"His father, a Palestinian"...Paragraph #25 in Washington Post article. The connection isn't high on US gov. check lists either. Per 2011 Pew Poll it should be: 19% of US Muslims think suicide bombing is justified. By 2014 population estimates, this means 600,000 US Muslim residents say suicide bombing is justified. (19% of 3 million).
10/11/14, "American suicide bomber’s travels in U.S., Middle East went unmonitored," Washington Post,
As the 22-year-old Florida native made his way through a U.S. border inspection, officers pulled him aside for additional screening and searched his belongings. They called his mother in Vero Beach to check on his claim that he had merely been visiting relatives in the Middle East. But when she vouched for him, U.S. officials said, Moner Mohammad Abusalha
was waved through without any further scrutiny or perceived need to notify the FBI that he was back in the United States.
Earlier this year, after returning to Syria, Abusalha became the first American to carry out a suicide attack in that country, blowing up a restaurant frequented by Syrian soldiers on behalf of an al-Qaeda affiliate. His death May 25 was accompanied by the release of a menacing video. “You think you are safe where you are in America,” he said, threatening his own country and a half-dozen others. “You are not safe.”
It was a warning from someone who had been in position to deliver on that threat. By then, Abusalha had made two trips to a conflict zone seen as the largest incubator of Islamist radicalism since Afghanistan in the 1980s. Between those visits he wandered inside the United States for more than six months, U.S. officials said, attracting no attention from authorities after their brief telephone conversation with his mother.
His movements went unmonitored despite a major push by U.S. security and intelligence agencies over the past two years to track the flow of foreign fighters into and out of Syria. At the center of that effort is a task force established by the FBI at a
classified complex in Virginia that also involves the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center.
Despite that expanding surveillance net and more than a dozen prosecutions in the United States, the outcome for Abusalha depended more on the priorities of his al-Qaeda handlers than U.S. defenses. FBI officials involved in the case said it exposed
vulnerabilities that can be reduced but not eliminated.
“It is extremely difficult for the FBI to identify individuals in the U.S. who have this kind of goal,” said George Piro, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami field office, which led the Abusalha investigation. “It requires a loved one or really close friend to note the changes. . . . The family has to intervene.”"...
[Ed. note: "His father, a Palestinian"...Paragraph #25]
(continuing): "Abusalha is counted among the 100 or so Americans who have traveled to Syria or attempted to do so, a figure cited repeatedly by senior U.S. officials in ways that suggest there is precision in their understanding of who and where those people are.
In reality, officials said, the total has risen to 130 or more, and it includes individuals about whom only fragments of information are known. The clearest cases involve U.S. citizens arrested by the FBI before they depart. But others cases are incomplete, based on false names or partial identities assembled from references on social media or U.S. intelligence sources.
Even the estimate of 130 is low, according to U.S. officials who said there are undoubtedly Americans in Syria and Iraq who have not surfaced. Abusalha was part of that invisible category until shortly before he recorded his farewell videos and stepped into the cab of an armored dump truck packed with explosives....
Aspects of Abusalha’s case make it tempting to play down the threat he posed. A wayward youth who cycled through three Florida colleges without earning a degree, he appears to have stumbled into the ranks of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria rather than being recruited, let alone groomed as a high-level operative.
This account is based on interviews with U.S. officials and family members who provided the most detailed reconstruction to date of Abusalha’s case. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss aspects of the investigation and family matters.
Abusalha was filmed shredding and eating his U.S. passport, destroying a document that would have been critical if his al-Qaeda handlers had any impulse to employ him in a plot against the West. By the time he killed himself, he was already on the U.S. no-fly list, added to that terrorism database after the FBI fielded a tip that Abusalha had gone to Syria....
Americans account for a tiny fraction of an estimated 15,000 fighters who have flocked to Syria from other nations. The majority are from elsewhere in the Middle East, but at least 700 have traveled or attempted to travel from France, with an additional 400 from Britain and 250 from Germany.
Still, U.S. officials described the domestic security challenge as daunting, in part because the potential danger is so dispersed."...
