This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/266
Text of Fatwah urging' Jihad against Americans' by Bin Laden 1998 -Trial Transcripts of "The United States vs. Usama Bin Laden"
September 1, 2004
MIM :In 1993 counter terrorism expert Steven Emerson made a video exposing the terrorists operating in the United States. The program aired on PBS and Emerson was condemned by leaders in the American Muslim community. In 1983 Enerson had published "The American House of Saud" - The Secret Petrodollar Connection' describing how Saudi money shaped American foreign and domestic policy. His 2001 book "Jihad in America" became a best seller and is considered a handbook for understanding the agendas ,individuals, of militant Islamist groups now operating in the United States.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005TPOO/ref=pd_luc_17_lc_a53x0//104-8982832-2981513?v=glance&s=video (video and book info on Amazon)
In 1995 Dr. Daniel Pipes stated :
Pipes in 1995: "Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States." He has been, at times, eerily prescient. Just four months before the attack on the twin towers, he and Steven Emerson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Al Qaeda was "planning new attacks on the US" and that Iranian operatives "helped arrange advanced ... training for Al Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings."
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1129
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393325318/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/104-8982832-2981513?v=glance&s=books (video and book info on Amazon)
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Below: Information and statistics from Eurolegal website:
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Bin Laden Attacks Against US Interests
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US Public Enemy No.1 |
18 April 1983 |
7th August 1998 |
11th September 2001 |
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Osama Bin Laden |
US Embassy bombing in Beirut. |
US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam bombed |
Al Quai'da terrorists destroy New York's World Trade Center |
MIM: It is vital to remember that the massacre of 3,000 Americans and the use of passenger planes as bombs to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 was a culmination of a long series of miltant Islamist assaults targeting the United States of America . The first attempt to destroy the Twin Towers was launched in 1993 under the leadership of the so called "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman. Many of his followers were also tried in connection with plots to bomb the Holland Tunnel and other New York City landmarks.Several of the people involved have spawned a second generation of terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda.
One example is Adnan Shukrijumah, who was designated by law enforcement as "Mohammed Attas' sucessor ". In 1995 Adnan Shukrijumah's father Gulshair, aka Gulshar El Shukri( Jumah ), testified as a character witness for Clement Hampton - El , an African American convert to Islam who was sentenced in the NY City landmark bombing plot. The trial was labelled "The United States vs. Usama Bin Laden". Adnan Shukrijumah's father Gulshair, had been sent to the United States as a Saudi "missonary' and settled in New York where he became at Imam at the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn . Shukrijumah lived on the same street as Hampton El and some of the terrorists convicted in the bombing plot were congregants at his mosque .Several years later he brought son Adnan and the rest of his family over to the US and settled in Miramar, Florida where he ran a mosque next door to his house and sold tapes to learn Arabic via his "Master Arabic" website . Gulshair Shukrijumjah died 3 months ago, of a stroke which was attributed to the stress of seeing son Adnan on TV as one of America's Most Wanted . Gulshair Shukrijumah's funeral was attended by more then 1,000 people who lavished praise on him as " a wonderful example" and "great scholar". See : http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/ "Father Knows Terrorism Best".
Newsweek journalists Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball recently revealed that Gulshair Shukrijumah, "had been on the FBI radar screen for some time" and that he was receiving payments from the Saudi Embassy until 2003. Gulshair Shukrijumah was an integral part of the 'first wave' of Al Qaeda operatives who came to establish a base of operations in the United States and translated several of Omar Abdel Rahman's speaches in the early 1990's,
(For background information terrorist attacks orchestrated by Bin Laden and a history of Al Qaeda see):
http://www.eurolegal.org/terror/terror2.htm
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25 April 2001
Source: Digital file from the Court Reporters Office, Southern District of New York; (212) 805-0300.
This is the transcript of Day 33 of the trial. April 24, 2001. Transcript delayed due to outage of e-mail of Court Reporters Office.
See other transcripts: http://cryptome.org/usa-v-ubl-dt.htm
4604 1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK 2 ------------------------------x 3 UNITED STATES OF AMERI 4 v. S(7)98CR1023 5 USAMA BIN LADEN, et al., 6 Defendants. 7 ------------------------------x 8 New York, N.Y. 9 March 29, 2001 9:50 a.m. 10
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MIM :Note that the United States vs Usama Bin Laden trial against the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 1998 US embassy bombings took place 6 months before 9/11 . Many of the unindicted co conspirators, such as Siraj Wahhaj , whose testimony featured prominently in the trial, is a leading member in some of the largest Muslim American organisations in the United States today. Sirra Wahaj heads the Al Tarqwa mosque in New York and is a trustee of the newly formed Universal Heritage Foundation in Kissimmee, Florida which is a project of the Islamic Circle of North America and the Muslim American Society. Wahaj also became a member of the advisory of board of CAIR - The Council on American Islamic Relations.
http://www.politrix.org/foia/binladen/usa-v-ubl-33.htm
File of daily transcripts of the United States vs Usama Bin Laden
http://www.politrix.org/foia/binladen/usa-v-ubl-dt.htm
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400049016/104-8982832-2981513?v=glance
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MIM :In 1998 journalist Kenneth Timmerman published this article in the Readers Digest which predicted the menace of Osama Bin Laden and explained that he had declared war on America . Three weeks after his article appeared the American Embassy in Nairobi was attacked and nearly 300 people were dead. Timmerman also quotes the leader of Al Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri Mohammed who clearly stated that Muslims were in training to wage war against the West.
"...Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a religious scholar in London with ties to bin Laden, told The Digest that bin Laden is funding armed Muslim groups in Albania, Chechnya, Bosnia, Nigeria and Algeria. "We are sending British and American Muslims to train in camps run by bin Laden," Bakri says. "This is an international army—Mohammed's army—to combat occupying governments..."
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This Man Wants You Dead
Reader's Digest ^ | July 1998 | Kenneth Timmerman
Click here for Kenneth Timmermans website:
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1121079/posts
In July 1998, Reader's Digest published Kenneth Timmerman's report, "This Man Wants You Dead." Three weeks later -- with more than 200 innocent civilians torn to bits by al-Qaeda bombs in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- bin Laden's face was plastered in newspapers around the world.
The notice appeared in an Arabic newspaper in London last February. "The ruling to kill Americans and their allies -- civilians and military is a duty for every Muslim. We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim to kill the Americans." Islamic extremists make outrageous statements every day in the Arabic-language press, most of which go unnoticed. But this one, a fatwa (religious order), alarmed government officials around the world. Within days U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Pakistan were threatened with attack. Government buildings in Washington, D.C., went on a rare "high security alert." Vehicles entering the Pentagon were searched.
Financier of Terror
U.S. officials took the death threat seriously, sources tell Reader's Digest, because of the reputation of the main signatory: Osama bin Laden. This former Saudi businessman was virtually unknown to Western intelligence agencies until just a few years ago, but today the U.S. State Department considers him a significant sponsor of world terrorism. Evidence points to his connection to persons suspected of numerous acts of violence, including:
Bin Laden is a pariah in many Islamic countries, but he operates with impunity from a base in Afghanistan. Using huge financial resources, he supports international terrorist networks, encouraging others to act while never pulling a trigger or detonating a bomb himself. Tall and thin, with a full beard, Osama bin Laden wears long, flowing Arab robes fringed with gold, and wraps his head in a traditional red-and-white checkered headdress. Those who have met him say he is soft-spoken and extremely courteous. Despite his apparent humility, he has become an almost mythic figure in the Islamic world because he has dared to stand up to two superpowers.
Bin Laden, now about 43 years old, is one of some 65 children of a Saudi construction magnate. When family patriarch Mohammad bin Laden died in the late 1960s, his children inherited a financial empire that today is worth an estimated $10 billion. The Saudi bin Laden Group is now run by Osama's family, which has publicly said it does not condone his reported activities.
In November 1996 Palestinian journalist Abdelbari Atwan visited bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, expecting to find the lavish camp of a man of wealth. Instead, he spent two nights sleeping next to bin Laden in a cave. "It was freezing," Atwan says. "I reached under my camp bed hoping to find an extra blanket. Instead, it was crammed with Kalashnikov rifles and mortar bombs." What drove bin Laden to take up arms? Those who know him agree: a burning faith that sees the world in simplistic terms as a struggle between righteous Islam and a doomed West. It is a worldview taught to many young Saudis. But the teachings struck a particular chord in bin Laden, reverberating with his seeming passion for danger.
