or to appear tolerant, it cannot change reality.

We will not be able to free ourselves from horrors like the one perpetuated at Fort Hood, until we free ourselves to speak the truth and describe the reality of the threat we face. Otherwise, we will never win the War on Terror unless we can do that, but, “if that is granted, all else follows.”

On 9/11, these jihadists were between the age of 10 and 13. Who over the decade indoctrinated them, recruited them, and trained them? Even more daring is to ask who is indoctrinating children age 10 and above to jihadism within the United States. It would be hard to believe that Boyd was the only jihadi instructor in the country.

And the other key point:

The question is how many other American “Saifullahs” are practicing taqiyya and since when? Are the urban jihadists in numbers greater than what we think or our defense and national security institutions thinks? How many U.S.-born terror combatants have been able to perform perfect taqiyya for 10 or 20 years until today? Does our government know what this doctrine is all about and, more importantly, are authorities educating the body of our defense apparatus regarding this stealthy threat dormant among us?

The study examines several specific manifestations. These include adopting a legalistic interpretation of Islam, coming to trust only select and ideologically rigid religious authorities, perceiving Islam and the West as irreconcilably opposed, manifesting a low tolerance for perceived theological deviance and attempting to impose one’s religious beliefs on others. We found that all of these steps occurred frequently enough among the sample to be significant.

The prevalence of these factors suggests the importance of religio-political ideology as individuals become radicalized (an ideology that cannot be described as Islam itself, but rather a rigid and non-mainstream understanding of that faith). Underscoring this finding, more than a quarter of the homegrown terrorists examined had a spiritual sanctioner in their plot, an individual with perceived religious authority who provided theological approval for the violent activity. About 20 percent had a spiritual mentor, a more experienced Muslim who gave instruction and direction during the radicalization process.

The legalistic interpretation of Islam (that is to say Shariah law), is the center of the jihadist ideology. It’s also why preventing the spread of Shariah law in the United States has been a primary concern among the organizations concerned with radical islam. As the organizers of the Mapping Sharia Project have demonstrated, the more prevalent a strict adherence to Sharia is, the more likely a given religious center is to serve as a target for Jihad recruits.

Read the rest of Gartenstein-Ross’s article, its worth the time.

James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen, all of Newburgh, were charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Three of the defendants are U.S. citizens and one is of Haitian descent, officials said.

The men had planned to detonate a car with plastic explosives outside a temple in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale and to shoot military planes at the New York Air National Guard base at Stewart Airport in Newburgh with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles, authorities said.

The defendants planned to “destroy a synagogue and a Jewish community center with C-4 plastic explosives,” Acting U.S. Attorney Lev L. Dassin said.

The lead defendant Cromitie apparently told an FBI informant that he had ties with Pakistani jihadist group Jaish-e-Mohammad, which CounterTerrorism Blog describes as a terror group with strong Pakistani intelligence ties. I notice from their report that JEM is believed complicit in the murder of Daniel Pearl, which makes me wonder, as Israpundit does, whether the four  had any ties to Jammat-al-Furqa aka Muslims of America. al-Furqa is a homegrown jihadist group with many compounds within the United States, and consists primarily of African-American jailhouse converts to Islam, which these four are described as. The group is founded by Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, who also has a connection in the Pearl case (Pearl was scheduled to meet with Gilani when he was kidnapped.)

The other important thing to note here, is that the arrest followed a year long investigation by the FBI, after an informant who went to the same mosque as the four men was approached about their interest in purchasing explosives. This kind of undercover work is obviously absolutely crucial at infilitrating and distrupting homegrown terror plotters before they can get themselves armed in preparation for attack. Of course this kind of quality counterterrorism is exactly the sort of thing which so offends Muslim Brotherhood-linked CAIR.