 ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish police on Friday rounded up 120 people suspected of links to the Al Qaeda terror network in simultaneous pre-dawn raids in 16 provinces, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. It was not clear if Friday's detentions would amount to a major blow to homegrown Islamic militants allegedly affiliated with Al Qaeda. Turkey has carried out similar raids against alleged Al Qaeda suspects in the past year. The arrests follows another raid on suspected militants in the cities Ankara and Adana last week in which police rounded up and interrogated some 40 people and reportedly seized documents detailing Al Qaeda activities. Twenty-five of them were charged with membership in a terrorist organization while the rest were released. "Each operation against Al Qaeda leads to new information and widens the net," said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Ankara. He said the operations were likely to continue. Those detained Friday include a faculty member of the Yuzunci Yil University in the eastern city of Van, who is suspected of recruiting students at the campus and other people through the Internet and of sending them to Afghanistan for training, Anatolia reported, citing unnamed police officials. The suspect was identified by his initials M.E.Y. only. Anatolia said other suspects included some local leaders, university students, and people believed to be spreading Al Qaeda propaganda. Police seized documents and computer hard-disks during Friday's raids, it said. Police would not comment on the arrests Friday. Homegrown Islamic militants tied to the Al Qaeda carried out suicide bombings in Istanbul, killing 58 people in 2003.
The targets were the British consulate, a British bank and two Jewish synagogues. In 2008, an attack blamed on Al Qaeda-affiliated militants outside the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul left three assailants and three policemen dead. Turkish authorities have said dozens of Islamic militants have received training in Afghanistan. However, Al Qaeda's austere and violent interpretation of Islam receives little public backing in Turkey. Several other radical Islamic groups are active in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim but officially secular country. In June, Turkey's court of appeals upheld life sentences for six militants accused in the 2003 deadly bombings, including Syrian Loa'i Mohammad Haj Bakr al-Saqa, who was charged with masterminding the bombings. The court sentenced 33 others to between three years nine months and 18 years.
It acquitted 15 of the suspects, citing a lack of evidence. Hundreds of other suspected militants are on trial for membership in a terror organization. FoxNews
 Thomas L. Friedman Let’s not fool ourselves. Whatever threat the real Afghanistan poses to U.S. national security, the “Virtual Afghanistan” now poses just as big a threat. The Virtual Afghanistan is the network of hundreds of jihadist Web sites that inspire, train, educate and recruit young Muslims to engage in jihad against America and the West. Whatever surge we do in the real Afghanistan has no chance of being a self-sustaining success, unless there is a parallel surge — by Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders — against those who promote violent jihadism on the ground in Muslim lands and online in the Virtual Afghanistan. Last week, five men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan, where they went, they told Pakistani police, to join the jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They first made contact with two extremist organizations in Pakistan by e-mail in August.
As The Washington Post reported on Sunday: “ ‘Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,’ a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said. ... ‘Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet,’ said Evan Kohlmann, a senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.” The Obama team is fond of citing how many “allies” we have in the Afghan coalition. Sorry, but we don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas, which, thanks to the Virtual Afghanistan, are now being spread farther than ever before. Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam.
We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North. Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate. What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: “We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.” How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few. Where was the outrage last week when, on the very day that Iraq’s Parliament agreed on a formula to hold free and fair multiparty elections — unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history — five explosions set off by suicide bombers hit ministries, a university and Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, killing at least 127 people and wounding more than 400, many of them kids? Not only was there no meaningful condemnation emerging from the Muslim world — which was primarily focused on resisting Switzerland’s ban on new mosque minarets — there was barely a peep coming out of Washington. President Obama expressed no public outrage. It is time he did. “What Muslims were talking about last week were the minarets of Switzerland, not the killings of people in Iraq or Pakistan,” noted Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. “People look for red herrings when they don’t want to look inward, when they don’t want to summon the moral courage to produce the counter-fatwa that would say: stabilizing Iraq is an Islamic duty and bringing peace to Afghanistan is part of the survival of the Islamic umma,” or community. So please tell me, how are we supposed to help build something decent and self-sustaining in Afghanistan and Pakistan when jihadists murder other Muslims by the dozens and no one really calls them out? A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them. Arab and Muslims are not just objects. They are subjects. They aspire to, are able to and must be challenged to take responsibility for their world. If we want a peaceful, tolerant region more than they do, they will hold our coats while we fight, and they will hold their tongues against their worst extremists. They will lose, and we will lose — here and there, in the real Afghanistan and in the Virtual Afghanistan. NYT 