Afghan Arabs
Enraged when the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan in December 1979, bin Laden went there to aid the mujahedin freedom fighters, providing food and weapons, much of it with family money. A Saudi official says bin Laden helped to recruit thousands of Arabs who volunteered for the jihad (holy war) against the Soviets. Early in the war the mujahedin were getting slaughtered by Soviet helicopter gunships as they tried to bring in supplies on mules across the mountain passes of northern Afghanistan. bin Laden volunteered the services of the family construction firm to blast new roads through the mountains. "He brought huge bulldozers," says London-based Khaled Fuawaz, a former bin Laden associate. According to Fuawaz, when bin Laden could not find drivers willing to face the Soviet gunships, he drove the bulldozers himself. One time he was attacked by Soviet helicopters and wounded. Bin Laden poured millions of dollars of his family's cash into the war, with the blessing of the Saudi government. He also personally led a contingent of Arab troops, winning a key victory against the Soviets in 1986. By the time the Soviet Union had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden was leading a fighting force known as Afghan Arabs, which numbered nearly 20,000. "Bin Laden was like a head of state," says a Saudi dissident. "The Afghan Arabs had a romantic image of him."
Hero to Outlaw
Bin Laden viewed any Western presence in the Middle East as a threat to Islam. After Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Reader's Digest has learned, bin Laden met with Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan to offer his services to the Desert Storm operation—but only if the United States were not involved. "Bin Laden spread out maps in front of Prince Sultan," a Saudi official says. "He had all kinds of plans for how to defeat the Iraqis without American help. Prince Sultan asked what he planned to do about the Iraqi tanks, aircraft and chemical and biological weapons. bin Laden said, 'We will defeat them with our faith.' " The Saudi government declined his offer, and bin Laden later moved to Sudan—but not before he cashed out of the family business, receiving an estimated $260 million. It is this fortune that he uses today to prime the terrorist pump.
In 1992 bin Laden's attention appears to have been directed against Egypt. That year, Reader's Digest has been told, an extremist group with financial ties to bin Laden sent a fax to Egypt threatening the government of President Hosni Mubarak, America's closest Arab ally.
"Bin Laden focused on Egypt," says a former spokesman for President Mubarak, Mohammad Abdul Moneim, "because he knew that if Egypt fell to the Islamists, the whole Arab world would fall." bin Laden, says the U.S. State Department, was the key financier behind a camp providing terrorist training to the Egyptian group. Its members, whose spiritual leader was the blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, opposed not only Mubarak but also Westerners—particularly Americans.
Members of the group slaughtered 58 foreign tourists visiting a temple at Luxor in November 1997. A U.S. diplomat in Cairo told Reader's Digest that the planner of the attack "would have loved to get Americans" but failed. Most of those killed were Swiss. Bin Laden hasn't limited his efforts to the Middle East. There is evidence linking him to Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and to other terrorists who planned attacks on American soil. Sources tell Reader's Digest that the federal government is investigating bin Laden's involvement.
Making Connections
Edwin Angeles, a leader of a radical Islamic group in the Philippines who became a government informant, says that Yousef and bin Laden were linked at least as long ago as 1989. In that year, Yousef went to the Philippines and introduced himself as an emissary of Osama bin Laden, sent to support that country's radical Islamic movement. One of Yousef's main contacts in Manila, according to Angeles, was Saudi businessman Mohammad Jamal Khalifah, bin Laden's brother-in-law. After participating in the Trade Center bombing, Yousef returned to the Philippines, where he plotted to plant bombs aboard U.S. passenger airliners in 1995.
In New York City, Sheik Rahman and others plotted attacks on major bridges and tunnels. During Rahman's 1995 trial, prosecutors included bin Laden on a list of nonindicted persons who "may be alleged as co-conspirators," though bin Laden has not been charged.
While living in Sudan, bin Laden established a construction company employing many of his former Afghan fighters. In the spring of 1996, according to Pakistani government officials, one of bin Laden's bodyguards attempted to assassinate him. After the attempt failed, bin Laden flew to Afghanistan on board his unmarked, private C-130 military transport plane. There, according to Pakistani officials, bin Laden established a base southwest of Jalalabad, under the protection of the Afghan government. A few weeks after the attempt on bin Laden's life, a powerful explosion ripped through the Khobar Towers complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemen. bin Laden, who called this "a laudable kind of terrorism," publicly denied participating. But a knowledgeable Saudi dissident in London has told Reader's Digest that the six men whom the Saudi government arrested for the bombing all trained in Afghanistan. "If they trained there," declared the dissident, "they have a connection to bin Laden." In August 1996, and later in November, bin Laden announced that he and his followers would stage terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to force an American withdrawal. The Digest has learned that after bin Laden called for this jihad, as many as eight attacks against U.S. military targets in the Middle East were attempted. These were foiled by an intense Saudi intelligence effort, which included enticing a top financial aide to bin Laden to defect.
Today, the State Department says, terrorist organizations that have received support from bin Laden continue to operate around the world. In March 1998 Brussels police arrested seven men and confiscated a cache of explosives. The men are believed to be part of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which is responsible for the slaughter of thousands in Algeria over the last six years. One knowledgeable source says GIA has received financial support from bin Laden. In May, eight suspected GIA members were arrested in London.
Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a religious scholar in London with ties to bin Laden, told The Digest that bin Laden is funding armed Muslim groups in Albania, Chechnya, Bosnia, Nigeria and Algeria. "We are sending British and American Muslims to train in camps run by bin Laden," Bakri says. "This is an international army—Mohammed's army—to combat occupying governments."
The Coming Crusade
The groups obeying bin Laden are hard to track down and difficult to penetrate. "These small groups, which may be just five or ten persons, can never be eradicated," says Saad al-Faghi, a Saudi dissident living in London. "They believe they belong to the jihad, not by command but by faith. They are very dangerous." Today bin Laden lives in Afghanistan with three wives and 42 other Arab families in a 30-house complex. Reader's Digest has been told that bin Laden has bought heavy weapons on the black market and is training new fighters at his camp in the north. He is also seeking to widen his alliances. The February 1998 London fatwa against Americans was issued under the banner of the International Islamic Front and signed by radical Islamic leaders in Egypt, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Bin Laden's coldblooded invitation to murder is taken seriously by American diplomats. "If they want to attack us, they can," says a U.S. diplomat in Pakistan. "We're all soft targets." But U.S. officials are not the only ones at risk. In November 1997, for example, four American oil-company workers were gunned down in Pakistan. The murders were just two days after the conviction in a Fairfax, Virginia, court of Pakistani Mir Aimal Kasi, who went on a 1993 shooting spree outside CIA headquarters, killing two CIA employees. For more than a decade, bin Laden has reached across the world, funding terrorism. As his money flows, so does innocent blood.
"Having borne arms against the Russians in Afghanistan," bin Laden has declared, "we think our battle with the Americans will be easy by comparison. We are now more determined to carry on until we see the face of God." "Bin Laden has plenty of manpower and explosives," declares Saad al-Faghi. And the world has learned that when a pronouncement is uttered in the name of Osama bin Laden, the threat is anything but idle.
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http://www.ict.org.il/articles/fatwah.htm
Published in Al-Quds al-'Arabi on Febuary 23, 1998
Statement signed by Sheikh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin; Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Jihad Group in Egypt; Abu- Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, a leader of the Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlul Rahman, leader of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh
Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said "I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders." The Arabian Peninsula has never--since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas--been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations. All this is happening at a time when nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.
No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.
The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.
The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al- Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said "As for the militant struggle, it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
This is in addition to the words of Almighty God "And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated and oppressed--women and children, whose cry is 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"
We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
Almighty God said "O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."
Almighty God also says "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."
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MIM: A recent Boston Herald article accesses the efforts to capture Bin Laden and concludes that "he will make a mistake sooner or later " which will result in his capture.
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http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=43858&format=text
On the run, Sly Osama keeps allies guessing
By Jules Crittenden
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, America's No. 1 enemy remains on the loose, mocking the world's sole superpower with his ability to elude the allied forces arrayed against him.
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http://www.danielpipes.org/article/77
by Daniel Pipes
Commentary
November 2001
In the aftermath of the violence on September 11, American politicians from George W. Bush on down have tripped over themselves to affirm that the vast majority of Muslims living in the United States are just ordinary people. Here is how the President put it during a visit to a mosque on September 17: "America counts millions of Muslims among our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads." Two days later, he added that "there are millions of good Americans who practice the Muslim faith who love their country as much as I love the country, who salute the flag as strongly as I salute the flag."
