It would seem at first glance to be a case right out of Merrick Garland’s fondest dreams: a good ol’ boy from Bowling Green, Ky., gets mixed up with a bad crowd and ends up getting “radicalized,” joining a terror group, and plotting all manner of mayhem. After all, the always honest and scrupulously fair “Justice” Department chief has assured us, as has Old Joe Biden, FBI top dog Christopher Wray, and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, that “white supremacists” are the biggest terror threat America faces today. Now here comes this ol’ boy from Bowling Green to prove them right, no? No.
The Kentucky-fried terrorist in question is one Mirsad Hariz Adem Ramic, who does indeed hail from Bowling Green but is also a dual citizen of the United States and Bosnia. He was found guilty Wednesday, according to the Justice Department, on charges of “providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (‘ISIS’), conspiring to provide material support to ISIS, and receiving military-type training from ISIS.”
Ramic flew from Bowling Green to Istanbul in 2014, along with two other would-be jihadis; once there, the trio bought tickets to Gaziantep, Turkey, a city near Turkey’s border with Syria. They crossed the border to enter the Islamic State’s domains in Syria. Ramic was to all appearances a convinced, dedicated jihadi: he “attended an ISIS training camp, where he received military-type training. A Photograph of Ramic, posted on social media, depicted him, among other things, wearing camouflage clothing and standing in front of a truck outfitted with an anti-aircraft gun and the ISIS flag.”
The Kentucky jihadi appears to have been deeply involved in the Islamic State’s aggressive activities. “After joining ISIS, Ramic and his co-conspirators remained in contact with each other and discussed, among other things, his use of an anti-aircraft weapon to shoot at planes. Ramic and his co-conspirators also discussed jihad, martyrdom, and fighting for ISIS.” But he didn’t just talk: Ramic “joined an ISIS fighting unit comprised primarily of Bosnian foreign fighters, and participated in ISIS’s offensive in Kobane, Syria.”
Since the fall of the ISIS caliphate, Ramic had been in prison in Turkey but was deported back to the United States in Dec. 2021. Now he is looking at fifty years in prison and a $750,000 fine if he is convicted.
The Justice Department press release about Ramic’s indictment is laconic. It gives no indication of how a young man (Ramic is 34) in Bowling Green could have come to believe that it would be a great idea to join an internationally feared and despised jihad terror group. This is the question that remains unanswered whenever a Muslim living in the United States decides to join a jihad group or even plot a jihad massacre on American soil.
We are constantly told, by all sorts of learned imams such as Pope Francis, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Why is it that there are still some Muslims in the United States, a country where, contrary to leftist myth, they enjoy complete equality of rights before the law and no institutionalized discrimination, get the idea that their religion teaches them that they have a responsibility before Allah to wage war against unbelievers?
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The Justice Department doesn’t mention whether Mirsad Hariz Adem Ramic attended a mosque in or around Bowling Green. Is it possible that he learned at a Kentucky mosque that the Islamic State was truly Islamic and deserving of support? Has the mosque Ramic attended, if indeed he attended one, been investigated? Almost certainly not, because even as people such as Mirsad Hariz Adem Ramic are indicted, the Justice Department remains dogmatically committed to the proposition that Islam, properly understood, is entirely peaceful and benign, and no more likely to give rise to violence than any other religion.
This is a massive blind spot, as Ramic’s trajectory itself demonstrates. Usually, the question of where young men such as Ramic got their ideas is waved away with the claim that they were “radicalized on the Internet,” a phrase that is usually meant to convey that the “radicalizers” are far away and pose no ongoing threat.
But the possibility that they were “radicalized” within the United States cannot be discounted. Our law enforcement and intelligence officials are suicidally foolish to dismiss it out of hand, but of course, they have more immediate questions of political expediency at the forefront of their minds, and can’t be bothered with such trivial matters as the possible mass murder of thousands of Americans.
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