Are you aware of the al Qaeda plot to assassinate President Bush that was uncovered in 2005? Did you know that jihad terrorists in the U.S. financed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing partially through the sale of counterfeit T-shirts? Did you know that a professor at the University of South Florida in the 1990s was one of the international leaders of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that he used his university activities as a cover while he raised money, gained recruits and disseminated propaganda for the jihad group? Had you heard that in May 2003, an American citizen living in Ohio pled guilty to conducting surveillance of the Brooklyn Bridge and other potential targets for al Qaeda?

These were not isolated incidents. In fact, they are just a few of the known activities of a huge jihad network that still operates in the United States, but of which few Americans are aware. That lack of awareness, however, is not because the information is unavailable: Steven Emerson’s “Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.” tears the cover off this American jihad network. It is a comprehensive summation of what is known about the activities of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other jihad groups within the United States. Although the tone of this book is sober and straightforward throughout, the cumulative effect is startling: The extent to which these jihad groups have penetrated American society is likely to come as a surprise even to relatively informed readers.

“Homegrown plotters, sleeper cells, intolerant and hateful imams, and their domestic apologists,” Emerson explains, “all seek to undermine the foundations of this country through a variety of means: rhetoric, fund-raising, and violence. Intricate webs of interconnected groups and organizations have been established to pursue—and often to obfuscate—the zealots’ destructive objectives.”