Karen Greenberg was quoted in an NBC News article about U.S.-born terror suspects.
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at the Fordham University School of Law, said the long timeline of the report overshadows the evidence — and the effects — of a more recent tactic used by ISIS that has produced U.S.-born attackers. Unlike al Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, the Islamic State has a decentralized power structure that relies heavily on radicalizing recruits living in Western countries and recruiting lone wolf attackers via social media.
“I think they are doing everything they can to justify the Muslim ban, and the unfortunate part of this is the backing away from the homegrown terrorist suspect … and how to prevent it,” Greenberg said. “And if you are born in another country and, 20 years later, you become a terrorist, whose fault is that — the country you were born in or the country you’ve lived in?”
Greenberg’s research on ISIS cases in the U.S. from March 2013 through the present found that U.S.-born defendants account for 84 out of the 156 cases prosecuted, or more than half.
