Is It Blowback If It Never Left?

Vodkapundit has a post up on the expected blowback from Syria - volunteer Islamist fighters having been trained in terrorist tactics returning to their homes in Europe and America will likely not just resume whatever they were doing before they left to fight on foreign shores but instead will likely launch jihadi attacks locally on their return.

I'd question use of the term blowback - it's not like we're supporting Al Qaeda/Salafi fighters. Instead we're just, in Obama's infinite wisdom, not supporting the more "normal" opposition to Assad, leaving them to get their butts kicked by both Assad and the Salafis, and it's resulting in Syria being locked into an Aliens vs Predator war where regardless of whoever wins, we'll have a heckuva foreign affairs problem for the foreseeable future.

Let's hope the NSA is doing, you know, their actual job of watching these foreign fighters and their movements rather than busily surveying little Timmy's online pron stash or Fred's Tea Party email list.

Meanwhile, back in America, and in Dearborn, Michigan in particular, there's a source of inspiration and terrorist advocacy for them waiting upon their return.

The Detroit Free Press: Dearborn cleric cited as most inspirational leader for militants from West in Syria

Just a few weeks after he was released from federal prison in March 2012 on fraud convictions, Dearborn cleric Ahmad Jibril told his followers in a fiery sermon posted online:

“When your brothers in Syria speak, everyone today needs to shut their mouth and listen, because they’re proving themselves to be real men.”

Jibril’s talk was the beginning of a number of videos and online comments that have made him an internationally known inspirational figure for militants in Syria. Over the past two years, Jibril has become the most popular religious leader online for Westerners who’ve joined the battle against the Syrian government, according to a new report by a security center in England.

And most of his followers online among the Western fighters surveyed are with groups related to al-Qaida, the report said.

Jibril, 43, acts as a “cheerleader ... a benevolent father figure” to foreign fighters motivated by Islam, said the report released last month by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. Based in London, the center is a partnership with five universities and for the past year has been studying the role that fighters from the West are playing in the Syrian war.

He's also quite the anti-American extremist:

Jibril has a history of making what prosecutors said were extremist comments, dating to at least 1995, according to a 2005 sentencing memo from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit. In November 1995, he sent a fax to CNN praising the bombing by terrorists of a building in Saudi Arabia used by U.S. military and civilian personnel, prosecutors wrote. The blast killed four Americans.

On a radical website he operated, “Ahmad Jebril encouraged his students to spread Islam by the sword, to wage a holy war, to hate and kill non-Muslims,” prosecutors said in the memo.

Maybe it's time to apply the RICO act to terrorists and their ideological enablers, as while Jibril may not be the guy pressing the button when the time comes, but he'll be one of those who set it in motion.