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America’s Homegrown Terrorists
Seth Wenig / AP Photo
As details on New York’s would-be synagogue bombers come to light, Steve Emerson explores the virulent Islamic underworld where America’s home-grown terrorists got their start—and how to infiltrate them.
Just when threats of terrorism had seemingly disappeared from the radar screen, Americans woke up last Thursday morning to hear the news about four radical Muslims who plotted to bomb two synagogues in New York and shoot down a military plane using a Stinger missile. Fortunately, the FBI had infiltrated the plotters from the very beginning with a confidential informant who learned of the plan from an Afghan-born Muslim.
Instead of being forthcoming about the radical presence in their mosques, Islamist activists urge mosque congregants to keep their mouths shut.
Prosecutors say the suspects obtained what they believed was a live Stinger missile and three improvised explosive devices with C-4 explosive. “While the weapons provided to the defendants by the cooperating witness were fake, the defendants thought they were absolutely real,” said acting United States attorney Lev Dassin in a prepared statement.
Their intention was to punish America for killing Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The plotters identified two Jewish institutions in the Bronx to blow up using the C-4 plastic explosives and then planned on shooting down a military plane at a nearby military air base.
The virulent hatred for Jews was manifested in a statement made by the accused ringleader, James Cromitie. After lamenting that the “best target”—the World Trade Center—was no longer available, Cromitie spoke of killing Jews: “I hate those motherfuckers, those fucking Jewish bastards…I would like to [destroy] a synagogue.”
As the plot developed and the would-be jihadists carried out surveillance, photographing synagogues and Jewish centers, the official FBI complaint released last week stated that “Cromitie pointed to people walking on the street in the vicinity of a Jewish Community Center and said if he had a gun, he would shoot each one in the head.”
But Jews were not the only target. The complaint says the accused terrorists wanted to destroy American aircraft at a military base using missiles. According to the FBI document, would-be terrorist Onta Williams said the U.S. military “are killing brothers and sisters in Muslim countries so if we kill them here with IEDs and Stingers, it is equal.”
There are several lessons that the U.S. government and public should finally learn from this plot.
The first is that the threat of home-grown terrorism is very real. The arrests come on the heels of convictions in a plot that targeted Fort Dix in New Jersey and one that sought to establish a jihadi training camp in Oregon.
All three cases ended without anyone being hurt—with the assistance of FBI informants. In Fort Dix, the defendants were arrested as they met with the informant to buy M-16 and AK-47 rifles to use in their planned attack.
As acting United States Attorney Ralph J. Marra Jr. said after the verdict: “The word should go out to any other would-be terrorists of the homegrown variety that the United States will find you, infiltrate your group, prosecute you and send you to a federal prison for a very long time.”
In the training-camp case, the Seattle Times reported that “the government has relied significantly on information provided by James Ujaama, a Seattle man who lived in London for several years and became a confidant of radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, considered one of al Qaeda’s leading supporters in western Europe.”
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Steve Emerson is Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of 5 books and countless articles on terrorism. His most recent book is Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.
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Steve Emerson is Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of 5 books and countless articles on terrorism. His most recent book is Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.
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Steve Emerson is Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of 5 books and countless articles on terrorism. His most recent book is Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.
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palmharbor
Oh come on...your paranoia is showing. During WWII we had 455,000 Nazi's and Italian Fascists in POW camps in 26 US states including the South. How much damage did they do....I guess they were just nice guys..huh? These
ignorant jerks were less dangerous than the Black Panthers in the 1970s.
I suggest you finish middle school and when you get to high school take
a good history class.
Martyz42
Not much to say about this sad story except how this sort of thing could be stopped in the future.
The bottom line here as with every other home grown bunch of terrorism guys is simple, they all are poor, uneducated & have nothing to lose & nothing to look forward to making them jealous of other people who have built themselves into folks with a real life & something real to look forward to meaning if you want to stop this type of thing from happening in the future, EDUCATE THIS COUNTRY, EDUCATE EVERYONE, GIVE EVERYONE SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN THEIR FUTURE. Try that & see how many followers the crazies attract them.
wolverine1987
Sorry, but your statement ignores reality. Poverty has nothing to do with terrorism, which is about ideology. Bin Laden is from a wealthy family, and that pattern is repeated amongst many of the terrorist leaders. Of course, as with anything, people at the lower end of movements can be seduced from poorer ranks, but these people were not terrorists until they converted to Islam. Ideology again.
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kmajor1
I think it's really complex. I think no opportunity does have to do with it. For the person here who claims that the majority of palestinian suicide bombers have college degrees, they really need to check their facts, because that is just bullshit. I think another big thing is identity. In the cold war american sense of identity revolved around the concept of liberty, freedom, the free market....soviet communism (rightly or wrongly) represented a threat to this very identity, which is why people were so fearful of the USSR.
