Are vigilant parents the first line of defense?

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In case you missed it this morning, it was announced that five young Muslim men from the Virginia suburbs were arrested in a jihadi safehouse in Sargodha, a city in northern Punjab. Trying to get in to Al Qaeda is kind of like trying to get in to the mob it seems. If you don’t have someone to vouch for you and you don’t know how to act the part, then you may be shit out of luck:

The men contacted extremist organizations, including two with links to al-Qaeda, and proudly told their Pakistani interrogators that “We are here for jihad,” said Usman Anwar, the local Pakistani police chief whose officers interrogated the men, all Muslims from the Alexandria area.

Anwar said police recovered jihadist literature, laptop computers and maps of different parts of Pakistan when the men were arrested near Lahore on Tuesday. The maps included areas where the Taliban train. The men first made contact with the two extremist organizations by e-mail in August, officials said, but the groups apparently rejected their overtures because they couldn’t find people to vouch for them. [Link]

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They were rebuffed in both places because of their Western demeanor and their inability to speak the national language, Urdu, an investigator said… [Link]

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p>The Washington Post identifies the five men:

The men, who range in age from 19 to 25, were identified by Pakistani officials and sources close to the case as Umar Chaudhry, Waqar Khan, Ahmad A. Mini, Aman Hassan Yemer and Ramy Zamzam. Chaudhry’s father, Khalid, was also arrested in Pakistan and is being questioned, authorities said. [Link]

In the years since the September 11th attacks we just haven’t seen much of this: young men who are U.S. citizens volunteering to become terrorists for Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. We saw our first hints of such a breach in the Somali community of Minnesota:

US prosecutors have announced charges against eight people as part of an investigation into young men leaving the United States to fight in Somalia.

Those charged are accused of giving financial support to recruits, and of training and fighting with Somali Islamist militants.

Up to 20 people are thought to have left Minnesota to fight with Somali militants in the last two years. [Link]

Here is what I find most intriguing about most of these new cases. The U.S.’s first line of defense against these would-be terrorists hasn’t been the Intelligence Community. It hasn’t been vigilant neighbors or NSA’s Echelon either. It has been the men’s own parents. It makes sense really. My overly protective parents are pretty vigilant about my activities. Even at 33 I doubt I could sneak out of the country for more than two days before they started to get worried and called the police (imagining that I was face down in a ditch somewhere). I remember once, a few years ago, when they called the police after my brother was out of contact for less than a day. I am SURE my parents are not out of the ordinary in this regard.

It’s a dilemma no parent wants to face — fearing a son or daughter may be mixed up in terrorism, wondering whether to turn in a loved one.

It was Washington-area parents who helped authorities find the young American Muslims arrested in Pakistan this week and parents in Minnesota who contacted the FBI last year with fears that their sons had gone off to Somalia to fight. Parents increasingly are reaching out to authorities for help when they think their children may be involved in terrorism, said Charlie Allen, formerly the top intelligence official at the Homeland Security Department. [Link]

My point? Law enforcement in the U.S. should learn from this and “target” the parents in at-risk communities by reaching out to them positively and proactively. They should also provide parents telephone access to people who specialize in intervention counseling. The immigrant American parent who wants to see their child go down this path is exceedingly rare. The point would not simply be to inform on their children but to monitor and intervene before they even go down this road. It is the same way you would watch for signs of alcoholism or drug abuse. I like the thought of parents being the first responders in the war against “homegrown” terror.

66 thoughts on “Are vigilant parents the first line of defense?”

  1. Anon wrote:

    I don’t know why educated Indians living in 21st century LIBERAL WESTERN cities are still so backward in their thinking, even as far as calling themselves by their barbaric caste system such as Boston Brahmin.

    Anon, The phrase “Boston Brahmin” refers to American families in Massachusetts that are descended from the original English settlers. It has nothing to do with the Indian caste.