 You’ve heard the narrative from the Beltway punditry: Our Muslims are better assimilated than Muslims in Europe. Our Muslims are more Westernized, less radicalized. Well, it’s a false narrative. We are seeing the horns of a Muslim insurgency in this country. We are being Europeanized. And we need a counterinsurgency plan not just in Afghanistan but right here at home. While our leaders are too politically correct to even think about such a thing, they are starting to at least recognize the problem. Even President Obama, who still won’t utter the M word, notes the rise in “extremists within our borders.” So does his Homeland Security chief, who just months earlier fixated on white militia groups as the main domestic terror threat. “We are seeing young Americans who are inspired by al-Qaida and radical ideology,” echoed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, while still failing to name the source of that ideology. “Home-based terrorism is here.” And for the first time, a senior Justice Department official has gone on record saying the U.S. is turning into Europe, with Muslim citizens becoming more and more hostile toward the government, and plotting and carrying out more acts of homegrown terrorism. “If there was ever a subconscious belief in the counterterrorism community that our society is different from Europe and therefore we don’t have to worry about problems like they’ve had, the activities in Minneapolis demonstrate we can’t think that way,” said Patrick Rowan, who led Justice’s national-security division when the government first started investigating the case of the 20 young Somali-American men who quit college and gave up promising careers in Minneapolis to join al-Qaida’s jihad in Somalia. The FBI fears the recruits — who have U.S. passports — may use their terror training to come back and attack their own country. One of them already carried out a suicide bombing, becoming the first American to do so. “We should all be on guard,” said Ralph Boelter who heads the FBI’s Minneapolis field office. As we dig in deeper in Afghanistan, hostility among our own Muslim population will only grow deeper. And as we import more refugees from Muslim countries, demands for Shariah (think: Taliban) law will only grow shriller. Consider that: * A new Gallup poll finds American Muslims are most likely to report feeling anger compared with the overall population — making even more of them ripe for radicalization. More at FPM
 Fort Hood shows us that Internet jihad is not a myth. BY EVAN KOHLMANN Upon learning of the reported "missed" link between the alleged culprit responsible for the massacre at Ft. Hood -- Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan -- and Anwar al Awlaki, my heart sank for a multitude of reasons.
Al Awlaki is an infamous character in the halls of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and he has been for several years at least. The cleric's recurring presence again in the Ft. Hood case seems to be powerful and disturbing evidence of how fringe extremists -- who otherwise might remain in obscurity with no real means of living out their private jihadi fantasies -- are quite literally being equipped for battle by so-called "theological" advisors known only to them through the Internet. In short, it is a reminder of how real online terrorism networks have become. In mid-2008, I was invited by the FBI to look at the voluminous evidence they had gathered against a group of defendants who were caught plotting to attack various military installations on the East Coast, including Fort Dix in New Jersey. At first, I was a skeptic. Most of the men under scrutiny were Westernized Albanian Muslims who spoke little to no Arabic, were into hip-hop music, and were working as pizza delivery boys and taxi drivers.
They didn't have any obvious connection to al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, they had never visited a real terrorist training camp, and they cut a pretty kooky appearance. They certainly didn't seem to fit the classical terrorist stereotype. But to my surprise, this motley crew of would-be homegrown killers turned out to be much more sophisticated than I had initially given them credit for. Read more at Foreign Policy
 Annie Jacobsen Was the Colorado terror suspect radicalized in an American mosque? It’s been a busy month for the FBI. All 50 field offices have been involved in the ongoing investigating of what may turn out to be the biggest terrorist plot in the United States since 9/11.
The man at its center is Najibullah Zazi, 24, an Afghan immigrant with a green card — which makes him the FBI’s worst nightmare of a threat. “I want to talk today about the changing shape of terrorism and, in particular, the threat of homegrown terrorism,” FBI Director Robert Mueller declared in an executive speech in June 2006.
When the FBI calls someone a homegrown terrorist, they mean the person gets radicalized while living on American soil. The homegrown terrorist speaks English, is familiar with American customs, and is able to blend in.
The privilege of U.S. travel documents allows the homegrown terrorist remarkable freedom of movement around the globe. Najibullah Zazi, for example, was able to travel from New York to Switzerland to Qatar to Pakistan, where he stayed for approximately five months before returning to the land he calls home. “To detect homegrown terrorists,” Robert Mueller pointed out, is difficult. “They operate under the radar. And that makes their detection that much more difficult for all of us.” Zazi, it appears, is such a case. “He was a nice guy,” one of his co-workers at Big Sky Shuttle in Lakewood, Colorado, told me on Friday afternoon (the co-worker chose not to be named). That’s where Zazi got a job working as an airport van driver beginning in February 2009. When I asked the man if he ever expected his co-worker to be at the center of an international terrorist plot, he replied: “No way, it’s so weird.” At first even Najibullah Zazi himself tried to play the innocent card with the public through the press. “I’m just normal,” he told the Denver Post’s Kirk Mitchell on September 15. “I pray five times a day. I observe Ramadan,” he said. Dressed in a button-down shirt and blue jeans, Zazi certainly looked the part of the “normal citizen” he claimed to be.
