New York-area bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami’s father “told [New Jersey] police that [his] son was a terrorist” two years ago, the New York Times reports. Mohammad Rahami apparently made the accusation after Ahmad Rahami was arrested for allegedly stabbing his brother but “recanted” his report after police passed the information on to the FBI, the Times writes. (Charges in the stabbing case were later dropped.) The younger Rahami, who arrived in the United States in 1995, does not appear to have been under investigation or on any sort of terror watch list at the time of the weekend’s attacks.
Ahmad Khan Rahami was arrested yesterday in Linden, New Jersey and is accused of planting homemade explosive devices in several locations in New York and New Jersey over the weekend. Twenty-nine people were injured when one of the bombs exploded in Manhattan.
Of some note here: One of our two major party presidential candidates believes we should …
- Stop admitting immigrants from countries “compromised by terrorism”
- Apply ideological extremism tests to immigrants
- Publicly shame Muslim Americans for their alleged failure to turn over the terrorist plotters in their midst.
Here, however, we have an example of a terror plot conceived by someone who …
- Immigrated from Afghanistan before the Taliban took power and before the group was widely recognized as a threat to U.S. interests
- Wouldn’t have had connections to extremism at that point because he was a child
- Was identified to authorities as a potential threat by his own family.
It seems that perhaps traditional law enforcement vigilance and competence should be a higher priority in counterterrorism policy than grandiose symbolic gestures which target the world’s entire population of Muslims.
