January 12, 2021: In December 2020 the FBI arrested American born (in 1998) Abdulwahab Humayun for lying on his application for a job as an FBI computer tech. Humayun graduated from George Mason University in early 2020 with a degree in computer science and had first applied for the FBI job during a 2019 FBI campus recruiting effort. Humayun was charged with lying to the FBI during his job application interview and trying to conceal a Twitter account he controlled and been using since 2018 to promote Islamic terrorism. Humayun denied knowledge of the account but it was traced back him to via Twitter records.

The FBI, Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies found that after 2001 that their Moslem employees were often pressured by Moslem friends and associates in the United States and abroad to either quit working for the infidels (non-Moslems) or support the struggle to defend Islam by attacking infidel, especially Western, targets. Many Moslem employees reported the harassment but others feared losing their jobs or security clearances by doing so. A smaller number, especially younger Moslems experiencing a lot of peer pressure over the issue of Islamic radicalism and violence against infidels, were persuaded to support Islamic terrorists openly or more directly and not publicizing it.

In many Moslem majority countries Moslems take it for granted that they can accuse local non-Moslems of “anti-Islam behavior” and get away with murder, literally. This is common in Pakistan, where Humayun’s family is from. Muslims from these countries emigrate to the West, especially Britain and North America, to get their kids away from these unsavory attitudes. Unfortunately, September 11, 2001 coincided with growing Internet access in Moslem nations and teenage children of immigrants found themselves exposed to the taunts and peer pressure from the old country that their parents hoped to get their kids away from.

Adult Muslims in the West can also be persuaded to break the law by family or friends back in the homeland. This is not a new problem. During World War II it was a deliberate tactic by the Nazis to use family connections back in Germany to pressure German-Americans to commit espionage. That tactic was not often successful but it worked often enough to add questions about such family connections to Americans applying for a security clearance or sensitive jobs. The tactic was used by communists during the Cold War and now China is doing the same thing. China has a cultural angle in their favor because it is customary for Chinese governments to consider Chinese born outside the country, even to families that have lived outside China for generations, to remain subject to Chinese law and loyalties. That’s literally the law in China, although nearly all foreign countries consider it invalid. Most of the time it is but China has had a lot of success recruiting ethnic Chinese born or living outside of China to carry out espionage tasks “for the motherland.”