New Jersey Jihadi Who Threatened Attack on United States Arrested, Extradited From Kenya

From 2018 to 2020, while I was working on a big project in New Jersey, my wife and I maintained a second residence in the small town of Raritan. While neither of us could live in New Jersey - the state government is just too wackadoodle and it's way too crowded - we did become kind of fond of Raritan. It's a friendly little town, hometown to WW2 hero Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone and home to lots of great diners and Italian restaurants. We still have friends there.

You can imagine my consternation, then, to see a jihadi nut was arrested in New Jersey for plotting violent jihad against the country that only recently welcomed him in.

A New Jersey man motivated by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel "devoted himself to waging violent jihad against America and its allies" and sought to join a foreign terror group, federal prosecutors in New York said Friday.
Karrem Nasr, 23, was arrested in Kenya earlier this month and brought to New York to face charges of attempting to provide material support to al-Shabab, the Somalia-based terror group affiliated with al-Qaida.
Nasr is expected to make an appearance later Friday before a federal magistrate in Manhattan federal court.

Here's the onion: Karrem Nasr isn't a "New Jersey man."

Nasr moved to New Jersey from Egypt in July, according to the criminal complaint, and repeatedly expressed a desire to join al-Shabab during communications with someone he thought was an al-Shabab facilitator, but who was really a confidential FBI source.

No, Nasr isn't a "New Jersey man." He's only been here a matter of months. It's unlikely in the extreme that he was "radicalized" after arriving in New Jersey. He was very likely a jihadi aspirant before he came to the United States. Nasr almost certainly came here, to the United States, with jihad already on his mind.

Hamas, yes, attacked Israel. But as I noted on Friday, there are plenty of targets of opportunity here in the United States as well.

The fall of Rome, it's important to note, was in large part due to barbarian invasions of Germanic tribes and Slavs from the north and east, along with the rise of the Eastern Empire and its increasing dominance as a trade hub. But when the Western Empire came apart, much of the Empire's former lands were settled by the Huns, the Goths, and the other tribes; many of them lived in Rome herself.

Sound familiar?

Nasr appears to have arrived in the United States legally, at least to begin with, before traveling to Kenya with plans to go to Somalia; but it's belaboring the obvious to point out that he could have just as easily arrived anywhere in Central American and simply walked across our southern border.

This is a calamity waiting to happen. Our national security status is abysmal. There are Iranian Huns, Egyptian Vandals, and Somalian Huns already within our city walls, and more are doubtless arriving every day. We are literally welcoming the invaders in, and there is no way this will end without some disaster, somewhere; while the FBI may have caught Karrem Nasr, our law enforcement and intelligence operatives have to be right every single time, while the jihadis only have to be right now and then.

And, as I pointed out on Friday, and as you can see in the links above, they are already here.