FBI official: Islamic State is Recruiting U.S. Teens

How could this be? Obama, Kerry, Biden, David Cameron, and everyone else assures us that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. So why is it so appealing to young Muslims in the West? Why are Muslim parents encouraging their children to join it? The cognitive dissonance is massive, and the FBI isn’t doing what it should be doing: calling upon U.S. Muslims to teach against the Islamic State’s ideology.

Right now, it is not being countered with any organized program in U.S. mosques or Islamic schools, and no one seems to care.

“FBI official: ISIS is recruiting U.S. teens,” by Pamela Brown and Wesley Bruer, CNN, February 4, 2015 (thanks to Aron):

Washington (CNN)For the head of the FBI’s counterterrorist division, Michael Steinbach, the unknown worries him the most.

Steinbach is leading the daunting effort to stay on top of the evolving threat landscape, which includes targeting and recruiting teenage Americans. In an exclusive interview with CNN inside the agency’s Strategic Information and Operations Center, he acknowledged it’s extremely difficult to track every American who might travel abroad to join terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

“I’m worried about individuals that we don’t know about that have training,” Steinbach said. “We know what we know. But there is a number that’s greater than that that we don’t know.”

Steinbach says U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies don’t track individuals leaving the United States to vacation in Europe.

“Once you get to Europe, you can easily get down to Turkey and into Syria” Steinbach says.

There’s growing concern about homegrown violent extremism in the aftermath of last month’s terror attacks in Paris. Those strikes underscored the threat posed to the West by small groups of terrorists with western passports who are influenced by the rhetoric espoused by ISIS. Steinbach is concerned that type of attack could happen on U.S. soil.

When asked if there are ISIS cells in the U.S., Steinbach said “there are individuals that have been in communication with groups like ISIL who have a desire to conduct an attack” and those people are living in the U.S. right now, but he says the term “sleeper cells” is too simplistic, because the threat is much more complicated and diffuse.

In the U.S., the FBI has seen children as young as 15 recruited by ISIS and Steinbach said he “can’t speak with 100% certainty that individuals of that age group have not gotten over there successfully.”

In some cases, Steinbach said parents even encourage their children to be involved with terror groups.

“There are individuals out there who are inspired by the message of terrorist groups and they encourage family members, including their children, to follow that path,” he said, adding in those cases, the FBI holds the parents responsible….