Amnesty International Presents ... Homegrown Terrorism: Is There an Islamic Wave?(Spotlight‪)‬

US Representative Peter King's congressional hearings--on Muslim radicalization, the war on terror, and the role of America's Muslims--proceed, provide an opportune time to take stock of a homegrown terrorist phenomenon that has gripped headlines across the country particularly since Christmas Day 2009. Even a cursory look at the past 18 months gives rise to a number of incidents that seem to reflect a view of the United States increasingly under attack, whether it be the Fort Hood shootings, the Christmas Day bomber Abdul Muttalab, or the attempted Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad. The most alarming things about these attempted attacks have been both the apparent ineffectiveness of the Homeland Security apparatus put in place post-9/11 and the rise in what is commonly termed homegrown terrorism: attacks conceived and launched by US citizens on US citizens. The link between some of these attacks and Anwar ai-Awlaki--an American imam living in Yemen--highlights the new threat from the United States' own. Even Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, recently described af-Awlaki as the greatest threat to the United States. These attacks, albeit unsuccessful, have punctured a false sense of security that has developed post-9/11, and contested the commonly held narrative that the United States was free from attack for seven years.