The New York Police Department deserves a lot of credit for trying to think through the conditions that turn someone into a jihadist, a task that suffers from lazy assumptions and insufficient empirical rigor. What its report on potential radicalization of U.S. Muslims suggests, though, is that determining patterns of behavior that indicate future terrorism is a frustrating and complex task. As a result, most of what we learn about potential homegrown jihadists is that their pre-radical behavior is… a lot like that of non-jihadists.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=180138