The New York City Police Department has a first-rate intelligence team that produced an important and timely report on the recruitment and indoctrination of Islamist terrorists in the West. My colleagues in the intelligence community say that the report is as good if not better than most of the analysis being produced in Washington.
"Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" is a guide to help police identify extremists-in-the-making, well before they have committed a crime. Using real-world instances, the report draws patterns to enable law enforcement to recognize locales where individuals become radicalized and indoctrinated for terrorist purposes.
And unlike a lot of the unclassified work done on the federal level, the NYPD report doesn't seem shy about calling things as it sees them, explaining matter-of-factly why mosques are legitimate surveillance targets because of the terrorist planning activity that some clerics permit within the sanctuary.
The NYPD report was released just before German authorities arrested German converts to Islam in connection with an alleged spectacular terrorist campaign. Germans are expressing alarm that some of their own countrymen are becoming Muslim extremists and terrorists. Says a senior official in Bavaria, "Germans converting to Islam should be watched because they tend to show particular fanaticism in order to prove worthy of their new religion."
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