Identifying Extremists
Why does the FBI refuse to admit there’s Islamic terrorism?
The first step in a 12-step program is to admit you have a problem. Federal authorities have not begun the first step when it comes to acknowledging a domestic Islamic terror threat exists.
The New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans by a man carrying an ISIS flag reminds us that Islamist extremists still pose a threat to public safety.
In the last 25 years, there have been countless Islamic terror attacks in the US. The biggest of these was the 9/11 attack. There have been many more attempted and successful attacks since then. Among these are Richard Reid, an Islam convert who attempted to detonate explosive material hidden in his shoes during a December 2001 Paris-to-Miami airline flight.
Iyman Faris was a Pakistan-born naturalized American citizen who was arrested in 2003 for a planned terror attack. He had collaborated with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge.
Then in 2009, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim who corresponded with terrorists overseas, killed 13 at Fort Hood, Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great). The FBI ignored several warnings about Hasan before he went on his shooting spree.
These are just a few examples. This doesn’t suggest that only Muslims commit terrorism. Far from it. Many groups commit heinous acts. But the fact remains there have been Islamists attempting or succeeding in perpetrating terror attacks toward the US. Yet, this reality appears to escape the grasp of the FBI.
In 2013, the FBI’s “National Threat Assessment for Domestic Extremism” identified violent extremists as including animal and environmental rights activists, black separatists and white supremacists, pro-life groups, and Puerto Rican nationalists. Curiously, the domestic threat document didn’t include a single mention of Islamic extremists.
The FBI must also have overlooked the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. These Muslim extremists born in Kyrgyzstan were behind the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which occurred 14 months prior to the FBI’s threat document release.
The year after the FBI report, the Department of Homeland Security released an intelligence assessment of domestic violence threats (“Domestic Violence Extremists Pose Increased Threat to Government Officials and Law Enforcement,” July 22, 2014). Again, no mention of Islam. The sad irony of this is the Department of Homeland Security was created as a result of the single greatest Islamic terror attack of all time.
There were other domestic terror attacks carried out by Muslims in the years following the 2013 FBI document release. In July 2015, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez killed 5 people when he shot-up an armed forces recruiting office and navy reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Months later in December 2015, Chicago-born Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people when they opened fire on an office party in San Bernadino, California. The following year, Omar Mateen killed 49 in an Orlando, Florida night-club. Mateen had been twice investigated by the FBI the two previous years over terrorism concerns but the agency dismissed those inquiries.
The FBI launched an interactive website page in 2016 that purportedly warned the public against becoming a puppet of groups posing domestic threats. The website alleged there were increased threats posed by white supremacists, anarchists, sovereign citizens, and other groups. But there was no mention of violence threats from Islamists.
In a 2017 report, the FBI warned of a possible increase in domestic threats. But these threats were not from radical Islamists. These rising threats were by “black identity extremists.”
Despite many Islamic attacks since its 2013 report, the FBI does not mention Islamist violence in its more recent 2021 threat assessment. Produced in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, “The Strategic Intelligent Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism” mentions “Muslim” one time. The document reported three individuals were arrested for a planned attack on Muslims in 2019.
To their credit, the FBI and other federal agencies have reported the public faces domestic terror and violence threats from several groups. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security warned that supporters of the Second Amendment and military veterans could be extremists. A 2012 Army training scenario envisioned the US military fighting an extremist militia that grew from the Tea Party movement.
In the past decade, the Government Accountability Office has relied on something called the Extremist Crime Database to help identify domestic threats. Nearly two-thirds of the criminal acts cataloged in the database were people who refused to pay income taxes or used offshore tax havens. Most people would consider them tax cheats. But database authors call them right-wing extremists who pose threats of violence to the general public.
One state has seemingly followed the lead of federal agencies. A Utah law enforcement bulletin issued in 2016 warned that anyone displaying the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag may pose a dangerous threat to the public at-large.
Yet, all these agencies make no mention of Islamic-related terrorism on US soil.
The Department of Homeland Security did release a document in 2019 titled “Department of Homeland Security Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence” that mentions Islamic terrorism, but almost exclusively in the context of violence abroad, such as in the Middle East.
A domestic threat report was released by the Office of Director of National Intelligence in 2021. Similar to the earlier FBI reports, the ODNI warns of potential violence from racists, sovereign citizens, animal rights activists, anarchists, and pro-life and pro-abortion supporters. But it didn’t mention Islamic extremists.
It's reasonable to question the FBI’s terror prevention and crime investigation priorities. What is driving the stubborn resistance to acknowledge Islamic-inspired violence? Perhaps the agency’s attention is focused elsewhere.
In recent years, the FBI targeted American Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. In 2021 at the direction of Attorney-General Merrick Garland, the FBI sicced agents on parents attending local community school board meetings.
Preoccupied with surveilling PTA members and pious Catholics may explain why the FBI appears to have had missed so many red flags of actual crimes of terror and violence. Even when it’s received threat warnings the agency didn’t act on them or failed to fully investigate the matters.
The FBI didn’t heed warnings of Nidal Hasan’s 2009 Ft Hood terror attack. Nor did it act on terror warnings regarding Omar Mateen. In January 2018, the FBI was warned teen Nikolas Cruz posed a threat to others, including by a possible shooting spree. The agency dismissed the warning. Weeks later, Cruz fatally gunned-down 17 people, including students, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Those three slaughtered 79 people.
The next director of the FBI has their work cut-out for them. The agency will continue to chase after rather than head-off terror attacks by Islamists if it continues to refuse they even exist.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
Mark welcomes all news tips and story ideas in the strictest of confidence. You can reach him at markhyman.tv (at) gmail.com.