These soothing words, echoed and amplified by many columnists and editorial writers, were obviously appropriate at a moment of high national tension and amid reports of mounting bias against Muslims living in the United States. And it is certainly true that the number of militant Islamic operatives with plans to carry out terrorist attacks on the United States is statistically tiny. But the situation is more complex than the President would have it.
The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people—many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Ladin—who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and the desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam. Although not responsible for the atrocities in September, they harbor designs for this country that warrant urgent and serious attention.
In June 1991, Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives. On that occasion he recited from the Qur'an and appealed to the Almighty to guide American leaders "and grant them righteousness and wisdom."
A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj articulated a rather different vision from his mild and moderate invocation in the House. If only Muslims were more clever politically, he told his New Jersey listeners, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." In 1995, Wahaj served as a character witness for Omar Abdel Rahman in the trial that found that blind sheikh guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. More alarming still, the U.S. attorney for New York listed Wahaj as one of the "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators" in the sheikh's case.
The disparity between Wahaj's good citizenship in the House and his militant forecast of a Muslim takeover—not to mention his association with violent felons—is only one example of a larger pattern common to the American Muslim scene. Another example, about which I have written recently elsewhere, involves the American Muslims for Jerusalem, an organization whose official advocacy of "a Jerusalem that symbolizes religious tolerance and dialogue" contrasts markedly with the wild conspiracy-mongering and crude anti-Jewish rhetoric in which its spokesmen indulge at closed events.1 At a minimum, then, anyone who would understand the real views of American Muslims must delve deeper than the surface of their public statements.
Doing so, one discovers that the ambition to take over the United States is hardly a new one. The first missionaries for militant Islam, or Islamism, who arrived here from abroad in the 1920's, unblushingly declared, "Our plan is, we are going to conquer America." The audacity of such statements hardly went unnoticed at the time, including by Christians who cherished their own missionizing hopes. As a 1922 newspaper commentary put it:
To the millions of American Christians who have so long looked eagerly forward to the time the cross shall be supreme in every land and the people of the whole world shall have become the followers of Christ, the plan to win this continent to the path of the "infidel Turk" will seem a thing unbelievable. But there is no doubt about its being pressed with all the fanatical zeal for which the Mohammedans are noted.
But it is in recent decades, as the Muslim population in the country has increased significantly in size, social standing, and influence, and as Islamism has made its presence widely felt on the international scene, that this "fanatical zeal" has truly come into its own. A catalyzing figure in the story is the late Ismail Al-Faruqi, a Palestinian immigrant who founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought and taught for many years at Temple University in Philadelphia. Rightly called "a pioneer in the development of Islamic studies in America," he was also the first contemporary theorist of a United States made Muslim. "Nothing could be greater," Al-Faruqi wrote in the early 1980's, "than this youthful, vigorous, and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]."
Al-Faruqi's hopes are today widely shared among educated Muslim leaders. Zaid Shakir, formerly the Muslim chaplain at Yale University, has stated that Muslims cannot accept the legitimacy of the American secular system, which "is against the orders and ordainments of Allah." To the contrary, "The orientation of the Qur'an pushes us in the exact opposite direction." To Ahmad Nawfal, a leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brethren who speaks frequently at American Muslim rallies, the United States has "no thought, no values, and no ideals"; if militant Muslims "stand up, with the ideology that we possess, it will be very easy for us to preside over this world." Masudul Alam Choudhury, a Canadian professor of business, writes matter-of-factly and enthusiastically about the "Islamization agenda in North America."
For a fuller exposition of this outlook, one can do no better than to turn to a 1989 book by Shamim A. Siddiqi, an influential commentator on American Muslim issues. Cryptically titled Methodology of Dawah Ilallah in American Perspective (more idiomatically rendered as "The Need to Convert Americans to Islam"), this 168-page study, published in Brooklyn, remains largely unavailable to general readers (neither amazon.com nor bookfinder.com listed it over a period of months) but is widely posted on Islamist websites,2 where it enjoys a faithful readership. In it, in prose that makes up in intensity and vividness for what it lacks in sophistication and polish, Siddiqi lays out both a detailed rationale and a concrete plan for Islamists to take over the United States and establish "Islamic rule" (iqamat ad-din).
Why America? In Siddiqi's judgment, the need to assume control here is even more pressing than the need to sustain the revolution of the mullahs in Iran or to destroy Israel, for doing so will have a much greater positive impact on the future of Islam. America is central not for the reasons one might expect—its large population, its wealth, or the cultural influence it wields around the world—but on three other grounds.
The first has to do with Washington's role as the premier enemy of Islamism (or, possibly, of Islam itself). In Siddiqi's colorful language, whenever and wherever Muslims have moved toward establishing an Islamic state, the "treacherous hands of the secular West are always there . . . to bring about [their] defeat." Nor are Muslim rulers of any help, for they are "all in the pockets of the Western powers." If, therefore, Islam is ever going to attain its rightful place of dominance in the world, the "ideology of Islam [must] prevail over the mental horizon of the American people." The entire future of the Muslim world, Siddiqi concludes, "depends on how soon the Muslims of America are able to build up their own indigenous movement."
Secondly, America is central because establishing Islamism here would signal its final triumph over its only rival, that bundle of Christianity and liberalism which constitutes contemporary Western civilization. (One cannot help noting the irony that Siddiqi's tract appeared in the same year, 1989, as Francis Fukuyama's famous article speculating that, with the collapse of Communism and the apparent triumph of liberal democracy, we had begun to approach the "end of history.") And thirdly, and still more grandly, the infusion of the United States with Islamism would make for so powerful a combination of material success and spiritual truth that the establishment of "God's Kingdom" on earth would no longer be "a distant dream."
But this dream will not happen by itself. To American Muslims, writes Siddiqi, falls the paramount responsibility of bringing Islam to power in their country; and to this goal, Muslims must devote "all of their energies, talents, and resources." For this is how they will be assessed on judgment day: "Every Muslim living in the West will stand in the witness box in the mightiest court of Allah . . . in Akhirah [the last day] and give evidence that he fulfilled his responsibility, . . . that he left no stone unturned to bring the message of the Qur'an to every nook and corner of the country."
How this desired end is to be achieved is a question on which opinions differ in Siddiqi's world. Basically, the disagreement centers on the role of violence.
As has been made irrefutably clear in recent weeks, there are indeed some, not just abroad but living among us, who see the United States as (in the phrase of Osama bin Ladin) an "enemy of Islam" that must be brought to its knees and destroyed. In its broad outlines, this judgment came to be solidified during the crisis over Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in the early 1990's, when militants like bin Ladin discerned a historic parallel between the presence of American troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia and the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's. In their dialectical view, as the New Yorker writer Mary Ann Weaver has explained, the United States, just like the Soviet Union before it, represented "an infidel occupation force propping up a corrupt, repressive, and un-Islamic government." And just as the Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan had succeeded in defeating and driving out their occupiers, and thereby played a role in the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union itself, so Islamists might cause the collapse of the United States: one down, one to go, as it were.
To the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who after bin Laden is perhaps today's most notorious enemy of the United States, bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 was part and parcel of this revolutionary strategy to "conquer the land of the infidels" by force. The idea, as one of his followers put it, was to "bring down their highest buildings and the mighty constructions they are so proud of, in order thoroughly to demoralize them." 3 And this was a duty that Islamists saw as incumbent on all Muslims; having helped humiliate the Soviets in Afghanistan, they now, as one native-born American convert to Islam proclaimed in July 1989, must "complete the march of jihad until we reach America and liberate her."
But there are several problems with the approach of revolutionary violence, even from the perspective of those who share its goal. The most obvious has to do with its impact on American society. Although attacks like the 1993 bombing or the suicide massacres of September 11 are intended to demoralize the American people, prompt civil unrest, and weaken the country politically, what they do instead is to bring Americans together in patriotism and purpose. Those who mastermind them, in the meantime, are often caught: Abdel Rahman is sitting out a life sentence in a federal penitentiary, his campaign of violence stillborn, while Osama bin Ladin is the object of a massive manhunt to get him "dead or alive." Unlike in the very different case of the Soviet Union, it is very hard to see how the use of force will succeed in wearing down this country, much less lead to a change in government.
