Intel Committee Chairman Says America Facing Highest Threat Level Ever

The epidemic is spreading.

Over the past week alone, five Americans–four in the New York City area and one in North Carolina–have been arrested for plotting to carry out ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Along with some other recent cases, that brings the total of U.S. citizens already arrested on Islamic-terror related charges so far in 2015 to right around 50.

2015 is the year of homegrown jihad, plain and simple.

If that leaves you feeling a bit unnerved, consider that over the weekend, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) said the United States now faces “‘the highest threat level we have ever faced in this country’ due to the flow of foreign fighters to and from Iraq and Syria and the radicalization of young people on the Internet.” That’s an absolutely stunning assessment–and, I believe, spot on. Incidentally, Nunes’ warnings have been echoed repeatedly in recent months by top Obama administration officials–not usually the sort to be forthcoming about the severity of the jihadist threat, to say the least.

The unprecedented and meteoric rise of ISIS into a global phenomenon has opened the floodgates here in the West, inspiring radical Islamists and assorted disturbed individuals from every race, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background to join the jihad and plot mass death against their fellow citizens. I warned about this growing trend in my first book, The Terrorist Next Door, published way back in May 2011. That was roughly three full years before ISIS captured world headlines with its conquest of Mosul. As I worked on my latest book, “ISIS Exposed” throughout the fall of 2014 and early 2015, it was clear that ISIS’s combination of barbaric violence, territorial conquest and social media savvy, combined with its declaration of a caliphate, had struck a lethal chord with the growing army of Western jihadi foot soldiers that I warned about four years ago. Thanks to ISIS’s clarion call, the “terrorists next door” are today expanding at an alarming rate.

The result? We now find ourselves in a situation where FBI Director James Comey admits that the Bureau still does not have a handle on how to stop ISIS’s recruitment of Americans online.

No wonder Rep. Nunes says the threat level here in America has never been greater.

And the year of homegrown jihad is only halfway done.