FBI chief: Potentially ‘thousands’ of Islamic State followers in U.S.

So don’t draw any Muhammad cartoons, people, and maybe they won’t hurt us.

Anyway, why are there potentially thousands of followers of the Islamic State in the U.S.? The FBI shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about that. Of course, Bureau policy is to ignore the ideology, motives and goals of the jihadis. Muslims are streaming into this Islamic group that the Obama Administration insists is not Islamic, and nary an Administration official stops even for a second to ponder how this strange phenomenon came to be.

“FBI Chief: Potentially ‘thousands’ of online ISIS followers in U.S.,” ABC News, May 7, 2015:

There may be as many as thousands of people inside the United States consuming online “poison” from ISIS alone, and, “I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there,” FBI director James Comey warned today, referring to one of the men who opened fire outside of an event in Texas earlier this week celebrating artists’ portrayals of the Prophet Mohammad.

“We have a very hard task” in trying to identify and stop anyone inspired to launch an attack inside the U.S. homeland, Comey told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas and a small group of reporters.

Such efforts have become particularly challenging because ISIS has reconfigured and redefined terrorist recruitment, according to Comey. In fact, while the FBI is trying to find that so-called needle in a haystack, “increasingly the needles are invisible to us,” he said.

As recently as two years ago, someone in the United States who wanted to consume “radical poisonous propaganda” would have to seek that out on the Internet, most likely on a jihadist web forum. So the FBI focused its investigative efforts on those jihadist web forums, Comey said.

But “that has changed dramatically, especially with [ISIS] and their use of social media,” where on phones in people’s pockets they ask Americans and other foreigners “to travel to the so-called caliphate to fight” but simultaneously say, “If you can’t travel, kill where you are,” according to Comey.

“It’s almost as if there is a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long,” he said. “[They are] recruiting and tasking at the same time. … In a way, the old paradigm between ‘inspired’ and ‘directed’ breaks down here.”…

Comey, meanwhile, warned that even when the FBI finds someone who has in fact connected with ISIS, keeping track of that person is becoming increasingly difficult.…

Especially since the FBI is bound as a matter of policy not to study or understand the motivating ideology of these people.

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