Terrorism: Muslim families as first line of defense

There is a heartening aspect to the otherwise unnerving story of five young American Muslims who flew to Pakistan Dec. 1 with the apparent intention of enrolling in a jihadist group. Law enforcement officials received crucial cooperation from anxious relatives of the five young men. The family members told imams and the Council on American-Islamic Relations of their worries, and CAIR officials swiftly arranged a meeting with the FBI. The five were then found in the house of a Pakistani man associated with an extremist group and detained by Pakistani authorities.

It would be hard to exaggerate the value of having Muslim community leaders take the lead, as they did in this instance, in guarding against terrorism - and in rescuing impressionable young Muslims from the effects of indoctrination in an alluring ideology rooted in a disfiguring of Islam.

Americans have thus far been spared the sort of mass killings perpetrated by locally grown terrorist groups in London, Madrid, and Bali. But recent incidents of Muslim Americans coming under the influence of Islamist extremists raise the specter of the jihadist pathology coming to this country. The first line of defense against that threat will have to be alert families, clerical authorities, and Muslim-American community groups.