To the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), plots or actual acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism are always of less concern than the public response to them.
Never mind that six Muslim zealots allegedly plotted to kill soldiers at Ft. Dix. The burning question, in CAIR's mind, is what the public's response to the news will be. http://www.trentonian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18328524 <http://www.trentonian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18328524&BRD=1697&PAG=461&de pt_id=44398&rfi=6> &BRD=1697&PAG=461&dept_id=44398&rfi=6 Free-lance jihads bring new worries Hold off on that sigh of relief. The news accounts hastened to point out that the six Muslim extremists accused of plotting an attack on Ft. Dix weren't linked to al Qaeda. That bit of information seemed to be a cue for folks to wipe their brows and say, "Whew, that's good to hear!" Well...not necessarily, perhaps. Several terrorism experts have noted that free-lance fanatics, such as the six "Jersey jihadists"are alleged to be, present a whole different set of difficult challenges to law enforcement. Small, scattered cells of rookie jihadists, so to speak, may have no history to draw attention to themselves and therefore may do their plotting unimpeded by surveillance. They have no organizational bases and networks that may leave a trail of communications for investigators to pick up on and follow. It's true that the free-lancers may be more amateurish, more prone to bumbling and plain stupidity than a full-fledged al Qaeda team. The Jersey jihad six emerged in some news accounts as something like an Islamist version of Jimmy Breslin's "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight."The charges are that the six made a video oftheir jihad drills and then took the incriminating evidence to a store to have a DVD made.How dumb can you be? Pretty dumb-- and yet still pretty destructive. But for Mohamed Salameh's bone-head decision to try to get back his deposit on a rental van after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the perpetrators might never have been tracked down.Nevertheless, this far-from-slick group-- also not tied to al Qaeda--managed to kill six and injure 1,042. The extremists who detonated bombs along a Madrid commuter rail line in 2004 also had no al Qaeda bona fides.Yet despite the absence of such credentials, they succeeded in killing 191 and injuring 2,050. Decentralization? Are free-lance terror jihads thetrend of the future?Possibly so, some experts believe. Al Qaeda kingpin Abu Musad al-Suri, captured last year, had circulated a 1,600-word treatise urging the decentralization of terror attacks, noted Mary Habeck, an associate professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins and author of Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. In a National Review Online symposium,she said al-Suri's recommendation was that aspiring jihadists be provided with ideological and tactical training, via the Internet, and loosed "to carry out attacks whenever and wherever they deemed appropriate." Andrew C. McCarthy, the lead federal prosecutor of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, notes that another radical Islamist figure, Omar Abdel Rahman (the "Blind Sheikh"), offered similar counsel as far back as a 1990 speech in Denmark. As with the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, what bound the Jersey jihad six together "was ideology, not connection to a particular organization," says McCarthy, now with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "Meet the new terrorism," he adds."Same as the old terrorism." Islam's worst foe To the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), plots or actual acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism are always of less concern than the public response to them. Never mind that six Muslim zealots allegedly plotted to kill soldiers at Ft. Dix. The burning question, in CAIR's mind, is what the public's response to the news will be. Will the news precipitate a "resurgence" of the virulent anti-Muslim bigotry and lynch-mob-mentality that CAIR would like you to believe infects the yahoo American psyche? After the usual, perfunctory statement against terrorism, CAIR gets down to the business at hand, which as always, isto fan fears of Islamophobia. Its Website urges "media outlets and public officials to refrain from linking this case to the faith of Islam." It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that all Muslims or even a majority are violence-prone extremists.And, really, virtually nobody makes such suggestions. Yet the unavoidable truth remains that the zealots who took down the World Trade Center towers and bombed the London and Madrid transit systems and who routinely spill blood on the streets of Baghdad-- plus, allegedly, the Jersey jihad six-- all linked their own cases to the faith of Islam. CAIR's beef should be with them. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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