Different Terrorist now, from 9.11 time.

Marc Sageman: Home-grown terrorism now main threat

(The Australian) FIVE years ago, the average terrorist was in his mid-20s, married with kids, university-educated, middle-class, psychologically stable and probably an engineer.

Today, he’s more likely to be poor, of limited education and a second- or third-generation product of the culture he is attacking.

Former CIA case officer turned psychiatrist Marc Sageman told the Safeguarding Australia Summit in Canberra yesterday the typical profile of a terrorist had changed since the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq invasion.

The well-educated young men who were radicalised while studying in the West (engineering was the most common degree) and who conducted the 9/11 attacks, had been replaced by self-trained, self-recruited and, thanks to the welfare state, self-financed “terrorist wannabes”.

Dr Sageman said al-Qaeda’s leaders had been all but cut off from the current crop of jihadists and comprised no more than two dozen people.

The threat was now coming from home-grown young men in their early 20s who recruited mostly on the internet.

Dr Sageman said there were “potentially thousands” of these “new” terrorists, although they were incapable of replacing older terror networks because of their self-organising, independent structure. Many were petty criminals or gang members who eventually drifted back to their Islamic roots.

Their actions were inspired by a sense of “moral outrage” at perceived grievances against Muslims, usually focusing on Iraq, reinforced by personal experiences of alienation in their host countries.

Dr Sageman said that well-intentioned attempts by governments to change attitudes within the Muslim community by promoting moderate interpretations of Islam were likely to fail as a result.

“That’s not why they join. They join for the glory,” he said.

Kinship bonds were the glue that held most terror cells together, rather than ethnicity, religion or ideology, he said.

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Brigitte Gabriel, founder and president of the American Congress for Truth, recently had the opportunity to testify before Congress about her concerns on the Islamic threat. She told members that various terrorist groups al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and Hamas, among others, are working with the MS-13 gang in smuggling terrorists across the Mexican border into the United States.

“The MS-13 gang is bad news. They are thugs. They are murderers. They are as bad as the Islamic radicals. These guys do not think twice about killing. They will kill their own family members. And this is why they found a great ally in the terrorist organizations,” says Gabriel.

Gabriel says America should only welcome into the country people who are willing to play by the rules in order to live the American dream. “I had to study a two-inch-thick book so I can take the test to become an American citizen,” she states. “And only those who want to be Americans, like me, so badly and are willing to adopt American culture — those are the ones we should have in this country. Not the terrorists, and not those who are dragging our culture down.”

Gabriel says it is unfortunate that MS-13 exists across the United States and in almost all the major cities in the country — a condition she believes should be unacceptable to any American, regardless of political affiliation. Gabriel believes that sooner or later the U.S. is going to pay a very heavy price for failing to build a fence and failing to take other steps to secure the nation’s southern border.

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