Free Jihad Joe by J. M. Berger Page B

anyone characterized as a jihadist will fit into one of the following categories:
    â€¢ Someone who travels abroad to fight in a foreign conflict specifically in the name of Islam.
    â€¢ Someone who takes part in terrorist activities that are explicitly defined by the participants as a form of military jihad or that are explicitly motivated by jihadist ideology.
    â€¢ Someone who actively finances, supports, advocates, or provides religious justification for explicit military jihad as described previously.
    Not all jihadists are terrorists or even criminals. Not everyone profiled in this book is a terrorist or a criminal, although many are. The sample of people discussed in these pages is skewed toward terrorists because those cases are better documented and because, in the post–September 11 environment, many American Muslims who took part in jihad but not in terrorism are understandably reluctant to draw attention to themselves. I can sympathize with their reasons, but I wishI could have found more people who would step forward for this discussion in order to present a more balanced point of view. Anyone with this kind of history should feel free to contact me—there will be other opportunities to tell those stories, and I think it’s important.
    A few other useful terms to consider:
    Radicals
: For purposes of this book, radicals are people or institutions that advocate an ideology with clear connections to nonstate violence, whether by justifying it or by providing rationalizations that are clear precursors to action.
    Conservative and/or fundamentalist
: Wherever possible, I prefer the former term to the latter. In discussing Muslim terrorism, the discussion of religious views and social mores is unavoidable. Muslims or people who adhere to forms of Islam described herein as conservative tend to be communities that strictly enforce such Islamic or Arab cultural practices as covering women’s faces, banning music, or criminalizing homosexuality.
    Jihadist incitement
: When people in this book are called jihadists even though they have not committed violence, this refers to those who make explicit and unqualified calls to take part in violent acts specifically described as jihad.
WHAT WENT INTO THIS BOOK
    I documented more than 240 American citizen jihadists while researching this book. About half of them were born in the United States. I also examined 41 legal long-term residents of the United States. For every case we know about, there are a certain number of cases that have never become public, particularly those concerning Americans who fought overseas in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Based on an extensive review of court records, interviews, and witness accounts, as well as informal conversations with intelligence and law enforcement officials and private experts working in the field of counterterrorism, my best guess is that at least 1,400 Americans have taken part in some form of military jihad over the last 30 years. However this number should be treated with extreme caution. We simply don’t know for certain.
    I performed about one hundred interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement, military, and diplomatic officials; Muslim radicals and counterradicals (including former jihadists and al Qaeda members); the familiesand the associates of former jihadists; and academics who study Islam and Islamic radicalism as well as some third-party accounts.
    I mined tens of thousands of pages of court records and drew on dozens of intelligence and diplomatic documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as well as material generously shared by sources and colleagues. Included in the data set are more than one thousand pages of FBI records pertaining specifically to September 11, which I obtained through the FOIA and which can be viewed on my website, Intelwire.com.
    I also reviewed scores of hours and thousands of pages of jihadist and Salafist propaganda, as well