Besides, as a number of commentators have recently pointed out, in targeting all Americans the perpetrators of Islamic violence do not bother even to discriminate between non-Muslim and Muslim victims. According to preliminary estimates, several hundred Muslims died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. This is not exactly calculated to enlist the participation of most resident Muslims in a campaign of violent insurrection. 4
For all these reasons, the non-violent way would seem to have a brighter future, and it is in fact the approach adopted by most Islamists. Not only is it legal, but it allows its enthusiasts to adopt a seemingly benign view of the United States, a country they mean to rescue rather than to destroy, and it dictates a strategy of working with Americans rather than against them. As a teacher at an Islamic school in Jersey City, near New York, explains, the "short-term goal is to introduce Islam. In the long term, we must save American society." Step by step, writes a Pakistan-born professor of economics, by offering "an alternative model" to Americans, Muslims can transform what Ismail Al-Faruqi referred to as "the unfortunate realities of North America" into something acceptable in God's eyes.
Practically speaking, there are two main prongs to the non-violent strategy. The first involves radically increasing the number of American Muslims, a project that on the face of it would not seem very promising. Islam, after all, is still an exotic growth in the United States, its adherents representing just 1 to 2 percent of the population and with exceedingly dim prospects of becoming anything like a majority. Islamists are not so unrealistic as to think that these numbers can be substantially altered any time soon by large-scale immigration (which is politically unfeasible and might anyway provoke a backlash) or by normal rates of reproduction. Hence they focus most of their efforts on conversion.
They do so not only as a matter of expediency but on principle. For Islamists, converting Americans is the central purpose of Muslim existence in the United States, the only possible justification for Muslims to live in an infidel land. In the view of Shamim Siddiqi, there is no choice in the matter—American Muslims are "ordained by Allah" to help replace evil with good, and otherwise "have no right even to breathe." "Wherever you came from," adds Siraj Wahaj, "you came . . . for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah's din [faith]."
This imperative, relentlessly propagated by authoritative figures and promoted by leading Islamist organizations like the Muslim Student Association, has been widely adopted by Muslim Americans at large. Many attest to the sense of responsibility that flows from being an "ambassador for Islam," and are ever mindful of the cardinal importance of winning new adherents. And, given what they hold to be the truth of their message and the depravity of American culture, Islamists are optimistic about their chances of success. "A life of taqwah [piety] will immediately attract non-Muslims towards Islam," writes Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, an important Indian Islamist, in his "Message for Muslims in the West."
He has a point: the more readily the message of Islam is available, the more converts it is likely to win. In making headway in the United States, Islam has largely depended on hands-on contact and personal experience. According to one survey, over two-thirds of American converts to Islam were motivated by the influence of a Muslim friend or acquaintance. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), with its moving account of redemption through Islam, has had a wide impact on American blacks (and even some whites), causing a substantial number to convert. Similarly not to be discounted are the efforts of the various Muslim organizations in the United States, whose "attempts at educating the American public about Islam" may be responsible, according to one observer, for "Islam's increasing numbers."
But if increasing numbers are necessary, they are also not sufficient. After all, whole countries—Turkey, Egypt, Algeria—have overwhelmingly Muslim populations, but Islamism is suppressed by their governments. From an Islamist point of view, indeed, the situation in Turkey is far worse than in the United States, for it is a more grievous thing to reject the divine message as interpreted by Islamists than merely to be ignorant of it. Therefore, in addition to building up Muslim numbers, Islamists must prepare the United States for their own brand of ideology. This means doing everything possible toward creating an Islamist environment and applying Islamic law. Activities under this heading fall into various categories.
Promoting Islamic rituals and customs in the public square. Islamists want secular authorities to permit students in public institutions, for example, to recite the basmallah (the formula "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate") in classroom exercises. They also want the right to broadcast over outdoor loudspeakers the five daily Islamic calls-to-prayer. Similarly, they have agitated for publicly maintained prayer facilities in such institutions as schools and airports.
Privileges for Islam. Islamists seek public financial support for Islamic schools, mosques, and other institutions. They also lobby for special quotas for Muslim immigrants, try to compel corporations to make special allowances for Muslim employees, and demand the formal inclusion of Muslims in affirmative-action plans.
Restricting or disallowing what others may do. Islamists want law-enforcement agencies to criminalize activities like drinking and gambling that are offensive to Islam. While seeking wide latitude for themselves, for instance when it comes to expressing disrespect for American national symbols, they would penalize expressions of disrespect for religious figures whom Islam deems holy, especially the prophet Muhammad; punish criticism of Islam, Islamism, or Islamists; and close down critical analysis of Islam.
Some of these aims have already been achieved. Others may seem relatively minor in and of themselves, implying no drastic alterations in existing American arrangements but rather only slight adjustments in our already expansive accommodation of social "diversity." Cumulatively, however, by whittling away at the existing order, they would change the country's whole way of life—making Islam a major public presence, ensuring that both the workplace and the educational system accommodate its dictates and strictures, adapting family customs to its code of conduct, winning it a privileged position in American life, and finally imposing its system of law. Steps along the way would include more radical and intrusive actions like prohibiting conversion out of Islam, criminalizing adultery, banning the consumption of pork, formalizing enhanced rights for Muslims at the expense of non-Muslims, and doing away with equality of the sexes.
A Muslim majority? Islamic law the law of the land? Even the most optimistic Islamists concede the task will not be easy. Just as Muhammad confronted die-hard opponents in pagan Mecca, writes Siddiqi, so pious Muslims in America will face opponents, led by the press cum media, the agents of capitalism, the champions of atheism (Godless creeds) and the [Christian] missionary zealots." Doing battle with them will demand focus, determination, and sacrifice.
And yet Siddiqi also thinks Muslims enjoy advantages undreamt of in Muhammad's day or in any other society than today's United States. For one thing, Americans are hungry for the Islamist message, which "pinpoints the shortcoming of capitalism, elaborates the fallacies of democracy, [and] exposes the devastating consequences of the liberal lifestyle." For another, the United States permits Islamists to pursue their political agenda in an entirely legal fashion and without ever challenging the existing order. Indeed, precisely because the Constitution guarantees complete government neutrality toward religion, the system can be used to further Islamist aims. Democratic means are at hand for developing an active and persistent lobby, cultivating politicians, and electing Muslim representatives. Nearly a million legal immigrants arrive in the country each year, plus many more through the long coastlines and porous land borders. The courts are an all-important resource, and have already proved their worth in winning concession after concession from American corporations and public authorities.
Even so, the road will not be completely smooth. A delicate point will be reached, in Siddiqi's mind, as society polarizes between Muslim and non-Muslim camps "in every walk of life." At that point, as the struggle between Truth and Error "acquires momentum and the tension increases along with it," the "Wrong Doers" are likely to take desperate steps to "eliminate the Islamic movement and its workers by force." But if Islamists tread cautiously to navigate this point, taking special care not to alienate the non-Muslim population, eventually there will follow what Siddiqi calls a general "Rush-to-Islam." It will then be only a matter of time before Muslims find themselves not just enfranchised but actually running the show.
How much time? Siddiqi sees Islamists in power in Washington before 2020. For Wahaj, implementation of the shari'a in the United States "appears to be approaching fast," and in contemplating what that means his language grows ecstatic:
I have a vision in America, Muslims owning property all over, Muslim businesses, factories, halal meat, supermarkets, all these buildings owned by Muslims. Can you see the vision, can you see the Newark International Airport and a John Kennedy Airport and LaGuardia having Muslim fleets of planes, Muslim pilots. Can you see our trucks rolling down the highways, Muslim names. Can you imagine walking down the streets of Teaneck, [New Jersey]: three Muslim high schools, five Muslim junior-high schools, fifteen public schools. Can you see the vision, can you see young women walking down the street of Newark, New Jersey, with long flowing hijab and long dresses. Can you see the vision of an area of no crime, controlled by the Muslims?
It hardly needs pointing out that this vision is, to say the least, farfetched, or that Islamists are deluding themselves if they think that today's newborns will be attending college in an Iranian-style United States. But neither is their effort altogether quixotic: their devotion, energy, and skill are not to be questioned, and the larger Muslim-American community for which they claim to speak is assuredly in a position, especially as its numbers grow, to affect our public life in decisive ways. Indeed, despite persistent complaints of bias against them—more voluminous than ever in the wake of the airplane hijackings on September 11—Muslim Americans have built an enviable record of socio-economic accomplishment in this country, have won wide public acceptance of their faith, and have managed to make it particularly difficult for anyone to criticize their religion or customs.