That was before he, his father Mohammed, and a Brooklyn cleric with a penchant for expensive cars named Ahmad Wais Afzali were arrested on plotting a terrorist attack inside the United States using weapons of mass destruction. That was before the material evidence came to light. There was the bomb-making instructions allegedly written in Zazi’s hand and the eerie video of him pushing a cart down a Denver beauty store aisle, purchasing enough potential bomb-making material to blow up several subway cars, stadium stands, or buses. Who can imagine what public venue the homegrown terrorists had in mind to destroy? When Zazi was asked by the beauty store clerk why he needed so much of a particular beauty supply product, the “normal citizen” responded: “I have a lot of girlfriends.” How American of him. Read more here,,,, Source: Pajamas Media
 Norrie Ross A HOME-GROWN terrorist who was committed to violent jihad was jailed this afternoon.
Justice Bernard Bongiorno sentenced Shane Kent to five years on two counts, with a minimum of three years, nine months, the Herald Sun reports.
He has already spent 1115 days in custody.
Justice Bongiorno told Kent, 32, in sentencing: "I am not prepared to accept on the material proferred, that he (Kent) has abandoned the cause of violent jihad.
"There is no admissable evidence of his having done so, or of his being genuinely contrite for what he did."
Kent, of Campbellfield, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years to being a member of a terrorist organisation, and two-and-a-half years on a second charge of recklessly making a document connected with preparing a terrorist act, but the two will be served partially concurrently. Read more here,,,, Source: News.com.au
 By Steven Emerson This week's arrest of seven North Carolina residents, including Daniel Boyd and his two sons, on charges of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder abroad, showed how the problem of homegrown Islamic terrorism is far more rampant than the media or the public is aware of. Just look at the major cases in the past year alone: - The convert from Long Island who joined al Qaeda (disclosed this past week) and gave the group information about Long Island trains and New York City's subways.
- The plot to blow up two synagogues and a National Guard plane in upstate New York by prison converts (scheduled to go to trial).
- The plot to kill hundreds of soldiers at Fort Dix by assimilated American Muslims living here 25 years (all convicted).
- The plot to operate a terrorist training camp in Oregon (pleaded guilty).
- The plot to blow up buildings by the Liberty City 7 (all convicted).
- The sweeping conviction of Hamas officials for conspiring to support terrorism overseas.
- The cases of young Somali teenagers raised in the U.S. going overseas to become suicide bombers.
The Boyd case in North Carolina proves that radical Islamic ideology transcends economic class problems as has been claimed by pointy-headed sociologists. The Boyd family was white, had a middle-class existence, and had the economic opportunities afforded all Americans—just like most of the terrorists cited above—and yet chose to engage in jihad to the point that Daniel Boyd was willing to send his two kids on suicide missions to Israel. Read more ...Source: The Daily Beast
 By M. Zuhdi Jasser Last week’s foiled bomb plot in New York City has been widely reported and confirms that homegrown Islamist-inspired terrorism is a clear and present danger. With three of the four assailants converting to Islam in prison, no one can ignore the impact which Wahhabi Islam, the strain of Islam being promulgated in many prisons has upon the radicalization of Muslim inmates. Predictably, Islamist groups (like CAIR and MPAC) with the aid of some non-Muslim echo chambers continue to be intransigent in their blindness. This blindness is manifest in their refusal to accept the fact we in the Muslim community have an ideological cancer lying within the House of Islam which can only be treated by fellow Muslims willing to do the hard work of reform. Blaming others or trying to say that their Islam is not our Islam while bearing some truth deflects real responsibility. Regardless of how some may try and dismiss the accused as “degenerates”, “drug addicts”, or “criminals”, the more important teachable moment here is that the opium of the minds of these inmates was pure and simply a supremacist form of Islam which depends upon the medieval Wahhabi-Islamist interpretations of our Islamic scripture and tradition. To deflect the public from this reality is to shirk our responsibility as Muslims and more importantly as Americans. Read more ...Source: The Hill Blog
 By Jamie Glazov Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ryan Mauro, the founder of WorldThreats.com. He is currently a national security researcher for the Christian Action Network and a researcher for the Reform Party of Syria. A frequent guest on radio and TV programs, he is the author of Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com. FP: Ryan Mauro, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Mauro: Thank you Jamie. FP: We’re here today to discuss “Homegrown Jihad: Terrorist Camps Around U.S.,” the new documentary being released by the Christian Action Network. Tell us about it. Mauro: This documentary is premiering at Washington D.C.’s Landmark Theater on February 11, at 7:30 PM. It is free to attend and I strongly encourage everyone in the area to come, and those out of the area to go to ChristianAction.org and order a copy. The Christian Action Network (CAN) is a non-profit organization and I personally will not see a penny from the sales. This documentary is simply too important; the threat too severe; and the public too unaware for me to not promote this is any way possible and call myself a patriotic American. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Jamie Glazov
The recent Mumbai horror has been yet another chapter in the dark tale of homegrown terror, as evidence indicates that British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists.
