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'Terrorist threats' by Muslims to U.S. appear exaggerated, study says
By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
February 10th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
February 10th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
Radicalized Muslim Americans who are inspired to commit acts of terror
against the U.S. appears to have been exaggerated. According to a new
study on domestic terrorism released this week, the numbers of these
dangerous individuals have been somewhat inflated, and their rate of
terrible "success" - where an act of terrorism is carried out, has been
remarkably low.
In fact, only one of the 20 Muslim Americans who were indicted in 2011 for plotting terrorist activities succeeded in carrying out an actual attack . with 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," the report's principal author, Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina wrote.
"However, the number of Muslim-Americans who have responded to these calls continues to be tiny, when compared with the population of more than two 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," Kurzman wrote, who last year published a book titled "The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists."
The new report was released simultaneously as a senior Pentagon official suggested that Washington may also have exaggerated the threat posed by Al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11.
"Al-Qaeda wasn't as good as we thought they were on 9/11," Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict told a conference.
"Quite frankly, we . were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, and 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," Sheehan was quoted as saying.
"They didn't have other units here in the U.S. . Really, they didn't have the capability to conduct a second attack," he added.
Critics of former U.S. President George W. Bush and his "global war on terror" have insisted that it exaggerated the threat posed by both Al-Qaeda and by its sympathizers in the United States.
The latest report Triangle Center report focused primarily on the period since Barack Obama became president in January 2009.
Indeed, 2009 saw a major spike in the number of indictments, 47 in all 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 U.S. soil than in any other single year since 9/11, heightening concern.
Significant incidents included an attack on Nov. 5, 2009, when army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan opened fire at Ford Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Abdulhakim Muhammad had shot two soldiers outside a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one of them three months previously.
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.
© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.