The little-observed subculture in which aspiring Muslim terrorists — like alleged pressure-cooker bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami — reside is essentially a series of enemy outposts within American society in which those who want to harm America operate almost completely without restraint.

Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, was left alone by federal authorities — even after his own father warned the FBI that he was “fascinated” with jihadism and might be planning terrorist attacks. The FBI ran Rahami’s name through databases and reportedly found no definitive information.

It doesn’t help that in the Obama era, with the president’s never-ending race-baiting, law enforcement officials are afraid of being accused of religion or race-based discrimination.

Rahami was charged Sept. 20 in federal court with using weapons of mass destruction, bombing a place of public use, and multiple counts of attempted murder arising from the shootout with police that ended in his capture. At least 31 people were injured on Sept. 17 after the pressure-cooker bomb he planted in Chelsea, Manhattan, exploded. Court documents state the bombing caused injuries and “multiple-million dollars of property damage across a 650-foot crime scene.”

Like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, Rahami was active in the Muslim community and traveled overseas to apparently receive terrorist training. He made two extended trips to Quetta, Pakistan — a Taliban stronghold.

Rahami attended the Muslim Community of New Jersey Masjid, a mosque in Woodbridge, New Jersey. As Ryan Mauro of the Clarion Project discovered, the mosque’s imam and religious affairs director is one Asif Hirani. Hirani is also in charge of a Muslim proselytizing campaign administered by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a group investigated by the FBI for terrorist ties. ICNA grew out of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic supremacist party in Pakistan.

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ICNA produced a 300-page teaching guide that states it is based on the work of Islamist extremists such as Hamas financier Yousef al-Qaradawi. The guide calls for “reinstating the Caliphate system” and infiltrating the American political system. A 2010 member’s handbook produced by ICNA calls for achieving a “united Islamic state, governed by an elected khalifah [caliph] in accordance with the laws of Sharia [Islamic law].”

The family of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook also had ties to ICNA, according to a report from The Daily Caller. Farook’s mother received an award from a branch of the group called ICNA’s Sister’s Wing. Noelle Velentzas, who was arrested in 2015 in a bomb plot, lived at an ICNA homeless shelter in Queens, New York. Velentzas spoke at a 2012 ICNA event attended by Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), one of two Muslims in Congress.

In August 2016, the FBI arrested former ICNA employee Erick Jamal Hendricks and charged him with conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State. Al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki addressed an ICNA event in Baltimore in 2002. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. In 2009, five American students who belonged to an ICNA mosque in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested in Pakistan after they allegedly plotted to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The failure to monitor this domestic jihadist subculture properly has deadly consequences. As of early September, there have been 89 Muslim terrorist plots and attacks in the United States since 9/11 — and 25 of those took place since the beginning of 2015, according to The Heritage Foundation.

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These hidden enclaves in which anti-American, radical Muslims function are subversion factories. Many radical mosques and Islamic community centers throughout the nation focus very little on strictly religious matters. Instead, they are hotbeds of jihadism where hatred of the United States, its form of government, religious pluralism, history, and culture are taught and reinforced.

Critics say Islam isn’t exactly a religion in the way Americans use the word. As counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka of the Institute of World Politics has put it, “Islam is a totalitarian ideology suffused with religion.”

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“Islam is not a religion of peace,” adds scholar and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “It’s a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder Omar Ahmad confirmed this view years earlier when he was paraphrased telling a sympathetic audience in California that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant.” CAIR, by the way, is a much-investigated front group for the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, according to national security experts.

Many of these off-the-radar jihadist fiefdoms sprinkled throughout the country have militant congregants like Rahami. Yet they are largely “no go” zones for federal law enforcement agencies investigating terrorist networks. This is because President Obama, whose sympathy for Islam has been exhaustively catalogued, protects them from on high.

Remember that President Obama is a man who stood by Islam after Muslim militants slaughtered four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Instead of pointing an accusing finger at the perpetrators, the Obama administration comforted them, blaming an obscure anti-Islam video for the terrorist assault. Obama declared at the time that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Anyone who follows the news knows that Obama has also worked to stigmatize those who worry about the Islamic terrorist threat by suggesting they are motivated by racism and xenophobia — not love of country.

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Obama has handcuffed terrorism investigators. For example, in 2012, an FBI directive titled “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training,” prohibited FBI agents from treating individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation. The memo stated that “mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate [advocacy] and illicit [violent extremism] objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective[s].”

Even without these hindrances, investigating Muslim militants is never easy because Muslims generally embrace “taqiyya,” a doctrine that allows Muslims to lie to non-Muslims to advance jihad. “Taqiyya is of fundamental importance in Islam,” according to Sami Mukaram, a former Islamic studies professor at the American University of Beirut who wrote two dozen books on Islam. It is “very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.”

So even if federal authorities had vigorously pursued Rahami, Muslim witnesses could have invoked “taqiyya” to frustrate any proper investigation.

And it doesn’t help that in the Obama era, with the president’s never-ending race-baiting, law enforcement officials are afraid of being accused of religion or race-based discrimination. Sometimes they let things slide that they ought to investigate.

No doubt there are many more American Muslims like Ahmad Khan Rahami ready to attack America from within.

Matthew Vadum is senior vice president at Capital Research Center.