Spencer Ackerman reports that administration officials may be overstating the threat of domestic terrorism in order to justify escalation in Afghanistan, something that has worked in part because of the administration's emphasis on recently foiled domestic terror plots. While it's unclear if these actually represent a rising danger of domestic radicalization, I think Ackerman's thoughts on how the alleged perpetrators get radicalized are worth considering (my emphasis):
But al-Qaeda's message is finding at least some appeal, however marginal, among American Muslims in their teens and 20s, more than it did to their older brothers, cousins or fathers. “Those people were 10 years old when 9/11 happened” and have since “felt like they grew up under a cloud of suspicion because of their religion.” said a former counterterrorism official who declined to speak for the record. Those individuals — whom the ex-official clarified were “a few bad apples” among millions of law-abiding American Muslims — “saw issues like torture, Guantanamo, and Iraq and decided to react because they lacked an understanding of history, and view things instead from a conspiratorial view and are open to being radicalized.” By contrast, the older generation — the families of the five Virginians — were encouraged to go to the FBI with their worries about their children’s travel to Pakistan after the prompting of a major American Muslim lobby group, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council released a report last week making suggestions about how to counter domestic radicalization, namely by partnering with Muslim communities rather than simply treating them with suspicion. The idea is that people in Muslim communities have the proximity and cultural resources to help inform the authorities of potential dangers without incurring a backlash. Law enforcement foils plots and incapacitates would-be terrorists, while the communities themselves work on "draining the swamps," so to speak.
What's really important is that law enforcement does not develop the kind of toxic relationship with American Muslims that has emerged in some urban communities in the United States, which would discourage open cooperation with law enforcement and give credence and power to extremist narratives. (Granted, in some cases, that toxic relationship is a few centuries in the making.) That's going to be a danger as long as one of the two major political parties in America continues to support torture, racial profiling, and excluding Muslims from participating in the political process.
-- A. Serwer
