In a brief, cryptic article, CNN quoted NSA Director Mike Rogers saying the Islamic State’s online recruitment efforts are “increasingly resonating” with Americans.

The article did not say what type of Americans were responding to the ISIS recruitment pitches. Nor did the article’s author ask Rogers to explain how or why ISIS is able to attract so many followers among American Muslims.

Rogers’ admission that ISIS is offering a popular theology that “resonates” doesn’t square with repeated comments by President Obama that ISIS offers a warped version of Islam that the overwhelming majority of Muslims find repugnant. In fact, Obama said, ISIS’s brand of religious fanaticism isn’t Islamic at all.

Rogers also told CNN that the NSA struggles to find a balance between privacy and national security. Some see this as bowing to political correctness by not singling out Muslims for closer scrutiny when the overwhelming majority of terror attacks are carried out by Muslims worldwide.

Analysts say Rogers comments are shocking in their level of naivety.

“The refusal of senior U.S. national security leadership to know and confront the Islamic jihad enemy is nothing less than dereliction of duty,” said Clare Lopez, a Middle East specialist who serves as vice president for research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy in Washington. “When NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers raised his right hand and took the oath of office, he pledged to defend the Constitution against ‘all enemies, foreign & domestic.’ By his statements here, he demonstrates that he has no clue who the enemy even is.”

The truth is that the ISIS message resonates with Muslims because it zeroes in on a core value of the Quran, Lopez said. And that is spreading the faith through jihad.

“The reason the Islamic State’s call to jihad resonates with U.S. Muslims is that it represents the hopes and dreams of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world who, for the first time since 1924, are now inspired that a Caliphate has been re-established,” she said in an email to WND. “As a result, we are seeing tens of thousands of devout Muslims answering the call to jihad and making the hijra (migration) to Middle East battlefields. That is because Muslims everywhere understand that the Islamic State is the purest expression of authoritative, mainstream, orthodox Islam in the world today and that it fights to establish the rule of Islamic Law — and they want to be a part of it.”

Reports by European media put the number of Muslims who have left that continent to join ISIS at no less than 6,000 and as high as 10,000.

In the U.S., the FBI has said it has active investigations of ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states. How many have actually left the U.S. to join the terrorist organization is unknown but that number is thought to be at least 1,000. Lopez says those who decide to stay in their American homes could actually be more dangerous to the U.S. than those who leave.

“The most direct danger to the U.S. is that, living among us are thousands of Muslims who may be susceptible to the Islamic State’s call to jihad. There is simply no way to know which of them might decide to take their Muslim faith to the next level and embark on the pathway to jihad, whether by traveling abroad to join the fight or by deciding to engage in individual jihad attacks here at home,” said the woman whose analytical acumen was honed by 20 years as a CIA field operative.

Lopez said American Muslims are radicalized not only online but in mosques and on university campuses.

“Given the extensive influence of the Muslim Brotherhood within the top levels of the U.S. government, in academia, the media, and in U.S. mosques and Islamic centers (like the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, where the two Garland, Texas, gunmen were indoctrinated), the threat is a grave and growing one.”

The numbers of American Muslims are growing due to unprecedented levels of Muslim immigration over the past 25 years.

According to figures released recently by the DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics and reported by Conservative Review, the U.S. government has handed out 1.6 million green cards to persons from primarily Muslim countries since 9/11.

Estimates of how many Muslims reside in America range from 3 million to 9 million, depending on the source.

And the U.S. is importing about 100,000 new Muslim residents every year, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

That means the potential audience for which ISIS’s message of jihad can potentially “resonate” just keeps growing.

“Our leadership is obligated by oath of office to understand this and act accordingly to defend our Republic and the right of all Americans to live free of Shariah,” Lopez said.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/nsa-chief-isis-increasingly-resonates-with-u-s-muslims/