[Ed. note: "His father, a Palestinian"... Paragraph #25]
(continuing): "The FBI employs numerous means of spotting would-be jihadists: using networks of informants and undercover agents in Muslim communities; tracking Internet chat rooms and social media sites where militants congregate; and relying heavily on the National Security Agency to monitor messages between Americans and suspected terrorists overseas.
Abusalha never surfaced on any of those screens.
“He hit none of the tripwires,” one senior U.S. official said."...
[Ed. note: "His father, a Palestinian."...Paragraph #25]
(continuing): "Abusalha did not seemed particularly concerned with avoiding them. His initial departure for Syria took place in late January 2013. He told his parents that he was heading to a mosque in Fort Pierce, Fla., and left his champagne-colored Chevrolet Malibu in the parking lot, with the keys still in the ignition.
Abusalha was living with his parents at the time. His father, a Palestinian, and his American mother, a convert to Islam, operated a small market. The family endured occasional economic setbacks, including the foreclosure of their home about five years ago,
as well as episodes of discrimination.
Neighbors recalled Abusalha being suspended from high school after
he fought with classmates
who mocked his mother for wearing a headscarf."...
[Ed. note: "Discrimination?" Per Pew Poll, 600,000 US Muslim residents say suicide bombing is justified. (19% of 3 million). Correctly recognizing this guy, the son of a Palestinian, might be one of 600,000--is bad? Not wanting to die is "discrimination?"]
(continuing): "After high school, Abusalha drifted through jobs and half-hearted attempts at college, struggling to find his footing in a life that he railed against in his suicide videos.
“You have all of fancy amusement parks and the restaurants and the food and all this crap and the cars. You think you’re happy,” he said. “This life sucked. . . . All you do is work 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and then you go waste it on garbage, and then you do the same thing.”
Always religious, he gradually embraced ever stricter interpretations of Islam. He told one friend that he had dedicated himself to pursuing the “straight path” of the Koran, meaning a life free from sin. He avoided restaurants where alcohol was served and traveled to take part in “fast festivals” at which participants abstained from eating for days....
When Michelle Abusalha was called by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer about her son, she confirmed that he had been visiting relatives in Jordan. If she knew or suspected that Abusalha had been in Syria, she did not share that information.
Abusalha’s encounter with Customs and Border Protection appears to be a critical moment. Even without forthright answers from the family, Abusalha was a military-aged male coming back from a country on the edge of a war zone. Had the bureau been notified, agents probably would have opened at least what is known as an assessment, questioning the family in Florida and Abusalha himself.
But U.S. officials familiar with the airport screening defended the CBP officers’ actions. Abusalha’s travel records showed multiple trips to Jordan dating to 2005, a senior Homeland Security official said. There was no entry on Abusalha in any FBI or counterterrorism database.
Nothing in his behavior or belongings betrayed any tie to the conflict in Syria."....
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Comment: "His father, a Palestinian,"paragraph #25. Per 2011 Pew Poll, 19% of US Muslims think suicide bombing is justified. That's 600,000 US Muslims. Either you want to protect US lives or you don't. It's very simple. Anything in between is moral preening.
A 2011 Pew Poll (below) surveys US Muslim attitudes and finds up to 19% of US Muslims think suicide bombing is justified. By 2014 population estimates, this means approximately 600,000 US Muslims believe suicide bombing is justified at least in some cases (19% of 3 million). Pew below headlines these findings, "Overwhelming Majority Say Suicide Bombing Never Justified,"
Pew describes the number approving suicide bombing as "negligible" because it showed "no signs of growth" from previous years, or because 19% isn't an "overwhelming majority": Subhead below, "Support for Extremism Remains Negligible."
The second Pew Poll below also presented as good news is titled, "Islamic Extremism, Widespread Concern, Minimal Support." One poll question finds 8% of US Muslims believe suicide bombing is justified "often or sometimes." 8% of 3 million US Muslims in 2014 is 240,000. Pew calls this "minimal" support.
