In response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the world trade center and the pentagon, the then president, George W Bush, developed a new organizational structure to ensure that the security of the American homeland was beefed up, he intended to achieve this by creating the office of the Homeland Security. In order for the Department of homeland security be able to provide for safe and secure environments, extensive researches are regularly done so to improve on our homeland security. In this paper, I will critically analysis and compare two reports that have been designed to improve on our homeland security. The New York police department (NYPD) report; Radicalization of the west and the Department of Homegrown Security; Right –wing Extremism report that was released on April 7, 2009 and touches on the current economic and political temperatures that fuel resurgence of right wing extremists within the American boundaries.
NYPD Radicalization Report
Despite the numerous criticism this report on radicalization of the west has faced , the NYPD arguably provided the best analysis of our security concerns. This report focused on the Islamist –based terrorism and was dubbed the Radicalization in the West: The homegrown Threat. This report was co-authored by Senior Intelligence Analysts Mitchell D Sibler and Arcin Bhatt from the NYPD . The report was drawn from various case study's analyses from abroad as well as from the US and uses them to critically explain radicalization. It explains that there have been an increase in sympathizers of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda amongst our local citizens who are then used to attack their own countries while utilizing al-Qaeda as their source of inspiration.
The NYPD report used the terrorism cases from the Madrid’s 2004 attack, Amsterdam’s Hofstad group, the attack on London in July 2005, the Toronto 18 case and the Australia’s operation Pendis which thwarted an attack in November 2005 (White,2012, p224). The Radicalization process has been explained to have resulted as a result of young men and women who have been born or are living in America accepting the Jihadist ideology which motivates them to commit acts of terrorism to their host countries. The report mostly focused on both qualitative and qualitative data to come up with their findings. It explained radicalization in four distinct steps: Pre-radicalization, Self-identification, Indoctrination and Jihadization.
Pre-radicalization was used in the research to show an individual’s way of life before radicalization.
The study showed that most of the recent converts were 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants and were all having a college or degree qualifications. In self –identification, the individual identifies themselves with the radical movements. For instance, an event occurs that progress an individual to Salafi Islam or change in personal behavior and getting involved in social activism. Indoctrination was explained as to whereby a given individual starts to focus more on their personal belief. And lastly, the NYPD explained the last step as Jihadization n whereby an individual takes an action based on their personal beliefs, this usually happens when individuals becomes very interested in travelling to countries involved in conflicts for training. They may also be visiting jihad websites especially for words of encouragement before launching an attack.
DHS Right-wing Extremism report
On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security released a report, which warns that some right wing extremist would use the poor performance of the US economy and the election of the America’s first black president to recruit new members into terrorism. The report highly warns that the extended downfall of the economy performance, high rate of unemployment, real estate foreclosures and the inability to access credit effectively would cause some of its citizens who have been supportive of this cause get recruited into being extremist. The author of this report, Daryl Johnson, argued that the bad economy that was caused by the 2008 financial crisis, the election of a black president, increased debates over immigration, abortion and gun control all create a suitable stage for the increased rise of right –wing extremists.
The DHS extremist resurgence report is purely a qualitative research, it is more of an opinion than a concrete research made. In fact, at many times it has been rubbed off as just another politically motivated report. He claimed that in the past four years there have been a rapid increase in the number of radical right-wing groupings which hold anti-government ideologies from 150 groups to approximately 1300 groups recently(Johnson, 2012, p97).
When comparing the two reports, one can comfortably conclude that the NYPD report on the radicalization was done better and had more substantive evidence that the latter.
The house of minority leader J. Boehner was infuriated by the DHS report terming it as ‘Offensive and unacceptable’(Johnson, 2012, p98) he even demanded for an explanation on why the reports use the term ‘terrorist’ to refer to American citizens who seems to disagree with the direction that Washington Democrats was taking instead of referring to groups such as al Qaeda. However, both the reports have proven that there has been an increase in the number of local citizens being recruited into terrorism activities. Therefore, as much as the law enforcers concentrate their focus on curbing the Islamic related types of terrorism they should not forget that there may also be existing domestic right-wing extremists.
References
Johnson, D. (2012). Right wing resurgence: How a domestic terrorist threat is being ignored.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Scribd, NYPD, Report On Radicalization In The West
http://www.scribd.com/doc/129055651/NYPD-Report-Radicalization-in-the-West Retrieved March 30, 2013
White, J. R. (2012). Terrorism and homeland security. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage
Learning.
Issues in terrorism and homeland security: Selections from CQ researcher. (2011). Thousand
Oaks, Calif: SAGE.
