noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- The events shocked a nation and elicited concern that terrorism was now a home-grown product.
A Muslim-American member of the Army guns down fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Five young Muslim-American men from Virginia are arrested in Pakistan and charged with terrorism. Members of a Muslim-American family living quietly near Raleigh are indicted for plotting terrorist acts.
But, in fact, a new report released Wednesday by scholars at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill says the number of radicalized Muslim-Americans remains small.
"Muslim-American organizations and the vast majority of individuals that we interviewed firmly reject the radical extremist ideology that justifies the use of violence to achieve political ends," said David Schanzer, an associate professor at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, and co-author of the report.
"The incident at Fort Hood was truly horrific and the recent events are surely cause for increased concern and certainly raise questions in people's minds," Schanzer added. "But we should also be cautioned that there is a huge Muslim population in America and these are a very small number of incidents."
The 61-page study, "Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans," found that since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, 139 American Muslims have been accused of planning or carrying out violent attacks motivated by extremism.
That's out of around a population of 2.5 million. "Muslim-American terrorism has resulted in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11," said report co-author Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at UNC.
The researchers found no definitive pattern of how the 139 suspects turned to violence and no geographic center of radicalization in the U.S.
They also did not find the same levels of extremism as among Muslims in Western Europe. The Muslim population here is generally far less radical than in other developed nations, Schanzer said.
"America has a long tradition of assimilating immigrants, from the Mayflower on," he said. "We're quite good at it and our society is open to it. That makes the Muslim population here of a different character. Europe, for instance, does not have the same tradition as we do. There are more opportunities for disaffection there."
Greater radicalization here has been prevented by active community organizations, the report says, and credited U.S. Muslim leaders with vigorously monitoring their communities for potential threats. The study's authors urged civil authorities to offer more support for projects, such as Muslim youth groups, that reinforce the message that extremism is contrary to Islam.
The report suggests that denunciations of terrorism within Muslim-American communities, internal self-policing, community building, government-funded support services and political engagement can all reduce risks of radicalization.
But while the amount of terrorism activity in the Muslim-American community has been small, the paper's authors acknowledged that it also has been growing.
"We have seen a spike in the number of incidents in 2009, and that is disturbing," Schanzer said. "But it's too early to say if its a trend or just a coincidence."
The report's authors interviewed more than 120 Muslim-Americans, including in Durham and Raleigh, and analyzed public records of terror cases and reviewed existing studies of Muslim-American communities.
