A new study on homegrown terror found that most American Muslims who planned violent attacks since 2001 were young, male U.S. citizens who became radical as part of a group.
Still, researchers seeking lessons on preventing extremism found no definitive pattern of how the suspects turned to violence and no geographic center of radicalization in the U.S.
Experts from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tallied homegrown terror cases since the Sept. 11 attacks and found 139 American Muslims had been publicly accused of planning or carrying out violence motivated by extremism.
All but one of the suspects were male and most were under age 30. Most were U.S.-born, naturalized citizens or legal residents of the country. Although Arabs formed the largest group of suspects, the accused were almost evenly divided in terms of ethnicity, including African-Americans, South Asians, Somalis and whites. About a third were converts to Islam.
Funded by the National Institute of Justice, a division of the U.S. Justice Department, researchers sought to learn why American Muslims seem less prone to extremism than Muslims in Western Europe, where radicals preach openly and children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants often feel as alienated from broader society as their parents did.
The report’s authors analyzed public records of terror cases, reviewed efforts by American Muslim leaders to fight extremism, and interviewed more than 120 Muslims in Houston; Seattle; Buffalo, N.Y.; and around Raleigh and Durham in North Carolina. Each of the four areas had some cases of alleged radicalization.
U.S. Muslims accused of sending money to overseas terrorist groups were not part of the study.
The study found that the planned targets of most violent plots were overseas. Seventy percent of the conspiracies were pre-empted by law enforcement well before anyone was hurt.
Anger over U.S. foreign policy is generally considered a factor, as is a feeling of alienation due to intense suspicion of Muslims in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 strikes.
The report, called “Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans,” credited U.S. Muslim leaders with vigorously monitoring their communities for potential threats.