In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss the problem of the jihadization of homegrown Muslims. Our guests are: Brigitte Gabriel, a terrorism expert and the founder of ACT! for America. Her new book is They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It. Raheel Raza, a leading Muslim reformer, award winning writer, professional speaker, diversity consultant, documentary film maker and interfaith advocate. She is the author of Their Jihad . . . Not My Jihad. Visit her site at RaheelRaza.com. Christine Williams, the producer and host of the live current affairs Canadian daily talk show On the Line. The program has been recipient of five international awards. She holds a degree in Research Psychology from McMaster University and has distinguished herself as a political and crime reporter. Joan Lachkar, Ph.D., a licensed Marriage and Family therapist in private practice in Brentwood and Tarzana, California, who teaches psychoanalysis and is the author of How to Talk to a Narcissist (2007), The Many Faces of Abuse: Treating the Emotional Abuse of High -Functioning Women (1998), and The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment (1992). Dr. Lachkar speaks nationally and recently presented, "The Psychopathology of Terrorism" at the International Psychohistorical Association, and at the Rand Corporation. She is an affiliate member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and writes in the Journal of Emotional Abuse. Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psycho-analyst, Arabist, and counter-terrorism expert. Read more ... Source: FrontPage Magazine
 By Lorenzo Vidino Various CT Blog experts have posted in the past about homegrown terrorism in the United States (most notably Madeleine Gruen and Frank Hyland and the NEFA Foundation’s Target America series). I have published a long article on the subject in the latest issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, attempting to outline the history of homegrown terrorism of jihadist inspiration in America and analyze the U.S. government’s response to it. On March 9, 1977, a group of 12 armed men, all African American converts to Islam who called themselves Hanafi Muslims, brought havoc to the central area of Washington, D.C. Divided in three groups, the men stormed into the city’s Islamic Center, City Council chambers, and the headquarters of B’nai B’rith, America’s oldest Jewish organization. Wielding rifles, shotguns and machetes, the men took about 150 people hostage. They were led by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, an African American convert who had served as secretary to Malcolm X at Harlem’s Temple #7 under the name of Ernest 2X McGhee before leaving the Nation of Islam to form his own sect, which referred to a more traditional form of Sunni Islam. After seizing the buildings, Khaalis issued a series of demands. First he wanted authorities to hand over to him the five Nation of Islam members who had been arrested for brutally murdering several members of his family, including some infants, four years earlier. Then he demanded that authorities ban the showing of the movie Mohammad, Messenger of God, which he deemed offensive to Islam. This second request was granted and theaters nationwide stopped showing the controversial movie. The siege ended two days later, after extensive negotiations led by the Egyptian, Pakistani and Iranian ambassadors to the U.S., who read the men passages from the Quran about compassion and mercy. A security guard and a journalist were killed during the siege, and several others, including Washington mayor-to-be Marion Barry, were injured. Read more ...Source: Counterterrorism Blog
By China correspondent Stephen McDonell Muslim separatists are suspected to have carried out the latest series of bomb attacks in north-west China. Xinhua news agency is reporting that the attacks - which saw eight people killed in the Western province of Xinjiang - were the work of suicide bombers. Four of the bombers died in the assaults on government buildings and police shot dead three more. One security guard was killed. According to the Chinese military the East Turkistan Islamic Movement poses the greatest security threat to the Olympics. A week ago Muslim separatists killed 15 police in Xinjiang. This followed threats by militant ethnic Uighurs to sabotage the Games. At this stage violent clashes have not reached the capital, some 4,000 kilometres from Xinjiang. Source: - ABC Online
By Catherine Herridge WASHINGTON - Many Americans believe that the threat of homegrown terrorism is gravest in Europe, but according to the U.S. government, in the last 18 months more than a half-dozen plots were thwarted right here at home. Sen. Joe Lieberman says the threat is growing. "Bottom line: There is a threat of homegrown terror in America," he said. "It is not as great as in European cities, but it is growing and we have to take it seriously." Three young Ohioans were convicted in June on terrorism charges after officials gathered evidence against them that included suicide bomb belts filled with ball bearings. Read more ...Source: Fox News
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ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish police on Friday rounded up 120 people suspected of links to the Al Qaeda terror network in simultaneous pre-dawn raids in 16 provinces, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. 
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