Peter Bergen, who testified today before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, made an important point about homegrown radicalization.
An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17%. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the US Army after three weeks and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.
A few years ago Spencer Ackerman wrote what I think was a very accurate piece about how American pluralism and economic opportunity had stemmed the growth of homegrown Islamic radicalism. But that was years ago, and things change -- de facto segregation may be creating the conditions for the kinds of radicalization that we've seen in Europe.
Weeks ago I had a conversation with Bergen's colleague at the New America Foundation Andrew Lebovich, who warned that Americans may have gotten complacent about thinking of how to properly counter radical ideologies from spreading because of a certain strain of American exceptionalism -- the idea that American culture is itself a deradicalizing force. I happen to think that's true. Nevertheless, Lebovich points out that what we've seen recently -- most dramatically in Minnesota -- is the rise of isolated, economically depressed "country-or region-specific" communities where radicalization can take root anyway, often as a result of events in the country of their families' origin. It's a problem we're going to have to figure out how to face soon, without alienating or demonizing the communities in question.
As former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army John Keane said in the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing on the Ft. Hood shootings said earlier today, “you cannot kill this movement, you need moderate Muslims to reject it."
-- A. Serwer
