Yet Emerson has continued to keep tabs on militants who support or promote the concept of “jihad” -- in this case fundamentalist Islam’s virulent hostility toward Western nations, particularly the United States and Israel.
His book is primarily a straightforward history of nine “terrorist support networks” based in America: Muslim Arab Youth Association, the American Islamic Group, Islamic Cultural Workshop, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council, Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Alliance and the Islamic Society of North America.
Emerson boils the story behind these groups down to this “simple formula”: They use “the laws, freedoms and loopholes of the most liberal nation on earth to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world.”
His conclusion comes in only general terms: “Operating in the freewheeling and tolerant environment of the United States, bin Laden was able to set up a whole array of ‘cells’ in a loosely organized network that included Tucson, Arizona; Brooklyn, New York; Orlando, Florida, Dallas, Texas; Santa Clara, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Herndon, Virginia.”
There are several eye-openers, though, particularly the support of the University of Southern Florida for a quartet of Islamic Jihad members; open recruiting of bin Laden supporters; and the long-running recruitment and fund-raising efforts of the anti-Israel terrorist group Hamas from its American base.
You can find the article here:
http://www.post-gazette.com/books/reviews/20020303review943.asp