Editor’s Note: The opinion column below originally appeared in the highly-respected daily financial newspaper Investor’s Business Daily on January 11, 2012. We reprint it by permission (via our Lexis-Nexis subscription news feed) for your consideration. While you read this, consider how your department can increase interactions with local leaders in your area Mosques in an effort to interdict possible plans for wrongdoing among individual members of those institutions.
Investor’s Business Daily
The FBI has arrested yet another American Muslim for plotting to kill fellow citizens in the name of Islam. Why is the U.S. Muslim community so uniquely susceptible to violence?
According to a federal affidavit, Sami Osmakac, a 25-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, planned to use car bombs to blow up Tampa nightclubs, bridges and even a police station. He was arrested over the weekend.
Osmakac said he wanted to instill “more terror” in the hearts of “kaffirs,” or infidels, as “payback” for wrongs done to Muslims. His chilling plan, the FBI says, was to detonate a bomb at a popular Irish pub “where it gets real crowded,” and then hit another target several hours later.
He tried to obtain from an undercover FBI agent a 100-pound explosive that he thought was big enough to “take down buildings” and “kill people inside.” He ordered it packed with marbles, BBs and other projectiles to “rip flesh.”
Osmakac figured such horrific retail terrorism would also blow a huge new hole in the federal budget as Homeland Security shifted assets to protecting and hardening commercial targets.
“After all this money they’re spending for homeland security, this is gonna be crushing them,” he was recorded as saying.
Osmakac also planned to use automatic weapons to take hostages and use them to pressure the release of al-Qaida prisoners. He tried to obtain a suicide belt, which he planned to detonate as police closed in on him.
“They can take me in 5 million pieces,” he allegedly said. “We all have to die, so why not die the Islamic way?”
The FBI seized a martyrdom video he made, in which he explained why he planned to kill so many innocent fellow Americans. He claimed Muslim “blood” was more valuable than that of non-Muslims.
He also had discussed with several Muslim companions attacking the local sheriff’s office, military bases and Tampa Bay bridges, stating “this will crush the whole economy.”
Osmakac and his pals were regulars at an area mosque, the Islamic Society of Pinellas County. Mosque leaders reportedly asked Osmakac to leave. But they never informed the FBI of his violent views.
This is disturbing, especially considering investigators don’t think he was radicalized in jihadi chat rooms since he didn’t trust using the Internet.
Why didn’t anyone blow the whistle on him sooner? According to the Miami Herald, Osmakac had publicly been harassing Christians since 2010. He once ranted in front of a Tampa church about the evils of Christianity, and shouted “Submit to the rule of Allah!” And last April, Osmakac head-butted a Christian demonstrator on a Tampa street corner -- all caught on video.
It was only because of great undercover work by the FBI that this creep was taken off the street and a massacre was averted. Yet the Muslim civil-rights group CAIR is squawking about FBI “entrapment.”
CAIR should care more about why so many Americans -- more than 50 homegrown terrorists arrested over just the past three years -- are being radicalized in the Muslim community, and why so many Muslim leaders stay mum.
Copyright 2012 Investor’s Business Daily, Inc.