On December 8, 2006, the FBI and federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the arrest of Derrick Shareef, a 23-year-old convert to Islam. Though black, Shareef had not converted to the Nation of Islam but to mainstream Islam—“the religion of peace.” He was arrested in the parking lot of the East State Street Wal-Mart in Rockford, Illinois, after he attempted to purchase a handgun and grenades from an undercover FBI agent. Shareef intended to use the weapons to launch an assault on CherryVale Mall, the largest shopping center in the Rockford area, at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

At the time of Shareef’s arrest, Fitzgerald and others had claimed that he had acted alone. But Shareef turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. The FBI used his arrest to gather the information necessary to obtain an arrest warrant for Paul Hall, a.k.a. Hassan Abujihaad—another African-American convert to Islam who, as a signalman on a Navy destroyer in the Persian Gulf, had passed classified information on the movements of his naval battlegroup to a jihadist website in the months leading up to September 11. And information used from Abujihaad’s arrest is helping to make the case for the extradition from Britain of the suspected terrorist Babar Ahmad, who ran the jihadist website.

In the course of writing about these developments for Chronicles, I’ve uncovered evidence that Shareef was far from the “lone wolf” portrayed by federal authorities. To be fair, Fitzgerald and others clearly knew that they were presenting an inaccurate picture; the ruse was necessary, however, to avoid tipping off Abujihaad until enough evidence could be gathered to obtain an arrest warrant.

Now, however, with the trials of both Shareef and Abujihaad set to begin in September, prosecutors are beginning to confirm publicly what my sources had already told me: Far from being “lone wolves,” Derrick Shareef and Hassan Abujihaad, who had once been roommates in Phoenix, Arizona, were working together (possibly with others) to plan attacks on military recruitment stations and other targets.

Critics of the arrests argue that there’s no evidence that either man was connected to Al Qaeda, and they’re absolutely correct. But that is precisely the point: As we approach the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, our attention continues to be drawn overseas. The real danger to the average American, however, may lie instead in homegrown terrorism—in small groups and even individuals. Often converts to Islam (and very often black), this fifth column in the United States is indoctrinated in radical Islam through “mainstream” mosques such as the one that Shareef attended here in Rockford. While our local mosque and Islamic school have been praised by the Chicago Tribune and the Rockford Register Star as shining examples of “moderate Islam,” the president of the mosque told me that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter and expressed his great admiration for Osama bin Laden in an interview I conducted with him in February 2002—five months after the September 11 attacks.

With Islamic “moderates” like these, who needs radicals?

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, the flagship publication of The Rockford Institute.