In the same respect, a lot of Muslims around the world (including in America) legitimately fear the United States as a threat to their very identity as a people. Same thing that led the United States into Vietnam and the Cold War is what makes people kill innocent people... globalization is great, eh guys?!
roger37
This is paranoid raving, and it buys into the Dick Cheney-style fearfulness that has guided his actions for the past 8 years.
wolverine1987
I'm not addressing you specifically, but this idea that taking aggressive actions against terrorism and pursuing every single lead, fertile or not, is guided by "fear" or "paranoia" is moronic therapist speak disguised as a political position. The President put himself in that camp last week, and it is intellectually indefensible gibberish.
We should have an active, open debate about how far we should go in defending ourselves, but to say that the other side is motivated by fear, rather than legitimate concern for the safety of our citizens, left or right, is simply stupid and worse, flat out wrong.
roger37
The gratuitous use of fear to sell the undermining of civil liberties is not necessary.
Look at these plots---bumbling homeboys that have been listening to too much Louis Farrakhan. More concerned with an al Queda "agent" dangling the possiblity of a free SUV in front of them (Miami plot) than the actual execution of the plot itself. And many similiar examples of Three Stooges-style conspiracy.
It is NOT necessary to torture people or to illegally wiretap US citizens to uncover plots like this--and that's mainly what the arrests around the country to date have been. Does that mean we don't have to fear real terrorists and pursue them aggressively? Of course not. But as we have already seen in the 9-11 plot, even if they are as detailed and professional as that one was, it can be uncovered by properly looking at available intelligence. It's a question of competence, not of abandoning our moral code.
I say again, that paranoid raving from Dick Cheney and the clown that wrote this piece is NOT the way to motivate the defense of this country.
Competence is.
finderj
Gee, you think fundamentalist Islamic terrorists attend Sunday School at the local Baptist church?
Or a mosque?
Terrorists should be kicked out everywhere they are found. No organization should accept violent terrorists/terrorists wanna-bes in their midst.
And if they do, they should expect law enforcement to check them out.
Period.
felixsama
You, make the flaw in this article most clear. Who says all would be terrorists in this country are Islamic or necessarily even anti-semitic? Timothy McVey was neither."Terrorists should be kicked out everywhere they are found", well, duh. What's a terrorist,dude? There are already laws that address obvious psychopathic behavior and even sometimes ideas- what civil liberties are we going to be asked to give up next to find 'home grown terrorists'? Or do you hope the law that allows us to find these future- would- be terrorists will only apply to Muslims or people whose last name is Ali or something?
logicwhore
This is just about laughable...CIA and FBI guys who save lives, I praise them. But, in this case how can the informant be the protagonist and antagonist? He takes 'em down ...but only after he sells them fake weapons? these bumbling idiots would have never possessed the capacity to acquire c4 or rocket launchers. Plus one of the Imams at the Mosque they attended said they were morons and he could spot the informant from day one. I mean if i send an informant into any jail in the country I bet a dollar he could find a or create a riot plot...with in a week. The whole Muslim vs Jew thing is tired and old, but the fear pumping is alive and well. when the F8ck are we going to grow up.
artois
This is the first sensible comment I've seen. Does it trouble no one that the only "conspirators" the FBI seem to "get" are bumbling imbeciles who, BUT FOR THE INFORMANT, have no capacity to articulate much less execute a "terrorist plot"? Have they ever caught ANYONE who actually had the knowledge or ability to carry out an attack? That these "home-grown terrorists" are a bunch of venom filled morons I don't doubt. But this "bust" is ALL about headline grabbing and political and budgetary justification. And the media is either tacitly or actively complicit in perpetuating these stories to a moronic American public.
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logicwhore
hey i could care less about some ones religious faith but cut the shit reagal. what religion was Hitler, or Mussolini, or any demagogue? Are you suggesting that we stop Muslims from entering the US? maybe we should stop letting Irish folks from coming here ...IRA...heard of it? we all have a right to be fearful but ignorance and group think is not a right, not last I checked.
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roger37
Hey, watch the language. If everybody uses words like you just did, the Daily Beast will become a super-moderated blog like Huffington Post, where your opinion isn't published if some simpering recent Seven Sisters graduate doesn't agree with your opinion. I try to keep it to an occasional "shithead" and the big F I use only when I'm really cranked up.
irfsol
I've been to plenty of mosques and I've not heard plots to kill or maim anyone. Maybe the mosques loughreagal is talking about are run by the KKK. Or maybe they exist only in between his/her ears.
baptox
The American Israeli lobby has been supporting the government of Israel since Israel's inception. Many synagogues and their members are directly ties to political support for the Israeli government.
