Will Homegrown Terrorists Turn the Big Apple Into 'New Yorkistan'?

They had ambitious dreams, these guys. They would astonish the world, making it big by killing lots of American soldiers overseas in Somalia or at home in America. Worst case: they would die as holy warriors and become, if not rich, famous.

“My soul cannot rest till I shed blood,” Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, the 20-year-old, American-born son of Palestinian parents, told his putative partner in crime, Eduardo Almonte, 24, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal district court this week. Alessa considered fellow Muslim Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the naturalized U.S. Army psychiatrist who gunned down 13 fellow soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood last November, a nut and an amateur. “I’ll do twice what he did,” Alessa vowed. “I wanna, like, be the world’s known terrorist.”

Fortunately, Alessa was plotting not only with Almonte, but also with an undercover officer from the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, who was recording every word. As a result, the duo were arrested Saturday night as they tried boarding separate Cairo-bound planes on their way to Somalia, where they intended to join an Al Qaeda-affiliated, Somalia-based terrorist group called Al Shabab, or “the guys” in Arabic. On Monday, they were arraigned in federal court in Newark, accused of conspiring to commit murder, kidnapping, maiming, and mayhem in the name of God.

Terror experts from the NYPD and the FBI have just begun analyzing the latest foiled terror plot against America, and they’ve already come to some disturbing preliminary conclusions. First, the plot is further evidence of the NYPD’s once controversial thesis that Americans will increasingly face a challenge from “homegrown” terrorism. The grim statistics can no longer be denied. 

In a May meeting, Mitch Silber, the NYPD’s top terrorism analyst, told a gathering of security representatives at police headquarters that the preponderance of major terrorist plots against Americans since 9/11 were “homegrown,” that is, planned by terrorists either born or raised in the United States. In fact, Silber said, quoting his latest report on homegrown terror, 90 percent of the core conspirators of jihadist plots against America and the West throughout the world between 2004 and 2009 were radicalized in the West. ...more..