Middle East expert Walid Phares said nearly a decade ago that the number of "lone wolf" jihadists was on the rise, an ominous warning that has been borne out by recent events, including the Boston Marathon bombings and a hit-and-run driver in Canada, Phares said Tuesday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"I've projected already, it's been almost 10 years now, in my book
"Future Jihad," that there are strategies against America, published in 2005, that with time those lone wolves, rats or lone jihadists, will increase in numbers," Phares said.
"The calculation that the ideology is spreading, and it's spreading faster via Facebook and social media. The wider the pool of radicalized individuals is, we're going to see a segment of that pool growing as well."
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The Obama administration's obsession with political correctness in preference to honesty is disingenuous to the American people, he said. Instead of calling these homegrown terrorists what they are, the violent acts of these radicalized jihadists are couched as
"workplace violence" or
random acts of violence, said Phares.
"The problem with the administration over the past five to six years is that they refuse to identify it as a collective problem," Phares said. "Each one has a reason: workplace violence, hit-and-run accident. They do not want to recognize that there is an overarching ideology.
"I hope the next Congress will be able to come back and give us some better legislation as to how to identify this ideology, how to stop it, and how to confront these lone wolves, rats or jihadists."
Phares said his own research, along with that of colleagues, shows that there are parts of Canada where jihadist ideology is "not just progressing, it is now visible. Pure ideology of jihadism."
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Despite the facts, "academia, media and the establishment, like here, does not want to go against this ideology," he said while discussing the news coverage of
two Canadian soldiers targeted in a hit-and-run in Quebec, allegedly by a 25-year-old radicalized Muslim.
"This is not so different from the dozens and dozens of attempts by lone wolves," Phares said. "We don't know if that wolf jihadi was alone or not, but he acted alone in this case. This is a continuation of . . . the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston and the shooting in Arkansas.
"In Canada, this is coming after a call by the heads of ISIS to any jihadi around the world to do as much as they can to harm the West, the U.S., members of NATO and others."
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