Budding Silicon Valley Terrorist Thwarted

Since President Obama announced his commitment to resettling an additional 10,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees this fiscal year, the White House has assured and reassured Americans nervous about terrorism attacks that they have no need to worry. The refugees will be thoroughly vetted, according to the White House, and placed seamlessly in American communities.

FBI foils domestic terrorism threat, but can agency succeed every time?

Even though there’s ample reason to be skeptical of Obama’s refugee resettlement vision, for the sake of this post, let’s accept his version of things. But there’s an alarming new report from refugee-overwhelmed Denmark which suggests that the real refugee threat may come from the second generation, a theory that the slaughter in Paris and Brussels would seem to confirm. According to data assembled by the former chief of Statistics Denmark, criminal tendencies, including jihad, are 218 percent more probable among the first refugee waves’ children.

More evidence recently surfaced in Silicon Valley that the same trend of budding second-generation terrorists within the U.S. might be accelerating. Sal Shafi, president and chief executive officer of Santa Clara-based Esg Consulting Inc., suspected that his son Adam was following extremist imams online, and that the 22-year-old was becoming radicalized.

As it turned out, Adam, who went missing from home while his parents vacationed, had traveled to Turkey where he might have been poised to join Syrian rebels. Shafi advised authorities of his concerns about his son’s activities. When Adam returned home, the FBI arrested him. The FBI had cause for concern. The agency had been tapping Adam’s phone, and conversations revealed Adam’s ISIS sympathies, and his musings about killing American soldiers. In December, young Shafi was indicted on charges of providing material support to an al-Qaeda terrorist cell abroad.

The New York Times story that reported on the Shafi case cited other examples where distraught parents had hidden passports and money from their children in an effort to prevent them from traveling overseas to join terrorist ranks.

FBI director James Comey said that ISIS may have thousands of online followers within the U.S. and that his agency cannot keep up with the workload they pose to America. His agents successfully thwarted Adam Shafi, but may not be able to stop the next plot.