Whether and to what degree the community as a whole subscribes to the Islamist agenda are, of course, open questions. But what is not open to question is that, whatever the majority of Muslim Americans may believe, most of the organized Muslim community agrees with the Islamist goal—the goal, to say it once again, of building an Islamic state in America. To put it another way, the major Muslim organizations in this country are in the hands of extremists.
One who is not among them is Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of the relatively small Islamic Supreme Council of America. In Kabbani's reliable estimation, such "extremists" have "taken over 80 percent of the mosques" in the United States. And not just the mosques: schools, youth groups, community centers, political organizations, professional associations, and commercial enterprises also tend to share a militant outlook, hostile to the prevailing order in the United States and advocating its replacement with an Islamic one.
Not all these organizations and spokesmen are open about their aspirations, though some are: for example, the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia, proclaims its academic purpose to be nothing less than "the Islamization of the humanities and the social sciences." But the best-known organizations—the ones whose members are invited to offer prayers and invocations before Congress or to attend White House functions, or whose representatives accompanied the President on his September 17 visit to a mosque—tend to hide their true colors behind arch-respectable goals. Thus, the American Muslim Council claims to work "toward the political empowerment of Muslims in America," the Council on American-Islamic Relations is "putting faith into action," and the Muslim Public Affairs Council seeks only to make American Muslims "an influential component in U.S. public affairs."
But as I have documented at greater length on other occasions, 5 much if not everything about the conduct of these organizations points to their essential agreement with the "conquer America" agenda, and from time to time their leaders—including Al-Faruqi and Shakir—have even said as much. As for Siraj Wahaj, he is a top figure in the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Alliance in North America, and the Muslim Arab Youth Association, and his views contaminate every single one of them. It is not accurate to say, as President Bush said of the Islamist leaders with whom he met on September 17, that they "love America as much as I do."
That a significant movement in this country aspires to erode its bedrock social and legal arrangements, including the separation of church and state, and has even developed a roadmap toward that end, poses a unique dilemma, especially at this moment. Every responsible public official, and every American of good faith, is bent on drawing a broad distinction between terrorists operating in the name of Islam and ordinary Muslim "moms and dads." It is a true and valid distinction, but it goes much too far, and if adhered to as a guideline for policy it will cripple the effort that must be undertaken to preserve our institutions.
What such an effort would look like is a subject unto itself, but at a minimum it would have to entail the vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country, the active recruitment of moderate Muslims in the fight against Islamic extremism, a keener monitoring of Muslim organizations with documented links to Islamist activity, including the support of terrorism, and the immediate reform of immigration procedures to prevent a further influx of visitors or residents with any hint of Islamist ideology. Wherever that seditious and totalitarian ideology has gained a foothold in the world, it has wrought havoc, and some societies it has brought to their knees. The preservation of our existing order can no longer be taken for granted; it needs to be fought for.
1 "Islam's American Lobby," Jerusalem Post, September 20, 2001.
2 Here are two: http://www.islambook.com/dawah.htm and http:// www. halalco.com/dawah.html.
3 These words were found in a notebook kept by Sayyid Abd al-Aziz Nusayr, the Egyptian immigrant who assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in a New York hotel in November 1990.
4 Upon hearing an immigrant Islamist speaker instruct an audience of Muslims that they were "obligated to desire, and when possible to participate in, the overthrow of any non-Islamic government—anywhere in the world—in order to replace it by an Islamic one," one American-born convert remembers protesting in dismay that this would involve people like himself in political treason. "Yes, that's true," was the lecturer's blithe response. (Jeffrey Lang, Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America, 1997.)
5 See, in Commentary, "Are Muslim Americans Victimized?" (November 2000), "How Elijah Muhammad Won" (June 2000), "‘How Dare You Defame Islam'" (November 1999), and "America's Muslims Against America's Jews" (May 1999).
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HOW TERRORISTS HAVE INFILTRATED AMERICA
Journalist Steven Emerson, since leaving CNN in 1993, has come to be regarded by many as the nation's leading expert on Islamist terror networks. He works full-time on tracking the spread of terrorist networks to American shores, at great personal risk. In 1995, not long after the release of his PBS documentary "Jihad in America," he was informed by federal officials that an Islamist death squad had been dispatched to kill him, and that he should leave his home immediately. Ever since then he has not maintained a home address, varies his routine, takes a different route to work each day and practices other "living-underground" techniques, although he continues to write and testify under his own name, and is a frequent expert on TV news reports.
With the help of a staff of researchers he has followed the terrorists' monetary sources, monitored their attacks and plans, exposed their ties to charitable foundations, and assisted a variety of government agencies in the battle against them.
"What we discovered," says Emerson of his research group, The Investigative Project, "is that, indeed, international terrorist organizations of all sorts had set up shop here in America. They often took advantage of religious, civic, or charitable organizations. Usually this was more than enough to fool the public, the police, and especially naïve leaders of religious or educational institutions, who were more than willing to encourage and sponsor these groups in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity." Meanwhile, U.S.-based terrorists have been able to use these organizations to ferry equipment to Middle Eastern terror groups, to offer financial support to the families of suicide bombers, to coordinate efforts with other terrorist networks around the world, and ultimately to plan and support terrorist acts in the United States."
Following is an exclusive excerpt from Emerson's 2002 book, "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us."
Only by knowing how the terrorists' networks operate, and what they have accomplished in the past decade, can we be vigilant in detecting any new activity. Unfortunately, the terrorists' world is complex and shadowy, full of unfamiliar names and half-known or hidden activities.
In 1987, FBI informants reported seeing weapons in the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn.
An application for a wiretap was nonetheless turned down by the Justice Department since there was no evidence of criminal conspiracy. As it turned out, however, the Alkhifa Refugee Center, then based at the mosque had become a center for counterfeiting tens of thousands of dollars, shipping explosives to Hamas in the Middle East, reconfiguring passports to enable Muslim volunteers to visit the United States, and enlisting new recruits for Jihad in Bosnia, the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere. But at the time, none of this was known.
Two years later, on Aug. 29, 1989, a Connecticut state trooper stopped a suspicious vehicle carrying six "Middle Eastern persons" near the High Rock Shooting Range in Naugatuck. According to FBI reports, the trooper found a small arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and several out-of-state license plates in the trunk. The guns were legally licensed to the driver, a local gun dealer and former Waterbury policeman of Albanian origin. He told police he was training volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. A computer check found that the extra license plates were registered to El-Sayeed Nosair, a name that meant little at the time.
A year later, on Nov. 5, 1990, Nosair leapt onto the front pages of newspapers when he murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League and leader of a militant anti-Arab movement in Israel, at a hotel in New York. By then, several foreign militant movements had moved into the liberal environment of the United States of America. By 1990, Hamas (of Palestine) and al-Gama'at al=Islamiyya (of Egypt) were here, as was the precursor to the now-infamous al-Qaida (of Afghanistan and Sudan) run by Osama bin Laden.
In the following decade, a shifting cast of characters attempted a series of attacks on American targets:
These acts all aimed at Americans at home. But terrorists have also used the country as a base for mayhem committed against other nations and against American targets abroad. Osama bin Laden, for example, used agents in the United States to purchase a satellite telephone and carry it to him, for use in planning the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Hamas is known to have sent promising Middle Eastern recruits to the United States for training; here they were taught how to build car bombs and other explosives for use in the Middle East.
Above all, the United States has proven a fertile ground for fund-raising. Nonprofit foundations have helped raise untold sums supporting terrorist activities in the Middle East and elsewhere. Overall, the terrorists' activities can be divided into four categories: recruitment, fund-raising and /or money-laundering, networking, and direct organizing.
Recruitment
Foreign terrorist organizations have utilized solo operators in America as well as groups. Some of their representatives and supporters have entered the country illegally, using visa fraud; they have also actively recruited individuals who are able to use American passports to travel freely around the world.
A few examples will give the general idea. For just one example of visa fraud, consider the case of Ghazi Ibrahim abu Mezer. In 1997, he was arrested by New York police acting on a tip, foiling his plan to bomb the city subway system. Abu Mezer had no business being in this country; he had been apprehended on three separate occasions by the Immigration and Naturalization Service within little more than a year prior to his arrest, each time for illegally entering the country from Canada.
