Militant extremism alert in Minnesota

Sometimes it seems that the Twin Cities metropolitan area is a central front in the struggle against the phenomenon renamed “militant extremism” in the Age of Obama. Minneapolis seems to have proved a fertile source of funds for “militant extremists” who have set up shop in Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Minneapolis was also the site of the production brought to us by the flying imams.
The Twin Cities area is home to a large population of Somali Muslim refugees. Students drawn from this population form the core of the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy in suburban St. Paul that operates as a Muslim charter school on the public dime under the supervision of a leader of the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society. I have written about TiZA at length here several times, as in “What is to be done?”
Since we started writing about the school, the ACLU Minnesota has filed a lawsuit pending in federal court challenging the constitutionality of TiZA’s public funding. We discussed the lawsuit most recently in “Judge Frank denies TiZA’s dismissal motion.”
Minneapolis is also the site of a recruiting operation for Somali terrorists (sorry, “militant extremists”). An intensive federal investigation of the operation has been ongoing in Minneapolis over the past year or two. The Star Tribune reports that a 43-year-old Somali man from Minneapolis was arrested this week in the Netherlands for allegedly financing the recruitment of up to 20 young Somali men from Minnesota to train and fight with terrorists in their homeland.
With any luck the man, who was arrested Sunday at an asylum-seeker’s center 45 miles northeast of Amsterdam, will be extradited to Minnesota and prosecuted. We’d like more information about the operation and we’re a little concerned about what might happen with the Minnesota jihadis trained in Somalia if and when they make their way back to Minnesota.