Muslim 'terror threat' belied by
numbers By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The threat of terrorism
carried out by Muslim Americans appears to have
been exaggerated by US officials in recent years,
according to a new study on domestic terrorism
released Wednesday.
The study, the third
in an annual series by the Triangle Center on
Terrorism and Homeland Security in North Carolina,
found that both the number of plots by and
indictments against radicalized Muslim Americans
fell sharply last year from a high in 2009,
defying predictions by law enforcement and other
officials.
Only one of the 20 Muslim
Americans who were indicted in 2011 for plotting
terrorist activities succeeded in carrying out an actual
attack; in that case,
the assailant fired shots at military buildings
outside Washington without injuring anyone.
"Threats remain: violent plots have not
dwindled to zero, and revolutionary Islamist
organizations overseas continue to call for
Muslim-Americans to engage in violence," according
to the report's principal author, Charles Kurzman,
a sociologist at the University of North Carolina.
"However, the number of Muslim-Americans
who have responded to these calls continues to be
tiny, when compared with the population of more
than 2 million Muslims in the United States and
when compared with the total level of violence in
the United States, which was on track to register
14,000 murders in 2011," wrote Kurzman who last
year published a book titled The Missing
Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim
Terrorists.
Coincidentally, the new
report was released as a senior Pentagon official
suggested that Washington may also have
exaggerated the threat posed by al-Qaeda in the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"Al-Qaeda wasn't as good as we thought
they were on 9/11," Michael Sheehan, the assistant
secretary of defence for special operations and
low intensity conflict, told a conference here
Tuesday.
"Quite frankly, we were asleep at
the switch, the US government, prior to 9/11. So
an organization that wasn't that good looked
really great on 9/11. Everyone looked to the skies
every day after 9/11 and said, 'When is the next
attack?' And it didn't come, partly because
al-Qaeda wasn't that capable," he was reported as
saying by the Army Times.
"They didn't
have other units here in the US .Really, they
didn't have the capability to conduct a second
attack," he added.
Critics of the
administration of former President George W Bush
and his "global war on terror" have long charged
that it exaggerated the threat posed by both
Al-Qaeda and by its sympathizers in the United
States.
The latest Triangle Center report,
however, focuses primarily on the period since
Barack Obama became president in January 2009.
Indeed, 2009 saw a major spike in the
number of indictments - 47 - of Muslim Americans
for their alleged involvement in terrorist plots
or actual attacks. That was substantially more
than the annual average of 20 indictments since
9/11.
Moreover, the actual attacks
themselves killed more people on US soil than in
any other single year since 9/11, heightening
concern. On November 5, 2009, an army
psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan, opened fire at Ford
Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Three months
before, Abdulhakim Muhammad shot two soldiers
outside a military recruitment centre in Little
Rock, Arkansas, killing one of them.
Adding to concern by the end of that year
was the attempted bombing by a Nigerian Muslim,
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, of a Northwest Airlines
flight from Amsterdam as it was preparing to land
in Detroit.
The number of indictments of
Muslim Americans for alleged terrorism-related
activities subsequently fell in 2010 to 26, but
the attempted car bombing in New York City's Times
Square on May 1 that year by Faisal Shahzad, a
Pakistani-born naturalized US citizen who had been
trained in explosives by an extremist group in
Waziristan, bolstered fears that Muslim Americans
were becoming radicalized.
By the first
part of 2011, US officials such as Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller and
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, were
warning that the terrorist threat faced by the
authorities had reached its greatest height since
9/11.
At the same time, the Republican
chairman of the House Committee on Homeland
Security, Rep. Peter King, held a series of four
controversial hearings on "the extent of
Muslim-American radicalization by al-Qaeda in
their communities".
"These and similar
warnings have braced Americans for a possible
upsurge in Muslim-American terrorism, which has
not occurred," according to the Triangle Center
study which concluded that ", a byproduct of these
alerts is a sense of heightened tension that is
out of proportion to the actual number of
terrorist attacks in the United States since
9/11."
Indeed, public opinion surveys of
Muslim Americans have consistently shown a very
low degree of radicalization and a higher level of
satisfaction with their lives, their local
communities, and the direction of the country than
the general public as a whole.
While 55%
of some 1,000 Muslim American respondents told a
Pew Research Center poll released last summer
their lives had become more difficult since 9/11,
eight in 10 said they were satisfied with their
personal lives, and 56% said they felt satisfied
with the way things were going in the country,
compared to only a 23% satisfaction rate among the
general public.
A Gallup poll also
released last summer found that US Muslims express
greater tolerance for members of other faiths and
are more likely to oppose violent attacks against
civilians than any other major US religious group.
The Triangle Center study found that
almost 200 Muslim Americans have been involved in
violent terrorist plots over the past decade, and
more than 400 Muslim Americans have been indicted
or convicted for supporting terrorism, which
includes providing funding for terrorist groups
overseas.
In 2011, however, the numbers
dropped in both categories, and the severity of
the cases also appeared to decline: not only were
there no fatalities resulting from terrorist plots
during the year, but the four indictments issued
for terrorist financing involved relatively small
amounts of money, the report found.
The
nearly 200 Muslims who have been involved in
violent terrorist plots since 9/11 were roughly
equally divided between those who were born in the
US and those who immigrated here.
According to the Pew poll, 37% of Muslim
Americans were born in the US, and 63% were born
elsewhere.
Jim Lobe's blog on US
foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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