The INS had begun deportation proceedings, a lengthy process during which abu Mezer was free on bail. He had complicated the matter by applying for political asylum on the grounds that he was in danger of arrest by Israeli law enforcement thanks to his membership in the Hamas organization.
As abu Mezer's example demonstrates, visa fraud is a messy business for terrorists. It is possible, and sometimes even easy, to avoid detention and INS proceedings for months and even years, but if your real name is on a list of suspected terrorists, you must operate clandestinely. Even if the wheels of justice grind slowly, they do grind. Far better, then, for the terrorist organization is to recruit members who hold American passports.
For example, Hamas used Mohammed Salah, an American naturalized citizen, to travel to Israel using his American passport in order to enter Palestinian territories carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars—primarily from the head of the Hamas Political Bureau in the United States, Musa abu Marzook - to be distributed to Hamas military leaders in the Palestinian territories to help build the military/terrorist infrastructure there.
Salah, also known as Abu Ahmed, is a Chicago-based car dealer who was arrested by the Israelis in 1993 while funneling these monies to Hamas terrorists and who was subsequently released in 1997 ultimately to return to Chicago. While he was detained in Israel, he was declared a Specially Designated Terrorist by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and his assets were frozen in 1995. On June 8, 1998, his assets, and those of the Quranic Literacy Institute in Chicago, were seized in a civil forfeiture action by the U.S. government as proceeds of a Hamas money- laundering operation.
Another example is that of Wadih el-Hage, a 40-year-old naturalized American citizen from Lebanon who worked for al_Qaida and who was convicted in 2001 for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. FBI Special Agent Roberts Miranda testified in 2001 at the trial of Wadih el-Hage and others for their roles in the bombings regarding an interview he conducted with el-Hage on Aug. 20, 1998:
MIRANDA: Yes. He said that because he had an American passport, Usama bin Laden wanted him to work for him because he could travel more freely and buy things for bin Laden.
One of Wadih el-Hage's attorneys, Sam Schmidt, emphasized this point even further at the same trial by stating:
Wadih el-Hage served as Osama bin Laden's personal secretary in the early 1990s. In 1994, el-Hage moved to Kenya to set up businesses for bin Laden to be used as terrorist fronts. Mr. Hage's business card shows him as a director of Anhar Trading, a company with addresses in Hamburg, Germany, and Arlington, Texas.
One last example of al-Qaida's use of a U.S. passport holder shows how American residents can use their mobility and access to technology to promote evil. On Dec. 29, 1999, Jordanian authorities arrested "Khalil Ziyad," identified by the FBI as a Florida-based "procurement agent" for Osama bin Laden. His arrest was not publicly revealed by Jordanian authorities and he was later released. But according to U.S. government sources, "Khalil Ziyad" is most likely cooperating with the FBI and providing crucial evidence about the U.S. network of militant Muslims. "Ziyad" was to "procure computers, satellite telephone and covert surveillance equipment" for the leadership of bin Laden's organization.
"Khalil Ziyad" is actually known in the United States as Ziyad Khaleel (a.k.a. Ziyad Sadaqa, a.k.a Ziyad Abdulrahman). Public records reveal that he was associated with a variety of addresses in Orlando, Detroit, Columbia (Missouri), and Denver. Khaleel was also responsible for administering a variety of the most radical Islamic Web sites on the Internet.
At various points in the late 1990s, according to Internic/Network Solutions database records, Khaleel was the administrative and billing contact of the official Hamas Web site (http://www.palestine-info.net), the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) Web site (http://www.fisalgeria.org), the Web site of Liberty for the Muslim World (http://www.lmw.org), and the Palestine Times Web site (http://www.ptimes.com).
Liberty for the Muslim World, a London-based group, vigorously promotes and defends Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other terror groups, and republishes much of their propaganda. The Palestine Times is a monthly newspaper of the Palestine Information Center, the sponsor of the official Hamas Web site. The official Hamas Web site is regularly updated to maintain a photographic record of Hamas terrorists who have been killed, or martyred, as a result of their terrorist actions.
In addition, the Web site contains a section entitled "Hamas Operations - The Glory Record" which details many of the significant terrorist attacks carried out by the Hamas movement since its beginning. Khaleel has given at least one lecture to students at the University of Missouri (Columbia campus) representing the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP).
Until recently, the FBI would not have been allowed to investigate Khaleel. He did not have to tell anyone about his whereabouts. He couldn't be stopped from giving a lecture even if there were suspicions about him. Our freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion are among our most cherished rights, and the Bill of Rights, where these freedoms are enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, is one of the documents that makes America a beacon to the world.
What we must understand, however, is that these same freedoms are especially attractive to religious terrorists. We cannot stop anyone from preaching violence short of the "clear and present danger" standard, because we punish deeds, not words. We cannot stop groups from gathering to share their political views, even if one of those views is that the U.S. must be destroyed.
Fundraising and Money Laundering
Much of the terrorists' fundraising has been the old-fashioned kind: grassroots drives, featuring conferences at which leaders exhort attendees to dig down deep. Representatives of charities dedicated to serving "widows and orphans" of the Middle East conflict make pious appeals; they generally don't admit that they are sending money to the widows of suicide bombers. For example, an organization called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development has been suspected of funneling millions per year to Hamas activists.
Sometimes, according to authorities, the terrorists get more creative. On July 21, 2000, agents from the FBI in Charlotte, N.C., charged 18 people with smuggling contraband cigarettes to Michigan from North Carolina and money-Laundering, among other things. What they were really doing, according to authorities, was providing "currency, financial services, training, false documentation and identification, communications equipment, explosives, and other physical assets to Hizballah, in order to facilitate its violent attacks."
The media quickly dubbed the group the "Charlotte Hizballah cell." The group's lawyers say that providing aid to Hizballah shouldn't be illegal, since it is primarily a political and religious group. They also say that the case should be limited to a routine cigarette-smuggling claim rather than anything related to counter-terrorism statutes.
The suspects were initially accused of fraudulently obtaining visas and of setting up sham marriages. Their main economic activity allegedly consisted of buying cigarettes in large quantities from outlets in North Carolina and smuggling them to Michigan. Later, authorities charged eight men and one woman with providing assistance to Hizballah. These individuals are accused of planning to purchase night-vision goggles and cameras, stun guns. Blasting equipment, binoculars, radars, laser range-finders, mine detection equipment and advanced aircraft-analysis and design software; they also had wired money between accounts controlled by Hizballah operatives and even arranged life-insurance policies for operatives who might be killed in action. The government, unable to resist the pun, dubbed its sting "Operation Smokescreen."
I myself can testify to how widespread grassroots fundraising efforts are here in the United States. I have been at multiple conferences at which money has been raised for jihad, with passionate speeches that spare few details about the ultimate objectives of the fund-raisers.
Networking
By far the most important tactic utilized by terrorist groups in America has been to use nonprofit organizations to establish a zone of legitimacy within which fund-raising, recruitment, and even outright planning can occur. The use of charitable organizations by jihad warriors and their supporters is a complicated subject. Often, the organizations are perfectly legitimate, but they unwittingly provide a forum for evil. Many of these organizations react strongly when accused of collaborating with or facilitating the work of terrorists, for understandable reasons. If their official policy is to oppose and denounce terrorism, how much responsibility must they bear for the contrary behaviors of individual members or guest speakers?
At the meeting of the Muslim Arab Youth Association that I happened upon in 1992, for example, I was at a conference of a group that does very little, at least on the surface. MAYA runs conferences which other groups attend, and where speakers make speeches; it produces and sells an Arabic magazine, Almujtamaa, and it helps Muslim youths meet one another. At its Web site, you can download a "marriage application" in English or in Arabic. The organization does not issue many press releases, and those that it does are perfectly respectable.
After Sept. 11, 2001, MAYA promptly issued a condemnation of "these apparently senseless acts of terrorism against innocent civilians, which will only be counterproductive to any agenda the perpetrators may have had in mind." The release added the observation that "No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts."
Yet, as I have witnessed firsthand, MAYA's conferences bring together many promoters of hate and violence, and serve as fund-raising opportunities for groups that funnel money to the families of terrorists, perhaps even to the terrorists themselves. I have been accused of anti-Muslim bias for charging MAYA and similar organizations with supporting terrorism. I do not mean to suggest that all members of MAYA are sympathizers. Much less collaborators. But I do believe that the organization must take responsibility for what happens at its conferences.
