Recently, the war-front with Jihad-ism seems to have come home in Wichita, Kansas courtesy of Terry Lee Loewen.
A planned suicide bombing at Wichita’s Mid-Continent Airport was foiled by federal officials Friday when they arrested Terry Lee Loewen for seeking to commit “violent jihad against the United States.” Loewen was an avionics technician at the airport who tried to detonate a car full of what he thought were explosives.
Loewen was inspired to bomb the airport after studying the writings of the late al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamist cleric that also inspired Nidal Hasan to murder his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, as well as the failed Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber.” Al-Awlaki has been removed as an active threat by a U.S. predator drone in Yemen in 2011 but his teachings seem to keep inspiring new recruits.
As for Loewen, he wrote to an undercover FBI agent, “Brothers like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are a great inspiration to me, but I must be willing to give up everything (like they did) to truly feel like a obedient slave of Allah.” He was not associated with any organized religion in Wichita, though he claims to be Muslim. According to FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Kaste, “Lone wolves — homegrown violent extremists — remain a very serious threat to our nation’s security.” Of course, Loewen is only “homegrown” in the sense that he was born here. All his inspiration came from radical Islamists abroad.
