Some have argued that since the jihadist attack in Paris on November 13th, killing 130, and the December 2nd attack in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14, the United States has stepped up its domestic counter-terrorism efforts. But with only five interdictions of ISIS supporters in the six weeks since the San Bernardino attack, the rate of interdiction has not picked up at all (an average of 4.5 per month for a total of 90 since March 2014 when ISIS first appeared in international headlines). The bottom line is that the United States has not stepped up counter-terrorism efforts, and it continues to downplay the threat of ISIS to the homeland, emphasizing instead the threat from right-wing extremism.
Throughout the autumn, when it was already clear that ISIS was recruiting in the U.S. at a rate 300 percent greater than al Qaeda, and that the U.S. had ISIS investigations in every state, the administration implemented a number of initiatives that emphasized right-wing extremism and racial hatred over Islamist extremism. On September 28, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced the creation of the DHS Office for Community Partnerships, whose goal would be “to build relationships and promote trust, and, in addition, find innovative ways to support communities that seek to discourage violent extremism and undercut terrorist narratives.” The office, both in its staffing and in its mission statement, is placing heavy emphasis on civil rights and civil liberties, suggesting it is more concerned with protecting Muslim communities than with rooting out Islamist extremism and potential terrorists.
On September 29th, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Attorney General Loretta Lynch introduced the Strong Cities Network to combat violent extremism. Her speech did not name radical Islam as one of the threats to be addressed but only identified violent extremism. And on October 14th, Assistant Attorney General John Carlin announced the creation of a new Domestic Terrorism Counsel to focus on what he calls “Americans attacking Americans based on U.S.-based extremist ideologies.”
As suggested by the initiatives above, the Obama administration has built its strategy to prevent ISIS-inspired acts of terrorism in the United States on the Muslim community’s ability to police itself. As Attorney General Lynch said in her UN speech, “As residents and experts in their communities, local leaders are often best positioned to pinpoint sources of unrest and discord; best equipped to identify signs of potential danger; and best able to recognize and accommodate community cultures, traditions, sensitivities, and customs.” But the evidence does not support this. Of the 90 ISIS supporters who have been interdicted, only 18 (20 percent), were turned in by someone they knew, and not a single one of those by a local Muslim leader or Imam. As Melvin Bledsoe, the father of one convicted terrorist, testified before Congress, “Some Muslim leaders had taken advantage of my son. But he’s not the only one being taken advantage of: this is going on in Nashville and in many other cities in America. In Nashville, Carlos was captured by people best described as hunters. He was manipulated and lied to. That’s how he made his way to Yemen. …the former Imam of a Nashville mosque, the Al Farooq Mosque, wrote the recommendation letter Carlos needed for the school in Yemen. We also discovered that the school functions as an intake front for radicalizing and training Westerners for Jihad.”
This problem is also explained in a recent book on the FBI, in which former senior FBI executive Arthur Cummings said that in his experience, Muslim leaders want to fix problems within their own communities and not bring problems with extremism to the FBI. When Cummings suggested to a Muslim group that they let the FBI know when they had an extremist within their community, they told him, “That could never happen. We would lose our constituency. We could never admit to bringing someone to the FBI.”
What then can the U.S. government do to improve its ability to counter the homegrown threat? Obviously, defeating ISIS on the battlefield will have the single greatest impact on the threat, but even then, many other extremist Islamist groups will remain. Until radical Islam itself is discredited, there are important steps the U.S. government can take to better protect the homeland:
- Present a more accurate threat assessment, one shaped by the reality on the ground and not on ideological biases.
- Facilitate training for both federal and local law enforcement on the nature and scope of the threat (training budgets for both federal and local law enforcement have recently been cut).
- Target and interdict those who are propagating radical ideas, not merely those who are plotting or carrying out attacks.
- Implement a more aggressive counter-ideology campaign, both at home and abroad, one that is not based on the false premise that poverty and lack of education lead to jihadism.
ISIS has shifted away from the grand, centrally planned attacks that al Qaeda favored and instead is encouraging supporters to carry out independent attacks wherever they are able. As a result, we are likely to see more of the types of attacks carried out at the Boston marathon, in Paris, and in San Bernardino. This is borne out by statistics: of the 90 ISIS supporters interdicted in the United States since March 2014, 29 (32 percent) were domestic plotters who believed the best way to support ISIS was to carry out attacks against Americans on U.S. soil. If the administration does not begin to take this threat more seriously, there may yet be far worse to come.