Direct Organizing
I should note here, however, that there are also far more purposively sinister organizations in this country. These include a Tampa and Chicago- based organization run in part by known terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network took control of a network of offices dedicated to supporting Afghan mujahideen and refugees, located in over 30 American cities including such major urban centers as New York, Boston and Tucson.
In some cases, the terror networks have been operated under their own names. One good example is the Advice and Reformation Committee, also known as ARC, set up by a man names Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Fawwaz has been indicted by the United States in association with the bombing of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the United States is currently seeking his extradition from the United Kingdom in order to put him on trial. Al-Fawwaz was tasked directly by bin Laden to create the Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC) in London to facilitate the propaganda efforts of bin Laden against Saudi Arabia for permitting American troops to be based on its soil. As bin Laden has made clear repeatedly, the American "occupation" of the country in which are located the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, is one of the reasons why he declared jihad against all American citizens. Bin Laden himself is listed on the British articles of incorporation for the ARC.
On Dec. 2, 1998, U.S. prosecutors unsealed documents seeking the extradition of Khalid-al-Fawwaz. Among the unsealed documents were two invoices for telephone services billed to the Advice and Reformation Committee that were seized when authorities investigating the bin Laden organization searched al-Fawwaz's London apartment. These invoices bore post office box addresses in Denver, Colo., and Kansas City, Mo Despite having at least two United States addresses, the ARC was never incorporated in the United States. If there are other branches of the Advice and Reformation Committee here, they are under no obligation to announce themselves.
A number of known organizations are closely linked to infamous international terrorist organizations. For example, the brother of the head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and one of his top deputies (and eventual successor) came to America to help form and run an organization in Tampa and Chicago. On the other hand, the ties between terrorists and many of the mainstream Muslim groups are far more tenuous. The leaders of the Muslim Arab Youth Association are not suspected to be terrorists—but they are clearly proponents of militant Islam, and their group serves an important function as a venue for radical ideology to be disseminated in the American terrorist infrastructure. To paraphrase Mao, MAYA provides the sea in which the fish swim. But MAYA itself is not likely guilty of any criminal behavior.
I cannot overemphasize that the total number of terrorists in the U.S. is but a fraction of the total number of Islamic extremists, which itself is but a tiny fraction of the total number of American Muslims. There are peaceful and genuinely moderate Muslim-American leaders and organizations here, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of America and the Ibn Khaldun Society. If anything, it is precisely because extremism exists within otherwise legitimate, nonviolent organizations that it must be exposed. Some of these organizations, even as they pursue "civil right" and "humanitarian" causes, champion Islamic extremism.
One final bit of perspective: There are over 1,200 mosques in the United States, and anywhere from three to eight million Muslims (the figure is heavily disputed, although new studies clearly indicate the number at the lower end of the range). The vast majority of all American Muslims subscribe to the strong Islamic tradition of tolerance and human dignity. Yet for one key reason, the extremists have disproportionate influence. One prominent cleric argued in 1999 that "because they are active they took over…more than 80 percent of the mosques that have been established in the U.S."
Although our pluralist ideals tend to view this statement as an automatic exaggeration, the reality is far more sobering. The vast majority of American mosques are funded with Saudi Arabian money, and most of the funders subscribe to the Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism, an 18th-century ideology of extreme purity that supports the spread of Islam through violence. Local imams can be appointed by anyone who chooses to fund and/or found a mosque; hence, the influence of this minority ideology is well entrenched among American clerics.
Long before Sept. 11, 2001, investigative journalist and terror expert Steven Emerson was warning the U.S. government about the imminent threat radical islamists posed to this country. In his Jan. 25, 2000, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, Emerson highlighted the stunning array of terrorist kingpins who had set up shop in the United States.
"The list of major international terrorists and militants allowed to enter the United States in recent years or actually granted green cards and citizenship," he told the congressional committee, "is nothing less than staggering." They included:
Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, head of the Egyptian Al Gamat Al Islamiya, and convicted leader of an interdicted plot to bomb U.S. landmarks, bridges, and tunnels in New York.
Musa Abu Marzook, one of the top three officials of Hamas (who founded and operated a "think tank" in Chicago and Virginia)
Ali Mohammed, a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden (and not insignificantly, enrolled as a Special Forces sergeant at Fort Bragg)
Wadih el Hage, secretary to Osama bin Laden.
Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (who served as a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa).
Sheikh Abdel Aziz Odeh, spiritual leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (who visited the United States multiple times for fundraising and political recruitment without any knowledge of the INS)
Ayman Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Al-Gihad organization, lieutenant to Osama bin Laden and conspirator in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Rashhid Ghannoushi, head of the Tunisian Al-nahdah.
Anwar Haddam, a leader of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)
Leith Shbeilat, a militant Islamic leader implicated in assassination plot against Jordan's King Hussein.
Khalid Mishal, a top leader of Hamas, who, in his speeches in the United States, has called for stabbings.
Kamal Hilbawi, a spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood, who has called for attacks on American targets and who has encouraged carrying out of suicide bombings.
Yusef Al Qaradawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and active supporter of Hamas and other violent groups, who has called for suicide bombings and taking over the United States.
Qazi Hussein Ahmed, leader of Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami, a militant group that supports violent "jihad" or holy war.
Ramzi Yousef, the top organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Sheikh Abdulmunem Abu Zant, a militant Jordanian Islamic cleric, who has routinely called for violence.
Ishaq Al-Farhan, a leader of the militant Islamic Jordan Action Front who has issued numerous exhortations to carry out violence.
Wagdi Ghunium, a militant Islamic cleric from Egypt, who has called for jihad against Jews and other "enemies of Islam."
Jihad In America - Interview With Author Steven Emerson ----------------------------------------- Interview with Kenneth Timmerman author of "Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America" http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/timmerman200311210851.asp
Hate to Win? Journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman is author, most recently, of Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America. He recently spoke to NRO about his book, Islam, and the war on terror. Kathryn Jean Lopez: What first took you to the Middle East and the Arab world? Kenneth R. Timmerman: I first began reporting on the Middle East during the 1982 war in Lebanon as a radio stringer, and promptly wound up kidnapped by Fatah guerillas in Beirut and held for 24 days in a cellar prison. It was an experience that changed my life; among other things, it taught me firsthand how important freedom is. It also gave me a fascination with various cultures of the Middle East. Lopez: How often have you been back? Timmerman: After that initial trip to Lebanon, I spent the next two years on and off in Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, and Lebanon — until Hezbollah shot up the booze in the Commodore Hotel (February 1984). Then I migrated to covering the Iran-Iraq war. In Baghdad hotels, I think I must have met nearly every Western arms dealer who ever did business with Saddam. Surprisingly, they loved to talk. So did Saddam's top weapons' technicians. I was the first Westerner to interview Lt. Gen. Amir Rashid al-Obeidi, father of Iraq's missile and aviation programs, and Lt. Gen. Amir Hamoody al-Saadi, father of the chemical and nuclear-weapons programs, in 1986. Some of that information I have saved for another book. Since returning to the States in 1993, I have gone back to the Middle East once, twice, sometimes three times a year, and remain in close contact with "closed" countries through exiles and business travelers. Lopez: When were you most recently in that part of the world? Timmerman: I interviewed the Grand Mufti of Egypt for Preachers of Hate in November 2002. Although he is reportedly a "moderate," he stunned me by stating — repeatedly — that he felt it was a duty incumbent upon all believing Muslims to murder Jews. I also went during that trip to the scene of the Passover bombing in Netanya, where I interviewed survivors and members of the ZAKA unit, the Orthodox rabbis whose job is to pick up all the body parts spattered against walls and in streets after the homicide bombers do their evil, to give them a proper burial according to Jewish ritual. I have tried to get inside the mind of the bombers — through interviews which I describe in the book — and to describe for ordinary Americans the horror of these terrorist attacks. Lopez: How many imams are actually preaching hate — here and abroad? And where are the exceptions? Timmerman: There is a struggle underway for the soul of Islam between the preachers of hate and the preachers of peace. Unfortunately, as I document in my book, the preachers of hate are winning. I say this because from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, state-appointed clerics are preaching to the faithful that it is their "duty" to murder Jews, because Jews are "rejected" by God, who turned them into "monkeys and pigs." It is not well-known in the West that these clerics are, in fact, employees of the state. No one can ascend the minaret of the Great Mosque in Mecca, as Sheikh