The New York Post in an article today entitled Lying to Ourselves speaks about the fact that Umar Abdulmutallab, a wealthy Muslim university graduate, clearly planned to carry out his attacks on Christmas day in the name of religious fanaticism.

What he planned was a terror attack on Northwestern flight 253, inspired by the doctrine of radical Islam. His own father, a wealthy reputable banker in Nigeria, called the US embassy to warn them that his son had become radicalized. And yet, not only did the security system fail to catch him, our administration refuses to connect this incident with radical Islamic terror.

Much like the initial reactions after Fort Hood, our government rejects the claim that this man acted out of religious zeal. By continuing to ignore this fact and try and interpret every incident as isolated, we are only making it easier for the terrorists to take another shot at us. They have a well financed, global network powered by religious fervor and a penetrating ideology that has its goals set on bringing down the West.

Until we stop lying to ourselves and our administration starts to “connect the dots” no number of deodorant cans collected at the airport will put a real end to the terror.

To mark the closing of a new year Time Magazine published an article about how the year 2009 saw an “unprecedented surge” of terror activity on US soil. There have been 32 planned attack since the tragedy of 9/11. Some of the more well known cases included the shooting at the Fort Hood military base in November. The murder of a soldier by a Muslim convert in Little Rock, and in January, the arrest of a Long Island convert who pleaded guilty to helping Al Qaeda with a plot to blow up a train in Penn Station.
The spokespeople for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claim that these events do not point to a trend and the charge that Muslim Americans are being radicalized in US Mosques if false. What do you think about this? There is plenty of evidence that points to the fact that this is untrue and four of the cases outlined in the article are about Americans who converted to Islam and then carried out their plans.
One of the lessons learned in 2009 is that the internet has become a breeding ground for terrorist training activity. American Muslims are encouraged to stay in the US rather than travel to Pakistan or Afghanistan and commit isolated acts of terror.
Brian Jenkin’s a RAND corporation expert suggests that many of the young men carrying out these attacks were at a very impressionable age when the attacks on 9/11 were carried out. He says that “some would have been inspired by it and caught up in the jihadist narrative”. Thankfully, Americans are becoming more aware that this threat is here and more people are contacting their local officials when they see something suspicious.
I wonder what 2010 will bring?

What does it mean to win the war in Afghanistan, in order to make life safer for Americans at home?

On one side, there is a physical theater of war with real consequences at home.

President Barack Obama devoted a significant part of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to clarifying this, in the wake of controversy over receiving the prize while the U.S. was engaged in wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of the threats to the American people. For, make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations could not convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates addressed the subject in early December, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He noted that a loss will empower our enemies, just as they were empowered to attack the World Trade Center several years after driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has indicated as much in statements like the following one from senior figure Adam Gadahn.

So America’s might, in addition to being exaggerated, is strictly physical, and, thus, ultimately beatable. And I’ll back that up with an example from recent history: the Soviet Union. Before its collapse, the Soviet Union was considered virtually unbeatable by Americans and the world… But the Afghan jihad, which was waged by a small group of lightly armed but faithful and steadfast Muslims wiped the USSR from the world map.

So, although Afghanistan may be half a world away, the war being fought there is about American survival.

Let’s say the U.S. defeats its enemies there decisively. Will that end the threat posed to Americans at home? Will we be safer? Thomas Friedman writes that it’s important, but not enough. There’s another war that needs to be fought. Read more…

Drug Trafficking in North Africa is directly linked to Al Qaeda:

An article in yesterday’s LA Times speaks about the clear link made between the cocaine smuggling routes in North Africa and an Al Qaeda group in the Maghreb.

“Reporting from Washington - Three men alleged to be Al Qaeda associates were charged Friday with conspiring to smuggle cocaine through Africa — the first U.S. prosecution linking the terrorist group directly to drug trafficking.”

The terrorists provide protection along these dangerous routes in exchange for large sums of money. They then use the cocaine profits to acquire better weaponry, expand recruitment and buy off corrupt governments.
An even scarier element of this story is that the personal relationships being formed between the terrorists and the drug organizations can become operational in the future.

It is time that this dimension of the global terror threat gets more attention in the media.