The Muslim next door

A 39-year-old woman, working as a pharmacist in sleepy, sunny, suburban La Palma, California.

Her name isn't Kristen, or Casey, or Shannon -- it's "Oytun Ayse Mihalik" -- and she's of Turkish extraction, but no doubt she's a pleasant, personable, reasonably attractive woman who smiles for her customers at the pharmacy of the mall where on her lunch breaks she may do a little shoe-shopping and drink a decaf caramel latté from the Tully's there.

Had authorities not learned, and had news reporters not reported, that Ms. Mihalik at some point recently traveled back to Turkey in order to wire thousands of dollars to help fund terrorist attacks against U.S. military personnel -- no one would be any the wiser that she was capable of supporting terrorism, and quite eager to do so.

In addition, the news report from Associated Press (as reported in Jihad Watch) indicates rather cryptically that she may have been dipping her toes into home-grown terrorism as well:

...court documents reveal Mihalik's arrest is "related to national security investigations in other areas of the United States."

It is eminently unremarkable and reasonable to assume that an individual willing and committed enough to travel thousands of miles to send thousands of dollars to terrorists who are killing American personnel in some foreign country, would also not be averse to aiding and abetting, in one form or another, terror cells here in America.

But one would never know that about Ms. Mihalik seeing her step out from behind the pharmacist's counter with a friendly smile dimpling her pleasant cheeks from within the frame of her colorful, moderately unassuming veil resembling an accessory not much different from the scarves we've seen on Jackie O. or Hillary. Nor even when she steps outside into the La Palma, California sunshine to the parking lot to get into her 2008 Toyota Celica, even wearing fashionably white and smartly modern jeans, all the while talking to someone on her Android cellphone in a charming foreign language, to drive off on an errand, perhaps the optometrist appointment she had been putting off for her new prescription.

The only way we'd know she could be involved in terrorism is her identity as a Muslim. Given the ever-mounting mountain of data out there about Muslims around the world, throughout history and into the hot news of the present, such an identity by itself, with no other information known, should be sufficient to warrant an extremely low threshold for suspicion of seditious intent and activities.

Or we can continue to play Muslim Roulette and wait until after attacks far worse than 911 occur.