CIA Director: Children of Muslim Immigrants at High-Risk of Radicalization


Orlando Terrorist Omar Mateen may have been an American citizen at birth, but his parents were not. They emigrated to the United States before Mateen was born, in what has become a pattern for many U.S.-based terrorists. San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook was also second generation.

According to one former CIA director, this is no coincidence.

Authorities said Mateen had flirted with other terrorist groups but declared his allegiance to the Islamic State on Sunday morning as he began his horrific spree.

He follows in the footsteps of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino, California, terrorists who was the son of Pakistanis; Nadir Soofi, one of two men who attacked a drawing competition in Garland, Texas, last year and whose father was from Pakistan; and then-Maj. Nidal Hassan, the child of Palestinian immigrants whose shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 set off the modern round of deadly lone-wolf attacks.

In other cases, attackers were immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children. They grew up in the U.S. but were besieged by questions of identity.

The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were all foreigners who gained entry to the U.S. on visas, sparking a heated and still-running debate over the role of borders in trying to keep out would-be attackers.

But the second-generation killers pose a different issue: how to keep children of immigrants from abandoning the precepts of their adopted home.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Monday that the issues are one and the same.

“The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about,” Mr. Trump said in a speech in New Hampshire.

He revised his call for a temporary ban on admitting Muslims to the U.S., saying it would apply only to travelers from regions connected to terrorism. He said the ban would end once the U.S. has a better idea of who is coming and what values they hold.

Mr. Trump said immigrants from Afghanistan — the home of Mateen’s parents — overwhelmingly “support oppressive Sharia law,” which he said is anathema to American values of diversity. Indeed, Mateen’s father suggested that the killer may have been set off by having seen two men kissing. Mateen’s massacre targeted a gay nightclub.

Parents are often culturally Muslim but their children are more religiously devoted and seek out instruction online, where they are ripe for recruitment.

“There’s a responsibility for immigrant families to realize that their children may be learning religion online and there may be deviant interpretations online they may be subjected to,” she said.

“Historically, the ‘high stress’ generation for American immigrants has been second generation,” said former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “Mom and Pop can rely on the culture of where they came from. Their grandchildren will be (more or less) thoroughly American. The generation in between, though, is anchored neither in the old or in the new. They often are searching for self or identity beyond self.”

As long as we have a government who’s unwilling to identify radical Islam as an enemy of the United States, these homegrown terrorists will continue to rise. All we know for sure is this: As long as Obama is our president, nothing will be done to rid the country of this brand of despicable terror.

Source: Washington Times



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