MEANWHILE, IN DETROIT - AT 11:27 A.M. ET:  Did anyone notice that there was a major anti-terror raid in Detroit this week, in which a radical Islamic leader was killed?  Okay, so it's not American Idol, but it's something.

Reader Alan Bell has been keeping us up to date on the terror beat, and alerts us to this, from National Review Online, which points out that, while the group involved had not yet committed a terrorist act, the clock was ticking:

None of these people had committed a terrorist act yet, at least to our current knowledge, but people who believe in violent jihad against their fellow citizens and train in the use of firearms are just a small step from becoming terrorists. After all, the shariah law that they dreamed of imposing on the ummah that they fancied gives only three options to infidels: Convert to Islam, submit to Muslim rule and discrimination, or be killed.

And...

...the slain leader of this group, Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was a high official of the top national organization of African-American Muslims, the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA), a group founded and led by radical Islamists such as the notorious Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj.

The larger group to which Abdullah and his cohorts belonged and pledged allegiance, the “national community” of Imam Jamil al-Amin, a.k.a. H. Rap Brown, also enjoys an excellent standing in the American Muslim establishment, despite the inconvenient fact that the good imam is a convicted cop-killer serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.

Yes, we remember H. Rap Brown from his Black Panther days.

It is this disturbing reality of an American Muslim establishment in charge of countless mosques, Islamic cultural centers, madrassas, and charity organizations dominated by radical Islamist ideology and funded by Saudi money that Washington — under both Bush and now Obama — has long refused to acknowledge or do anything about in a systematic way. Until that happens, homegrown terrorism is not a matter of if but of when.

COMMENT:  Correct.  But only when "when" occurs will the press start paying major attention.  And even then, a good chunk of journalists will use the event to explain the "root causes," right out of the sixties handbook.

October 31, 2009