2011 Pew Poll on US Muslim attitudes:
8/30/11, "Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism," Pew Poll, people-press.org
"Support for Extremism Remains Negligible"
Per poll below, 70% of US Muslims identify as Democrat, 11% as Republican:
"Number of Muslims in the U.S."
p. 2, scroll down: "Based on data from the survey, in combination with U.S. Census data, Pew Research Center demographers estimate that there are about 1.8 million Muslim adults and 2.75 million Muslims of all ages (including children under 18) living in the United States in 2011. This represents an increase of roughly 300,000 adults and 100,000 Muslim children since 2007, when Pew Research demographers used similar methods to calculate that there were about 1.5 million Muslim adults (and 2.35 million Muslims of all ages) in the U.S.
The increase is in line with what one would expect from net immigration and natural population growth (births minus deaths) over the past four years. The 2011 population estimate also roughly accords with separate projections made last year by the Pew Forum’s “The Future of the Global Muslim Population.” For that report, demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria independently estimated the total U.S. Muslim population at about 2.6 million in 2010. The same report also estimated that about 80,000 to 90,000 new Muslim immigrants have been entering the United States annually in recent years.
How the estimate was made
Prior to Pew Research Center’s 2007 survey, no estimate for the Muslim American population, based on widely accepted social scientific methods, was available. Gauging the number of Muslims living in the United States is difficult because the U.S. Census Bureau, as a matter of policy, does not ask Americans about their religion. Nor do U.S. immigration authorities keep track of the religious affiliation of new immigrants. Both the Census Bureau and immigration authorities do collect statistics, however, on people’s country of birth. Researchers can estimate the size of U.S. religious groups by combining this country-of-birth information with data from surveys on the percentage of people from each country, or group of countries, who belong to various faiths.
For example, interviewing used to identify Muslim respondents for the Pew Research Center’s 2011 Muslim American survey (which screened more than 43,000 households, including non-Muslims) finds that 87% of people living in the U.S. who were born in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Yemen are Muslim.
Pew Research demographers applied this percentage to country-of-birth figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The census data show there are 198,000 households in which the head or spouse is from one of these three countries, which when multiplied by the percentage of Muslims from these countries (87%) results in an estimate that there are 173,000 immigrant Muslim households of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Yemeni extraction.
The survey also asked about other Muslim adults and children in the household. On the basis of this information, an average household size was calculated for each country-of-birth group (or parent’s country-of-birth group) and multiplied by the number of households. The 173,000 Muslim immigrant households from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Yemen, for example, contain an estimated 380,000 Muslim adults and 195,000 Muslim children, for a combined total of 576,000 Muslims in these households. A similar approach was taken for second-generation immigrant households, which were calculated separately. For households with no foreign-born respondents or natives with foreign-born parents (i.e., third-generation households), calculations were made using survey data on age and racial breakdowns of third-generation (or later) Muslim Americans, again applied to U.S. Census data on the third-and-higher generations."...
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Jan. 2011 Pew Research cites US immigration policy for increasing US Muslim population:
1/27/2011, “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Research
(p. 1, parag. 6): "In the United States, for example, the population projections show the number of Muslims more than doubling over the next two decades, rising from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, in large part because of immigration and higher-than-average fertility among Muslims.... (See the Americas section for more details.)"...
Citation for 80,000-90,000 new Muslim immigrants yearly in US:
p. 10, subhead, "Muslim Immigration to the United States"
"Projections start with Muslims making up 9.4% of a total of 938,000 new permanent residents per year, or an estimated 88,000 people in 2010. By 2020, Muslims are projected to comprise 10.5% of more than 1 million new permanent U.S. residents per year, or about 109,000 people annually....
The top countries of origin for Muslim immigrants to the United States in 2009 were Pakistan and Bangladesh. They also are expected to be the top countries of origin for Muslim immigrants in 2030."...
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My computations: 2014 US Muslim population estimates computed as follows:
2011 Pew estimate 2,750,000
Increase of 80,000 per year x 3 years= 240,000
2014 est. US Muslims: 2,990,000. Round to 3 million in 2014
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The US seems to be committing genocide on itself:
According to accepted definitions, US politicians are committing genocide against America via immigration policy. If one needed proof, Pew Research in Jan. and August 2011 provides it.
"What is Genocide?"
"The crime of genocide is defined in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide."...
"Lemkin defined genocide as follows:
"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.""
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Comment: Looking forward to a Pew Poll asking US Muslim views on beheading. Is it always OK or just sometimes OK?
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