Homegrown terrorists in NY
We'll have to fight them, er, here so they don't follow us, um, here.

They preferred bookstores or hookah bars to mosques. They stopped listening to pop music and instead surfed Web sites promoting radical Islam. They threw away their baseball caps and grew beards. New York Police Department intelligence analysts have concluded those were some of the telltale signs of homegrown terrorists in the making - a mounting threat as grave as that from established terrorist groups like al-Qaida.

Don't panic. Our National Guard can protect-- Oh, that's right. They're all in Iraq.

An NYPD report released Wednesday warns of a ``radicalization'' process in which young men - otherwise unremarkable legal immigrants from the Middle East - grow disillusioned with life in America and adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to jihad.

They're legal. Legal immigrants. They're here legally. But they're disillusioned. So am I, by the way. I thought we were a democracy. But that's another post for another time.

The findings drew swift criticism from an Arab anti-discrimination group, which accused the NYPD of stereotyping and of contradicting recent federal warnings that the chief terrorism threat remains foreign.

I bet the FBI had something to say about all this.

The FBI declined to comment.

Where do they hang out? How do we find them?

Instead of mosques, those places were more likely to be ``cafes, cab driver hangouts, flop houses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah bars, butcher shops and bookstores,'' the report says.

The Internet also provides ``the wandering mind of the conflicted young Muslim or potential convert with direct access to unfiltered radical and extremist ideology.''

That's right. Blame the Internets. It's all those tubes, they confuse people.

Potential homegrown terrorists ``are not on the law enforcement radar,'' the study says. ``Most have never been arrested or involved in any kind of legal trouble.''

Maybe they can read their faces and body language. That's the best way to discern if someone's a terrorist, remember?