MEQ: Can you estimate the number of fundamentalists in the United States?
Emerson: No one really knows but one can extrapolate some numbers. I have attended conferences in Detroit, Oklahoma City, and Chicago that were attended by thousands of people yelling "Allahu Akbar" on hearing the announcement of a suicide operation against Israel. Based on the number of participants at radical Islamic conferences, the estimated membership rolls of a dozen other radical Islam groups, plus the number of subscribers to Az-Zaytuna, the Hamas publication, I assume there are at least one hundred thousand hard-core believers in militant Islamic fundamentalism. The number may actually be significantly higher.