Jihadists are enjoying worldwide recruitment success as a result of their ability to capitalize on social media, former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik said Tuesday on "America’s Forum" on
Newsmax TV.
"That's their method of reaching thousands of people," he said. "Some committed to the jihad, some just want to jump on the bandwagon and go do total insane stuff. The reality is the way they're reaching these kids, especially these younger kids, is through social media and they have an enormous reach, it's global.
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"We've seen an enormous
recruitment campaign by ISIS and ISIL around the world. We've lost people in the United States that have gone there. More people I understand from Britain and the U.K. in Europe, but they're flocking to Syria and Iraq from all over the globe and the recruitment campaign is as a result of the social media stuff."
Particularly concerning, he noted, are American-born Muslims who travel abroad to madrasas, an Arab term for schools that study Islam.
"They come back here with this ideology of hate that's promoted in some of these madrasas around the world and they're sitting basically on an explosive mentality waiting for a call or waiting for a notion from abroad to go out and do something," Kerik said.
"Then you have the complete psychos like the hatchet guy in New York or some of the other things we've seen around the country where they're following these jihadists and they take it upon themselves to go out and do something. The problem is the media and the press have been targeted, our military has been targeted, the social media campaign by ISIS and ISIL has told these people to target those specific areas, and we now are seeing the reminiscence of that with these guys going out and doing it."
One World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower and Wall Street
— the "economic capital of the world"
— will always be targeted by terrorists, but the buildings are likely not in the crosshairs as much as they once were, according to Kerik.
"They don't need it," he said. "They can do a number, a series of smaller attacks around the country on schools, hospitals, tourist sites, soft targets and reap the same rewards. If they could take down the Freedom Tower, they would. The security measures in place today, plus our intelligence capabilities, I don't think that they can do what they did back in September of 2001."
Western-hating jihadists are "here to stay," Kerik said, so the task at hand must be to "figure out how to fight it and be victorious over there and we have to make sure that we stamp it out here where we can."
"You have an element of the Muslim religion and predominantly the Muslim religion is a great religion, they're law abiding people, they're very religious people, respectable people, but there is an element that believes in the demise of Israel, in the demise of Christianity and basically if you're not a Muslim you deserve to die and they have the right to kill you, that's their belief. It's always going to be there."
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