  3. Secondly, let’s examine some your points here: “Militant groups have become part of the fabric of society—Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba addresses large gatherings attended by government officials and gives press interviews. Newspapers are not free to criticize the army, but they are free to publish propaganda highlighting real and imaginary outrages in Kashmir as news. Extremist rhetoric is par for the course in the media and in drawing rooms.” You are a pot calling the kettle black.One does not need to look at liberal Hindutvas alone like Arun Shouries or Jaswant Singh

    “Hafeez Sayed = Arun Shourie”? Wow, who’s delusional now…

  4. Most indications are that the light-skin preference is a relatively recent thing dating to either the British Raj or the invasions of the Turkik/Afghan sultanates that preceded them. This is true. The gods and goddesses of hinduism, the heroes and heroines of the Puranas are overwhelmingly black/dark. The 1000 year slavery under muslim and european invaders has screwed up the desi mind big time.

    Muslims are indigenous to the subcontinent because only a small handful of foreign Muslims actually settled.

    The bulk of the Muslim community in India and elsewhere in South Asia are merely Hindu converts to Islam either because of coercion, choice, etc.

  5. Muslims are indigenous to the subcontinent because only a small handful of foreign Muslims actually settled. The bulk of the Muslim community in India and elsewhere in South Asia are merely Hindu converts to Islam either because of coercion, choice, etc.

    So, on that theory, communism is “indigenous” to the subcontinent? Do you even know what “indigenous” means??

  6. Gustavo wror,

    Please resolve your own ethnic issues before passing judgment on others’ ethnic issues!

  7. Islam’s contributions to Indian culture and civilization are immense.

    Islam was a hybrid civilization that amalgamated the cultures of the Hellenistic and Byzantine Near East, Iran, India, and other cultures.

    Most Muslims on the subcontinent are not descendants of Arab traders or Turkmen from Central Asia. The vast majority are merely descendants of former Hindus.

    The rise of Christianity in India among some communities of Indians is the same reason why Indians converted to Islam.

    Islam was during the medieval period at the apex of human civilization, Hinduism was recovering from the Jain-Buddhist religious revolution which questioned and challenged the Dharmic traditions.

    Now South Asians are converting to Christianity because Western civilization is now at the apex of human civilization. Even rising Asian economies like India owe their own achievements to Western civilization and accomplishments.

    @Armando,

    I’m Mexican and Afghan. I know what I am, I rejected Islamism and forms of Muslim chauvinism that see the West and India as threats to the Muslim “Ummah” (community of believers).

    Being a Muslim in America, many of the imams are Punjabi Pakistanis, with it comes their own cultural baggage.

    I have my own cultural baggage, I don’t deny my own biases.

    However, Pakistan and Afghanistan have an intimate but contentious relationship.

    Afghans basically reject Pakistan because a sizable portion of the country which is deemed “the ungovernable tribal region” is the “heart of Afghanistan.”

    We see ourselves as the “Palestinians of South Asia.” India also has issues with frontier tribal minority groups like the Naga, where Christian terrorism has been employed against New Delhi and they have used Bangladesh as a base to wage attacks against the Indian state.

    Communalism is the hallmark of South Asia, Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist majority country, doesn’t matter.

    Considering I have family in the “core South Asian” countries of Pakistan and India, when it comes to Muslim issues, considering my encounter with Islam is confined to mostly Desi encounters, I think I have say in the issue about young South Asian men in this country throwing away their education for the delusions of triumphal “jihad” against Amrika and Hindustan.

  8. Americans, pray that this is an aberration and not what we have been seeing in the UK for the last 8 years or so – systematic propagation of extremist ideology amongst young Muslim men and the practise of jihadism by young Muslim men. This has severely torn at the fabric of life and community relations in Britain. Don’t dismiss it as an impossibility (like some Americans did, comparing American Muslims to British Muslims “The London suicide bombers could never happen here”) — it can! Its a virus of hatred, a virus of hateful, murderous, supremacist ideology that will cause misery and damage to society — challenge the hateful atmospherics wherever you find it!

