Inside the Rise of Home-Grown Terrorism

Karen J. Greenberg has written an essay for The New Republic cataloging the rise of home-grown terrorism:

Most of us have in our minds a general sense of what a jihadist is. And Faisal Shahzad, who, earlier this month, was charged with attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, probably fits the bill. Since September 11, Americans have come to think of terrorism as a fundamentally foreign phenomenon that has somehow ensnared us. We have frequently been assured that the United States—unlike Europe—does not have a homegrown terrorism problem. Other than the fact that Shahzad is an American citizen, his profile conforms to this general pattern: He originally hailed from Pakistan. He was apparently working with the Pakistani Taliban. And he seems to have been furious at U.S. policies toward his native region of the world. Like the men who carried out September 11, Shahzad could not be described as a homegrown American terrorist.

And yet, Shahzad notwithstanding, there are reasons to think that this image of a jihadist is both outdated and incomplete. For one thing, the United States does have a homegrown terrorist problem: Of the 202 people charged in the United States with serious jihadist crimes since September 11, 131 have been American citizens—and, of those 131, over one-third are, unlike Shahzad, American-born. Moreover, of the 54 people charged in major terrorism cases since the beginning of last year, at least twelve (and perhaps as many as 20) were converts to Islam. If you read through the documents surrounding recent terrorism cases—the complaints, indictments, and so on—it becomes clear that the classic notion of a jihadist as someone dispatched by Al Qaeda or the Taliban from a far corner of the world to protest U.S. foreign policy by killing massive numbers of civilians no longer captures the full picture. On the contrary, the concept of jihad has come to encompass an array of agendas, affiliations, and tactics. Jihad has put down roots in America. And, at the same time, it is arguably being shaped by America as well.

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