May 4, 2015: In February a Somali man, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, was arrested in the United States and charged with travelling to Syria for training from ISIL. Then he was ordered to return to the United States and organize terror attacks. Apparently this is not the first time this has happened to a Moslem citizen of a Western country.

Mohamud had become an American citizen a year earlier and soon after that he travelled to Syria. His arrest marks the fifth Islamic terrorist attack disrupted in the United States so far in 2015 and the 67th since September 11, 2001. Several of the recent terror attacks, like the 2013 bombing in Boston, were carried out by Moslem immigrants who had become U.S. citizens. In most cases communications monitoring or information from foreign nations provides an alert of Moslem immigrants, citizens or not, who have become radicalized. But in the case of the two Boston bombers (from Chechnya) a warning from Russian intel about one of the two brothers was not followed up effectively. The same thing happened with the plotters of the September 11, 2001 attacks, when it was later found that there were warning about foreign Moslems taking flying lessons but ignoring instruction on how to take off or land. Information is not much good if it is not used. That said, there is often too many leads to act on in a timely manner.

As all counter-terror agencies have discovered all it takes is one lead not examined to make a preventable terror attack possible. In Europe the large number of leads has forced investigators to take chances and risk letting a potentially important lead go uninvestigated because it did not seem important enough only to later find out it was, and an attack takes place because of it. That sort of thing is quite common.

While most Islamic terrorist activity is carried out against government in Moslem majority countries, leaders of Islamic terror groups have, since the 1990s, come to believe that attacks in the West bring more international publicity, encourage more young Moslems to defend Islam (from Western retribution which is, of course, really an attack on Islam) and join the effort to turn all Moslem countries into religious dictatorships and eventually conquer the world in the name of Islam and social justice (according to Islamic law as interpreted by Moslem clerics). It doesn’t make any difference that this has been tried before and has never worked. In over a thousand years of trying no one has come even close to achieving these goals. But the idea of global (or even local) Islamic rule still attracts thousands of fanatic new adherents each year.

Moslems everywhere have become less tolerant of these homicidal Islamic fantasies and the Islamic conservatives who spread them around. In the past these violent proposals were tolerated because they do appear in Islamic scripture and Islam was founded via such large scale violence. But more Moslems are openly questioning these ideas as applied to the current world. Such criticism was unheard of in the past as such talk was considered blasphemy. That’s a welcome change but action is needed to stop the violence which, despite well publicized attacks in the West, mostly occurs in Moslem countries and over 97 percent of the victims are Moslems. Despite some Moslems seeing through the fantasies that justify Islamic terrorism many Moslems still believe that Islamic terrorism is a Western invention (like AIDS, poverty in Moslem countries and anything else you need a scapegoat for.)