The Terrorist Next Door

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BY MICHELLE MALKIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B
lind diversity is suicide; political correctness is the handmaiden of Islamic terrorism; and the so-called “tiny minority” of “fringe” radical Muslims who support violent jihad is actually a mainstreamed legion of hundreds of millions that hides behind the deceptive banner of the “Religion of Peace.”

These are the inconvenient truths that should have jolted Americans into post-9/11 reality a decade ago.

Instead, we hit the snooze button.

More American civilians and soldiers died at the hands of Allah's soldiers. More of Mohammed Atta's spiritual brethren infiltrated our shores. More lethal hatred for infidels festered in caves and on college campuses, in refugee enclaves and in jails, and on military bases here at home and abroad.

Intrepid journalist Erick Stakelbeck shouldn't have had to write this book.

But Americans—lulled by the passage of time and the passivity of their government—need another blood-boiling wake-up call to pierce the fog of apathy that has set over the West.

You are holding in your hands the unvarnished, invaluable reporting that the rest of the “mainstream media” can't or won't do. My friend Erick has traveled the world to interview terrorists who are plotting the
establishment of a global Islamic caliphate—and who have succeeded in Islamicizing large swaths of Europe. He has investigated fifth column organizations on our soil that pledge allegiance not to our Republic, but to sharia law. In
The Terrorist Next Door
, he also blows the whistle on how the same reckless, open-borders policies I exposed in
Invasion
nine years ago continue to aid and abet jihadi-sympathizers from Somalia and elsewhere.

Erick's on-the-ground investigative work in Muslim enclaves and mosques covers every corner of our country. Jihad doesn't just threaten Washington, D.C., New York, and other metropolitan areas. It's spreading across the South and the heartland. Radical Islam's virulently anti-American, anti-Western virus has infected a swelling army of homegrown jihadist wannabes—not just the sons and daughters of Muslim refugees, as Erick shows you, but also white suburban women, ethnic gang members, and alienated geeks.

On 9/11, I lived in the D.C. metro area. From a high-rise building in Montgomery County, Maryland, you could see the smoke plumes from the Pentagon, targeted by jihadi pilot Hani Hanjour and the suicide crew who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. A year later, Muslim convert John Allen Muhammad and his young conspirator Lee Malvo murdered ten innocent men and women on a terrifying, three-week-long killing spree in the Beltway area. “We will kill them all, jihad,” Malvo had scrawled in jailhouse notes.
¹

Several years later, my family and I moved to Colorado. The Rockies, I thought, would be a sanctuary from terrorism. The lesson for us—and for all Americans—is that there is no such thing as a safe haven from Islamic jihad. In February 2010, Afghan-born Muslim Najibullah Zazi of Denver pleaded guilty to terrorism charges related to his railway bombing plot hatched in Colorado and New York City. In April 2010, the feds charged Leadville, Colorado mom Jamie Paulin-Ramirez with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists as part of a wider plot to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who tested the narrow limits of Muslim
tolerance by depicting Mohammed as a pig. And in February 2011, 20-year-old Saudi student Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari was arrested in connection with a plot to bomb former President George W. Bush's Dallas home—along with twelve reservoir dams in California and in my adopted home state of Colorado.

Once again, the U.S. State Department's sloppy solicitousness of foreign students from jihad-coddling countries came back to bite us. Remember: it was thanks to Saudi-pandering Foggy Bottom programs that several of the 9/11 hijackers were able to circumvent regular visa screening procedures and obtain entry into our country despite incomplete applications and deadly intentions.
²
As the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
article on Aldawsari makes clear, the visa screeners fell down on the job again:

Young. Male. Saudi. Muslim. No independent means of income. These should have been automatic red flags. Yet, our anti-profiling national security agencies have shown a mind-boggling obliviousness to the sea of red flags flapping in the wind. Most alarming: the same bureaucratic incompetence that cripples our State Department and Homeland Security Department officials has emasculated our first line of defense—the U.S. military.

American soldiers on U.S. soil have paid a bloody price for these bipartisan failures of imagination and comprehension.

Political correctness is a gangrenous infection. For decades, American culture has submitted to a toxic diet of multiculturalism, identity politics, anti-Americanism, and entitlement. The problem metastasized under the Bush administration. Despite 9/11, government at all levels refused to screen out jihadi-apologizing influences in our military, at the FBI, in prisons, and even in city fire departments. Despite the bloody consequences of open borders, the Bush Pentagon allowed illegal aliens to enter the military. And the grievance lobby succeeded in plying the Muslim-jihadist-as-victim narrative to a sympathetic media. Homeland security has weakened further under the Obama administration—led by a chief executive who believes more empathy and education is the cure for Islamic imperialism.

The Fort Hood massacre is the starkest example since 9/11 of the continued perils of progressive political correctness. The violence at Fort Hood, President Obama told mourners, was “incomprehensible.” The “twisted logic that led to the tragedy,” he reiterated, may be “too hard to comprehend.” But what exactly was so hard to comprehend? Accused Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan made his means, motives, and Koranic inspiration all too clear for those willing to see and hear. His jihadi colors flashed like bright neon lights on the Las Vegas strip—and everyone in authority looked away:

Hasan missed a few “adverse events” that have faded from public memory in our reflexive age of “Islam is peace” emotionalism-overcomprehension: