Bill Bennett writes:
If one community is engaging in terrorism “at a greater rate” than the rest of the community; and if we are at war with or on the defensive against such terrorism; and if the secretary of homeland security states, The terrorist threat facing our country “may be at its most heightened state” since 9/11; and if the attorney general can say that “homegrown terror” is “one of the things that keeps me up at night,” why should there not be 10 hearings a year?
One last point as to why, perhaps, our civilian political leadership is now voicing so much concern. It’s a point most Americans do not know, but it is eye-popping: Al Qaeda is now practically an American-led franchise. The top three operational leaders of the top three al Qaeda organizations (al Qaeda in East Africa, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al Qaeda Central) are all homegrown terrorists, from America, either born or naturalized here.
Let us dispense with the nonsense that the U.S. government or the House Committee on Homeland Security is targeting or discriminating against a minority. As I point out in a book I have coming out later this month, there is one reason, and one reason only, that any of us speak of Islam in the context of terrorism, even as we know that most Muslims are not terrorists: When an adherent of the Muslim faith engages in an act of terrorism, he explains (or shouts out) that he is acting in the name of Islam.