Homegrown terrorists

Saturday, March 7, 2009 | 2:07 a.m.

The FBI says a Somali-American man who took part in a suicide bombing last year in Somalia was recruited and indoctrinated in America.

The man, Shirwa Ahmed, came to America in the mid-1990s with his family but returned to Somalia after being recruited by a terrorist group, FBI Director Robert Mueller said last week in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. “It appears this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.”

Ahmed was one of several young men who joined a Somali militant group near Minneapolis, the FBI says. The men then left the United States, and FBI officials say they do not know where they are now.

The Islamic community in Minnesota is concerned that Mueller’s comments will be taken to portray American Muslims as promoting terrorism, but his comments shouldn’t be construed that way. There are, as Mueller noted, “homegrown terrorists” in America, but to pigeonhole them is wrong. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, an Army veteran and one-time Roman Catholic.

Disgruntled with the federal government’s handling of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, McVeigh in 1995 set off a truck bomb in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Mueller’s point is valid — homegrown terrorism is a real threat in America. To combat that, the FBI has gone beyond just investigating cases to build bridges to immigrant groups and others who might be recruited into the radicalism that breeds terrorism. Such an effort is vitally important.

Americans should realize that the war on terrorism is really a battle of ideas. Our hope is that in the future the radical ideas that gripped Ahmed and McVeigh will find no place to take root in America, not because of force, but because the freedom America provides trumps any philosophy of terrorism.