California Shooting Shows Jihad Risk from Muslim Migrants’ U.S.-Born Children

The San Bernardino shooter who killed 14 Americans is yet another name on the growing list of U.S.-born children of Muslim migrants who grew up to embrace violent jihad.

Before Syed Rizwan Farook, the most notorious example was Anwar al Awlaki, born in New Mexico in 1971 to accomplished, professional-class Yemeni parents. He subsequently embraced the violent commandments of Islam, complete with its many calls for attacks on kaffirs, or non-Muslims. His career as a jihadi advisor, recruiter and cheerleader ended when he was killed by a U.S. missile in Yemen in September 2011.

Another example is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Virginia-born son of Arab migrants, who murdered 13 Americans in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. That attack was downplayed by federal officials as “workplace violence,” even though Hasan had described himself as a “Soldier of Allah” on his U.S. Army business cards.

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In August 2015, the FBI arrested the U.S.-born son of a supposedly moderate Imam as he began his journey to join ISIS in Syria. Mohammad Oda Dakhlalla was accompanied by his young, university-educated American wife, who was a convert to Islam. {snip}

In October 2014, two U.S.-born teenage girls were nabbed by the FBI as they began their journey to Syria.

The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center lists at least five additional U.S.-born jihadis, or would-be jihadis, at its site, including James Elshafay who tried to detonate a bomb in 2004, Ehsanul Sadequee, Tarek Mehanna, Walli Mujahidh [his family name comes from the Arab term for ‘Holy Warrior’], and Naser Jason Abdo, who planned to attack Fort Hood in 2011.

The problem of migrants’ jihadi children is not confined to the U.S.

Three of the four Muslims who murdered 52 of their British countrymen in 2005 were born in the increasingly diverse United Kingdom. The fourth migrated in from Jamaica at age five. More than 700 British jihadis, including many born in the UK, have joined, or tried to join, jihadis groups, according to the BBC.

At least two of the seven or nine Muslims who murdered 130 people in France this November were born in France to Muslim immigrant parents. Another French-born jihadi murdered five people in a prior wave of jihad attacks in January, 2015.

Also, young migrant children of migrants sometimes turn jihadi once they immerse themselves in the Koran when attending American mosques.

The most obvious example is Boston-bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was eight when he arrived in the United States in 2002. Eleven years later, amid much financial, emotional and social support from Americans, he and his brother used home-made bombs to kill three people in central Boston, and then murdered a cop while he trying to escape after the police posted his picture. His older brother was 18 when he was welcomed into the United States, nine years before he launched the bomb plot.

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