Foreign ideologies

Michael Ledeen writes about

Foreign ideologies. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist, Nidal Hasan was a radical Muslim. Both killed Americans in America, after coming to identify with doctrines that were anything but homegrown. Moreover, in recent years, establishing contact with foreign forces has become a piece of cake. We do it online, we don’t have to travel overseas to get our indoctrination (although, as if to prove the point, a considerable number of them do). Even when it “happens here,” the indoctrination more often than not takes place at the feet of foreign teachers and trainers. Take the radical mosques, for example. Most of them are funded with Saudi money, their texts come from the Saudi Kingdom, and their imams are trained by radical Saudi Wahhabis.

It does violence to the English language to call such avid followers of foreign leaders and foreign doctrines “homegrown terrorists.” They may have lived here, they may even have been born here, but at a certain point they became alienated and turned to non-American visions and visionaries.