Since 9/11, we have seen efforts by ISIS, al-Qaida and other violent extremists to recruit African American Muslims to their cause, preying on a collective sense of injustice and feelings of deprivation and social alienation from historic inequities. In 2008, for example, al-Qaida's then second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri sought to interlace domestic African American racial grievances with the global jihad movement, targeting and recruiting African American and Somali youth. A 51-minute recruitment video presented motifs of Malcolm X, attempting to exploit historical African American Muslim activism as a potential means for future radicalization.

This past year’s anniversary of the  9/11 attacks in America, I am reminded of how far Americans and humanity as a whole have come from that horrific incident that killed almost 3,000 innocent people in the United States. But similar atrocities and acts of terrorism remain a daily occurrence for ordinary people living in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia alike.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017, ISIS-inspired attack in New York City, the deadliest since 9/11, left 8 dead and several more injured. The perpetrator, 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, was an Uzbekistan native who had moved to the US in 2010.