"They grew up in my neighborhood"

Karol remembers two of the Fort Dix Six:

When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.

How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother's best friend's mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn't seem the most likely.

They had been in the country illegally for 23 years, and despite numerous traffic citations, they were never detected, much less deported:

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan "Anthony" or "Tony" Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir "Elvis" Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in "sanctuary cites," where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

The source said there is no record of them entering by way of a regular border crossing, so they are investigating whether they were smuggled into the country.

So the folks who swim Rio Bravo near Brownsville aren't just Mexicans on their way to roof houses in Jenks. Some of them are Albanian Muslims from Yugoslavia who wind up living in Brooklyn and plotting attacks on U. S. Army facilities.

Julia Gorin asks why the media -- even right-wing columnists -- are so squeamish about saying that these alleged terrorists are Albanian Muslims, and she answers her own question:

The answer is that the Balkans narrative MUST remain what it is: Serbs=bad. Muslims=victim.

The pro-Muslim mainstream media aside, even conservatives jumped onto the anti-Serb bandwagon starting in the 90s -- because conservatives are often accused of being anti-Muslim. So the one bone they can toss the Muslims is to take the typical bombastic and outraged stance about what was supposedly done to Muslims in the Balkans. (Recall “Hannity & Colmes” condemning the “evil on display” in the widely circulated execution video of six Bosnian fighters by Bosnian-Serb paramilitary. Of course, you won’t recall the far more graphic images of dead Serbs -- for those are never shown.)

Never mind that the aforementioned executions were precipitated by mutilated, burned, decapitated, dismembered Serbs of all ages, whose bodies were stuffed down wells near Srebrenica, the site of “the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.” And that’s not even mentioning the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo for decades, as was reported in The NY Times, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post throughout the 80s.

If you want to know more precisely what these Albanian Muslim illegal immigrants were up to, Michelle Malkin has an excerpt of the complaint against the Fort Dix Six, and a link to a PDF of the full complaint.

UPDATE 5/17/2007: Newsweek reports that the INS knew that the Duka family was here illegally for 16 years and did nothing:

As a result, for nearly two decades, American authorities were aware that members of the family were inside the United States, and that they had probably come here illegally. While the asylum application was under consideration, the government effectively suspended any effort to deport family members as illegal aliens, the source familiar with their immigration history said…

However, another official familiar with the Duka case history said that the family asylum claim got stuck for 16 years at INS because of a bureaucratic paperwork backlog of more than 100,000 asylum applications. The official said asylum claims routinely sat in “filing cabinets” for a decade or more.

(Hat tip: Hot Air.)