Word: zazie
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Asked to visualize a jihadist who is based in North America, most Americans would probably conjure up a profile not unlike that of Najibullah Zazi - the Afghan immigrant who was arrested in September in Denver for allegedly plotting to bomb targets in New York. Zazi, who sold doughnuts and coffee from a vending cart not far from Wall Street, is a young, poor and poorly educated Muslim from a country where the U.S. is at war. It's not hard to imagine someone of that profile being manipulated by al-Qaeda's skillful propagandists and recruiters...
...profile like Zazi's, say experts on terrorism, may be the exception rather the rule for jihadists who are recruited on North American soil. "Historically, the idea that terrorists come from [poor and quasi-literate] backgrounds is a complete myth," says Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. "They are much more likely to be well-educated and come from middle-class and wealthy families." (See the Fort Hood massacre in the top 10 news stories...
...mantra long invoked to justify American military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq - we're fighting extremists there so we don't have to fight them here - has taken a beating of late. In September came the arrest of Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado man accused of plotting perhaps the gravest U.S. terrorist attack since 9/11. November saw Major Nidal Malik Hasan gun down 13 people - including 12 of his fellow U.S. soldiers - at Ford Hood, Texas, in the deadliest assault on a military base in U.S. history. The latest blow came Dec. 7, when the U.S. Justice Department filed new charges...
Since 9/11, we've worried a lot about al-Qaeda's exporting terrorism to American soil. Call it the germ theory of terrorism--the idea that a foreign agent somehow infects people in America, creating hidden and diseased cells of domestic terrorists. From the Najibullah Zazi case to the Fort Dix Six, we've relentlessly analyzed whether these men are so-called homegrown terrorists. But we've been looking at these cases through the same microscope, always asking the same question: Were these men infected by exotic terrorists from abroad? Which is why the tragic actions of Major Nidal Malik...
...court documents say Najibullah's laptop computer yielded images of nine pages of notes--in what seems to be his handwriting--on how to make bombs. The FBI also found his fingerprints on a small electronic scale and batteries, which can be used in making explosives. Zazi told his interviewers he had downloaded the notes by mistake and had deleted them. But he admitted to training at an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan in 2008--and that may be enough for the FBI to charge him with supporting a terrorist group...