  9. One of the worst things that happened in the past was that whenever anybody tried to confront what was happening inside the Muslim community in Britain, they were slandered as being ‘Islamophobic’ and prejudiced……don’t allow that to happen. The consequences in not standing up to Islamism are disastrous, as a social practise and as an ideology.

    The other thing is, so often the response of those around the terrorists is one of surprise…..they can’t believe that they conspired to do this…..but it turns out that they didn’t see any signs because they themselves were in an atmospherics full of casual demonisation, hate mongering, and they grew with these as their legitimate parameters, so they didn’t see anything unusual in the attitudes of the men themselves.

    Muslims have to stand up and be counted. They have to call out the ideology of supremacism, separatism and hatred. And everyone else has to facilitate the ideological confronting of this dogma, and not allow it to be given a free pass in the name of cultural inhibition.

  11. No, I mean why are we profiling people like me, just because these guys are alleged to be bad?

    ‘Super Freakonomics’ has some interesting data on terrorists. According to the authors, in UK most of the arrested terrorist suspects had muslim names. A person with niether first nor last muslim name had 1 in 500,000 of being a suspect terrorist. The person with first or last muslim name had a chance of 1 in 30,000. The person with both first & last muslim name had a chnace of 1 in 2,000 of being a suspect terrorist. They were predominantly men, commonly between the age group of 26 to 35. Who did own a mobile phone, is a student & lived in a rented place. They would be unlikely to have an savings account or withdraw money from an ATM during Friday afternoon & never had a life insurance (since life insurance does not pay if the person commits suicide) Using all these variables UK(The actual name of the person who came up with this is not specified for security reasons) has apparently came up with an algorithm to identify the terrorists based on the banking activities done by them. Out of the millions of bank customers it narrowed the search to 30 persons out of which at least 5 were involved in terrorist activities. Yes, it is profiling but when the data supports it what can you do? (Interested readers may find more info in the book Super Freakonomics – cahpter 2)

    Also they point out that the analysis of Lebanese and Palestine suicide bombers show that they are less likely to come from poor families & have at least high school education. Terrorists are more likely to come from well-educated, middle-class or high income families.

    They don’t have any analysis of the parents of terrorists though.

  12. Wow UK’s strategy to narrow down terrorists is known to everyone now. Thanks Akash. How did you find it out?

  13. One of the worst things that happened in the past was that whenever anybody tried to confront what was happening inside the Muslim community in Britain, they were slandered as being ‘Islamophobic’ and prejudiced……don’t allow that to happen. The consequences in not standing up to Islamism are disastrous, as a social practise and as an ideology.

    The good news is that most of the other countries in Europe and are not weak like England when it comes to this problem. England on the other hand is gonna have major racial issues in the next few decades due this problem. And sadly other desi”s are gonna be stuck in the middle.

    This also is one of the reason the BNP is getting more popular in England.

  14. This also is one of the reason the BNP is getting more popular in England.

    I think British liberals are mortified of anything resembling Tatcherism, but by consigning the Tories to the wilderness they only ended up empowering the fringes.

  15. Regular old UK courts are now allowing non-muslim British citizens to cite Shariah law in their defence during DIVORCE proceedings.

    There are some men in America connected with MRA (Men’s Rights Activism) who hope to introduce the same here so that they won’t have to pay alimony and so they will get automatic custody of their kids.

    Google it.

    I’m all linked out.

  16. Asking parents to be vigilant worked in this case, but it’s not the only answer. Consider the case of Md. Mansoor Peerbhoy who was a regular guy last I saw him. Apparently, Arabic lessons were an important component of turning him to the dark side – and he travelled to the USA to learn Arabic. Seems it would help to look into the Arabic tutors for anyone found working for the bad guys.