The Threat of "Homegrowns"

By Jonathan Winer

The reported plot in New York to bomb Kennedy International Airport, like the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, last year's terrorist plots in Toronto and Ottawa, and the plans of a group led by a Miami Haitian to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower, featured not foreigners specially imported by Al Qaeda, but homegrowns, members of foreign Diaspora groups now based locally and seeking to demonstrate their political attitudes through a spectacular attack.

As FBI Director Mueller warned last year, however much we may manage to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda, we have not yet effectively dealt with the ideological legitimation that has taken place in too many parts of the world within fringe groups who have come to believe that the United States needs a violent come-uppance. Information on how to commit carnage is widely available online, as well as locations to obtain ideological support. Yet the footprint of individuals planning together to carry out such an attack may be little more than a ghostly palimpsest, except for the efforts to reach out to better known terrorist figures. It is that outreach that may have given away the would-be New York attackers. Like Theodore Kaczynski, in the end, they want not only to make their destructive impact, but to get credit for it.

While another plot has been averted, we need to continue to work to combat the radicalization process itself. In many other countries, we may not be the persons best situated to do that. But at home, there means ongoing engagement in Muslim communities locally, to deter extremism, just as such engagement was necessary a decade ago with the domestic militias. We have seen other domestic extremist theats -- from the anarchists to the black militants and Weather Underground of the 1960's to the militias of the early 1990's, quieted after absorbing the horror of one or another civic outrage against the innocent. What we have seen in common with each of these dangerous movements fizzling out is the lost of belief in the underlying ideology that sustained the terrorist fervor, and the integration of persons who once could have been subjects from recruitment into the opportunities of mainstream society.

Until the ideological fire is quenched, the daily, small, local work in the communities by local police, educators, religious groups, social service workers to help and heal the afflicted and to be aware of the criminal and the dangerous is going to matter a lot. There are implications here for how the federal government spends its money on counter-terrorism. There are also implications here for what it says about the problem, because increasingly it appears that it is not necessarily primarily something we can fight by just winning the battle "over there" rather than "over here."

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