Ordinary People: Jihadis In Sheep's Clothes

They were just ordinary people is the refrain being repeated by people who knew or had contact with the six men accused of plotting terrorist attacks against Fort Dix and/or other military installations along the East Coast.

What exactly did you expect? No one really noticed the 9/11 hijackers either. People who have entered this country or those who have decided to engage in jihad on their own are not going to want to bring attention to themselves by broadcasting that they're jihadis.

They are going to want to fit in. They're going to be middle class folks. And yet there were unsettling events surrounding one of the men arrested:

Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, an FBI agent showed up on Brookmead Drive, in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, with a photo of a man named Shnewer and some questions for his neighbors.

Was the man's cab company legitimate? the agent wanted to know, according to a neighbor who was questioned but asked not to be identified. Did he ever speak at length about his work? Did he ever mention terrorism?

This week, the man's son, 22-year-old Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, was one of six men arrested on charges stemming from an alleged plot to kill a large number of soldiers at the Fort Dix Army post in southern New Jersey.

The visit from the FBI was just one of many signs that unsettled neighbors of Shnewer, a Jordanian-born U.S. citizen. His fellow residents in two Cherry Hill neighborhoods described the family as unusually noisy, nocturnal, messy and unpleasant.

The children called people names and were suspected of stealing bikes. Doors slammed and cars arrived and left in the middle of the night. The lawn was so overgrown that neighbors took turns mowing it.

"So many people coming and going," said Steve Bender, a neighbor at Shnewer's current address on leafy East Tampa Avenue. "Very nasty and rude."

Yet, the six were done in because someone was smart enough to realize that something wasn't quite right with a video that the six wanted to make copies of. He saw something - and said something to the right authorities who launched an intensive investigation that resulted in the arrests. As the Star Ledger reports:

The Duka brothers -- Dritan, 28, Shain, 26, and Eljvir, known to many as Elvis, 23 -- live together in the Mimosa Drive house. They are ethnic Albanians who were born in the former Yugoslavia and reportedly are in the United States illegally.

Also charged was Shnewer, 22, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Jordan who was the Dukas' brother-in-law, authorities said, and working as a taxi driver in Philadelphia.

The other suspects included Agron Abdullahu, 24, of Buena Vista Township, another ethnic Albanian from Yugoslavia. Abdullahu, identified in the complaint as a one-time sniper in war-torn Kosovo, stands accused of aiding and abetting the others. A legal resident of the United States, he was employed at a ShopRite supermarket.

The sixth man, Serdar Tatar, 23, of Philadelphia, was born in Turkey and was also a legal resident of the United States.

None of the men was on anyone's radar screen, prosecutors say, until federal agents were tipped off by a clerk at a store where the men had dropped off a videotape to be copied. The tape, prosecutors say, showed men firing assault weapons and calling in Arabic for holy war.

The six men practiced at a firing range in the Poconos.

They seemed to be prepared: with terror training tapes, with computerized ballistic simulations, even with what appeared to be a template of the last will and testament drawn up by two of the hijackers from Sept. 11. At the same time, one of the men worried aloud to a government informer: “I just want to be safe, brother. I got five kids, so I don’t want to go down.”

The narrative of a foiled terror plot spelled out in the federal complaint issued yesterday by officials in New Jersey is full of tiny moments that are clearly chilling yet undeniably strange. Certainly, the 27-page document describing a plot to kill soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey stands out as one of the more detailed descriptions to emerge so early in a terrorism case during the last few years.

While the document paints a picture of a bloody-minded, though occasionally unsophisticated, plot, it is worth recalling that acts of terror — even deadly ones — have often included glaring strategic flaws in the past. One of the terrorists in the 1993 scheme to destroy the World Trade Center, in fact, returned to a rental office to claim his deposit for the truck that carried explosives into the complex’s garage.

The fact is that you don't have to be particuarly sophisticated to kill people. You just have to be extremely determined. The WTC bombers succeeded in killing six and wounded more than 1,000 people and came quite close to taking the towers down on that day in 1993, and they might have succeeded in getting away with the attacks to terrorize again had they not sought to claim the deposit on the rental truck.

Those who downplay this terror bust ought to keep in mind that it is far better to thwart these plots before they come to fruition than to deal with the repercussions of an actual attack. Even if this attack went off and didn't manage to kill anyone at Fort Dix, the fact that terrorists even considered attacking a US military installation inside the US would have been a propaganda coup of epic proportions for the jihadis around the world. Al Qaeda would likely try to take credit for the attacks, knowing that the media would play up that angle and show that the global war on terror was a failure because we couldn't even prevent a terrorist attack inside the US against a military installation.

Such an attack would have been likened to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces managed to attack the US embassy in Saigon and were eventually repulsed fully - with massive losses to the Viet Cong where they were no longer a viable force thereafter. However, the sight of the embassy under seige and the Tet campaign led the public to believe that the war was lost.