This is the same government that recently carried out horrific human rights abuses against innocent Palestinians.
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Banjo1
The author of this thin article writes, "Just when threats of terrorism had seemingly disappeared from the radar screen . . ."
It may have disappeared from the left's radar screen, but the rest of us aren't sleeping. Obama's deep bow to the Muslim king didn't defuse all the hatred felt by the Islamic crazies.
Llplo99
We should be aware of what goes around us, not paranoid! I am not the left but I sleep just fine. Thank-you.
avgguy
Simple search provides this info: these men were dimwits and morons lured into this plot like lambs to slaughter. An informant found a pool of misery, added a little gelatin and voila instant terror pudding. In the interest of the "fair and balanced" doctrine of your patrons may we please add this to your column: Christian terror has left many doctors & nurses dead or permanently disabled along with closing down a way for many women to receive needed healthcare. In addition these home grown Christian terrorists managed to blow up a federal building directly and indirectly destroying the lives of many. When do we start closing churches?
smitisan
Don't close them. Infiltrate them, get them riled up, give them the fake weapons, and start busting them. Let's see how long it takes people like Emerson to change their tune then. They'll be yelling "Thought police!' and "Christian prosecution!" and probably fomenting a radical revolt all their own.
Banjo1
The secular fundamentalists who post here often betray tell-tale signs of a dangerous cult worth infiltration. Reason magazine would be a good place to start.
GREGORYABUTLER
If we look at all of the so called "Islamic terrorists" jailed in this country over the past 7 years [the Buffalo 4, Tariq Shah, Jose Padilla, the Miami 7, the New Jersey 4 and the current guys the Newburgh 4] there is a common pattern.
That is, hapless idiots, often with mental problems and a history of petty arrests for stupid minor offenses, who make the mistake of being vocal about their unpopular political views get entrapped by career criminals who are acting as FBI informants into bogus, non existent police-manufactured "terrorist conspiracies".
That sounds suspiciously like jailing people for their opinions, not their actions.
While technically legal, it's unfair, unconstitutional and unamerican.
I'm quite sure that if the FBI were to infiltrate suburban White megachurches, they'd find Obama haters who could easily be talked into participating in police invented right wing racist terrorist conspiracies.
The feds would probably be able to arrest hundreds if not thousands of guys like that.
And if you put women's right to abortion in the mix along with racial Obama hate, you'd be able to get tens of thousands of White male fundies to join in the terrorism.
But there is no hue and cry challenging the patriotism of White suburban Evangelical Christians and demanding they show their loyalty and calling for even more police repression against them.
Bottom line, people should be jailed for their ACTIONS not because the cops tricked them into participating in imaginary crimes!
cbeenthere
And the next step jailing people for what you think they might do. Oops that has already happened.
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irfsol
Poor Steve Emerson. Ever since he claimed the Oklahoma City Bombing had "clear Middle Eastern characteristics", he's been the butt of too many jokes. Now the Beast gives this clown room to air his silliness.
Emerson should read the book "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement & The Radical Right" by Daniel Levitas.
TavernWench
Steve Emerson is also the same guy who initially blamed the first World Trade Center bombing on Yugoslavians. He also insisted TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a terrorist bomb. CBS, USA Today, and the Washington Post cut him off in 1996, but The Daily Beast doesn't seem to have any problem cutting this utterly discredited writer a check.
roger37
Yeah, why is Daily Beast giving this schmuck so much ink?
Plantagenet
Islamo-fascists in the mosques
anti-Americanism in their talks
stingers in the basements, bombs in the car
rifles in the closets, heads for holy war
baptox
Stupid people at their keyboard
Abusing poetry as their springboard
Random words and paranoid ranting
Do not create a poem worth printing
baptox
Note that the terrorist in the picture on the far left (striped shirt) has an sweatshirt on that says: "Ireland" and "The craic is mighty."
""Craic" loosely translates from Gaelic to "fun,enjoyment gaiety, mischief..."
Obviously, this is a very important clue that Mr. Emerson missed. Not only does this indicate that these fellows were up to no good, it implicates Irish terrorists, (specifically the black Irish) in this plot.
I going to contact Cheney and see if he can arrange an invasion of Ireland immediately. We Americans can never be too vigilant.
roger37
Or violent.
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baptox
...Huh?...And you thought it was okay that I contact Cheney to organize an invasion of Ireland?
Perhaps you should look up the term "black humor..."
Thank you.
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