Meanwhile, Muslim groups are complaining once again that the focus of the investigation and media coverage is on the religious background of the six. Sorry guys, but when the six made a point to say that they were going to commit acts of terrorism in the name of Allah, you lose the right to complain. These six wanted to commit jihad - to kill in the name of Allah. They were going to seek a fatwa, a religious edict, justifying their terrorist plans. Those are all parts of the complaint and evidence gathered against the six.

If these groups really want to change the image of Muslims around the world, they better start by doing a far better job of outing those extremists within their community that indoctrinate a new generation to the idea of jihad, terrorism, and violence to be done in Allah's name. One Muslim leader quipped:

"When that student in Virginia killed all those people, nobody made a big deal of his religion," said Mustafa. "And when there have been shootings in malls and offices, we don't immediately get told what the religion is. These are six crazy people, that's all they are."

The reason that Cho's religious views weren't made an issue was that Cho himself didn't make his religious views an issue. Here, the six explicitly made their religion a central issue in deciding to commit terrorism.

It's also curious that he mentioned mall shootings - as one of the recent mall shootings involved another Muslim immigrant in Utah, though his motive is unclear. The media repeatedly downplays the religious aspects of various shootings and incidents around the world, and instead of pointing out that the vast majority of terrorist attacks committed around the world are done by Islamic terrorists or that the overwhelming majority of suicide bombings are done by Islamic terrorists, we get comments about how these were just six crazy people. Yes - they may well be crazy, but they were doing so because they believed it was their Muslim religious obligation to do so.

UPDATE:
The New York Post makes an interesting comment:

No doubt lawyers for the Fort Dix Six soon will be claiming that their clients weren't engaged in a "real" plot - indeed, that they are victims of government-inspired "entrapment."

So, here's a question.

Why is it that so many of these individuals, whether in Buffalo, Albany, Fort Dix - or Dearborn, Mich., or the Pacific northwest - are so eager to be "entrapped" into plotting to harm Americans and/or U.S. institutions?

It's about the jihad. Each of the plotters believed that it was their religious obligation to attack the US in one form or another.

UPDATE:
Hot Air has more updates, though many of the initial questions remain - what about the video that shows 10 people and yet only six were arrested. Where are the other four? Is it possible that two of the four were informants for the government once they had been tipped off? No one in the media seems to be pressing that angle to find out what about those other individuals.

UPDATE:
The person who tipped off the authorities to the six works for Circuit City:

A spokeswoman for Circuit City on Wednesday said it was an employee from their Mount Laurel store who alerted authorities to the alleged terrorist plot.

"We can confirm that the tip to authorities about the alleged terrorist plot originated form our store in Mount Laurel, New Jersey," said Jackie Foreman, speaking by telephone from the company's headquarters in Richmond, Va.

Foreman said the store is not releasing the employee's name out of respect for the employee's privacy and since the investigation is ongoing. Foreman confirmed that the employee still works for the company but would not say at which location.

UPDATE:
There are still issues with security at Fort Dix, as the Star Ledger reports:

On Tuesday, hours after word of the arrest of six Yugoslav and Middle Eastern suspects was announced, at least two of the areas directly off the road were populated by dozens of soldiers conducting training exercises not more than 50 yards off the main road.

There were no fences, barriers or visible security patrols to deter an intruder or attacker.

Wednesday morning, the situation was the same. At one of the areas, which a sign identified as the Bastogne Range, a dozen soldiers ate breakfast under a wooden canopy about 30 yards from the road.

About a dozen similar unfenced spots called bivouac areas, where training maneuvers are done, are similarly accessible to the public from main roads cutting through portions of the fort property.

The seemingly open access to some parts of the fort could have proved enticing to the six young men, who federal authorities have accused of plotting a mass killing.

Some of the security issues can be resolved quickly. Fencing off wide areas of the base may take time, which means that the facility is still at risk, as are other military installations around the country that have similar security issues.

UPDATE:
Speaking of security, how exactly did the Duka brothers manage to get into the US illegally and weren't picked up sooner? Malkin has the details, but the gist is that they entered illegally from Mexico, and because they lived in cities whose municipal governments have chose to ignore federal law relating to immigration, they did not get picked up even though they accumulated 19 traffic citations:

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan "Anthony" or "Tony" Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir "Elvis" Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in "sanctuary cites," where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

One has to wonder who got the three across the border illegally, and the parents come to mind. Curiouser and curiouser.

UPDATE:
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, Stuck On Stupid, Cao's Blog, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, The Magical Rose Garden, third world county, stikNstein... has no mercy, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Planck's Constant, Wake Up America, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

UPDATE:
Don Surber thinks that college campuses may be safer than military installations for the simple reason that other than the MPs, the soldiers must have their weapons secured. He thinks the damage done by the six on the grounds of Fort Dix could have been severe. I continue to believe that regardless of how much carnage the six were able to accomplish, the real damage would have been as a propaganda victory for the Islamists.