Abdelaziz al-Sudais does regularly, without the sanction of the king. After the latest terror attack in Saudi Arabia, al-Sudais was widely quoted for having declared that the perpetrators were "un-Islamic" because their victims included Arabs and Muslims. Just one year earlier, however, he was on Saudi state television, where he called on the faithful to murder Jews and American "worshippers of the Cross." I argue in Preachers of Hate that everything changed in 1979. That was when the shah of Iran fell, and when the Saudi royal family out of fear and trembling agreed to finance a worldwide expansion of militant Wahhabi Islam. To my knowledge, no one has really focused on those two key events before as the genesis of the war of terror launched against the West by militant Islam. Lopez: What is the most common lie about Jews in the Arab world? About the West? Timmerman: Clearly, it is the widespread belief that there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. As I detail in Preachers of Hate, I was stunned when I first asked Arab leaders about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the basic antisemitic playbook. Many of them actually pulled out their own copy of the book, and cited it as gospel truth. They actually believe that this fiction initially spread by the intelligence services of the Russian czar in 1895 contains the actual minutes of conspiratorial meetings among Jewish leaders, who were plotting to take over the world. Much more depressing: There is no amount of logic or rational argument that can steer people who believe this type of nonsense away from it. Even a full year after 9/11, I found in universities and among newsmen in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim Middle East, that intelligent people actually believe that Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, carried out the September 11 attacks on America. Conspiracy thinking is not just loony: it kills. Lopez: What do you mean when you say that "It begins with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews." Timmerman: Jews have always been the targets of opportunity for haters of this world. But since 1979, we've seen the basic antisemitic beliefs morph into an ideology that goes beyond religious hate. Increasingly, radical Islam and the institutional Left, especially in Europe, find themselves on the same side in hating Jews, rejecting Israel's right to exist, and demanding an end to America's "hegemony." For the haters, Jews and America are one and the same. They hate us for our freedom, for our secular societies, for our tolerance. That is the great Jewish world conspiracy, and it is something Jews have shared with America. It is a conspiracy of freedom. Lopez: Today, do the mainstream in Arab countries understand what happened on 9/11? Timmerman: The failure to come to grips with 9/11 starts at the very top. It took five months before Saudi Interior Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz, his country's point man in the war on terror, even acknowledged that 15 Saudi citizens had carried out the attacks. One year after 9/11, well-known Arab intellectuals such as Diaa Rashwan of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo still claimed there was "no evidence" of bin Laden's involvement. These are absolutely stunning denials of rational thought that do not augur well for the future of this part of the world. If the leaders can't come to grips with what happened on 9/11 and what was behind it, how can the people who rely on them for leadership? Lopez: How widespread is Holocaust denial? Timmerman: Arab countries regularly host conferences on what is euphemistically called "historical revisionism," the Holocaust deniers who masquerade as historians and claim to be able to "prove" there was no massacre of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. I heard this on a very personal level during some of the interviews I conducted in Gaza and elsewhere. One Hamas leader in Gaza, Saad Shawa, told me that the Holocaust was "a big illusion of the Jews." As "proof," he cited the "fact" that all the films documenting the death camps were "produced by the Jews, but there are not any actual photographs from that period of history, which did not yet have film." The Zayed Center in the United Arab Emirates recently hosted a French author named Thierry Meysson who I believe is engaged in "real-time" revisionism. Monsieur Meysson has written a bestseller in France that claims no airplane crashed into the Pentagon, because no debris from the crash was ever found. To his mind, it was all a plot by the CIA and the U.S. military, who used an U.S. Air Force cruise missile to murder Americans to justify a new Middle East war. I couldn't invent that. Conspiracy thinking just takes your breath away. Lopez: What's the "Arab street" reaction to something like the synagogue bombings in Turkey this weekend? Timmerman: I haven't seen any reaction to the bombing. I have seen no commentary, no condemnation, no expressions of regret, no condolences. It reminds me a bit of the reaction to 9/11, where many editorialists in Muslim countries opined that America was reaping its just reward. Lopez: Who is your target audience for Preachers of Hate and what do you hope readers come away from it with? Timmerman: Antisemitism is a non-Jewish disease that kills Jews. It is the sewer from which the likes of Osama bin Laden have emerged. It has swept across the Arab and Muslim world, and it is reemerging with deadly force in Europe, 60 years after the Holocaust. For the first time since the Holocaust, Jews in Europe are afraid. I expect that most American Jews understand the dangers of antisemitism, but many non-Jewish Americans are probably unaware of just how extensive the hate teaching has gone. I offer this book as a wake-up call. When whole generations of Muslim children are being brought up to believe that Jews are the "sons of monkeys and pigs," and that they have a religious duty to murder Jews "and the Americans that are like them," then no amount of wishful thinking is going to make them go away. This is not a social problem. It is not even a political problem. It has become an existential problem: How do we come to terms with large groups of people who want to see us dead? Lopez: Your last book was on Jesse Jackson, who makes a showing in this book. To what extent do American liberals like Jackson feed Islamist hate by refusing to repudiate it? Timmerman: Antisemitism frequently masquerades as "anti-Zionism," a rejection of the right of Jews to a Jewish state. Martin Luther King warned against this 35 years ago. Here is what he wrote to an "anti-Zionist" friend: "You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews — this is God's own truth." Jesse Jackson never got the message 35 — years ago, and he still doesn't get it today. We've seen an astonishing expansion of antisemitic hate speech and demonstrations at universities and colleges across America over the past decade, much of it masquerading as anti-Zionism. In part, this has come from the institutional Left — which has always viewed the PLO as a "national liberation" group, and not as terrorists. We are also seeing it in Europe. Even in a country such as Norway, which has fewer than 2,000 Jews, I detail how the Left has organized a national boycott of Israeli products. Lopez: It seems so hard to talk honestly about imams and Arab leaders calling for jihad, telling lies about Jews, without sounding hateful. And yet it is essential. How does one do it? How is the president doing on this front? Timmerman: The president has gone out of his way — too much so, in the eyes of some — to distinguish between Islam as it is practiced by many loyal and patriotic Americans, and the Islam of hate, intolerance and murder. In the very moving speech he gave in London on his arrival this Wednesday, he remarked that the belief that the Arab world is incapable of democracy — a belief held by most Orientalists and Saudi-sponsored Arab-affairs "experts" — was the politics of "pessimism and condescension." He also noted that "we must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East." My own experience on the ground in the West Bank and elsewhere concords with this. There is a thirst for pluralism, for secularism, for fair government and for freedom throughout the Arab world. Instead, Arab leaders are encouraging their own Islamists to teach the young that "Islam is the solution," in the hopes it will divert their attention from the failed policies of their leaders. Lopez: What's the most encouraging sign of hope coming out of the Arab world today? Timmerman: Without a doubt, it is the incredible movement toward freedom that has been set in motion in Iraq. It is essential, in my view, that we succeed in helping Iraqis to create a new society based on freedom and tolerance that can spread across the region, working like an antidote to the virus of hate. ---
Talking with journalist Kenneth Timmerman.
A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez
Link to terrorism websites and information :
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/429/429links.htm
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http://www.techcentralstation.com/120704B.html
Why the Islamists Target Steve Emerson
But the same MPAC that comports itself as if it had no Islamist nature whatever, and had only just heard about Wahhabism and other radical doctrines, also targets and even profiles people. That was what MPAC chief executive Salam al-Marayati did on radio within hours of the September 11 atrocities. According to The New York Times of October 22, 2001, he told station KCRW, "If we're going to look at suspects we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what's happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies."
MPAC targets people, and with the release of propaganda for their convention, they have selected an impressive range of individuals they hope to marginalize. On the garish poster they have put on line, at www.mpac.org, five individuals are shown, identified as "THE FACES THAT ARE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT TERRORISM:" Osama bin Laden, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Rev. Pat Robertson, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who heads the Investigative Project, the most comprehensive counter-terrorist institute in the world today. The Investigative Project is uniquely effective in tracking the activities of Islamic militant groups.
The poster declares on behalf of MPAC, "Now It's Our Turn," allegedly to "counter religious and political extremism." The messages are multiple and clear: Daniel Pipes is comparable to Osama bin Laden, i.e. a terrorist. The Bush administration, of which Secretary Rumsfeld is a key member, is the equivalent of bin Laden's conspiracy.
But what is the message about -- and to -- Steven Emerson? Emerson does not concern himself with historical issues involving Islam, as Pipes and Robertson, the latter from the viewpoint of evangelical Christianity, do. And Steven Emerson is not responsible for guiding
The main aims of MPAC is, first, to cement an image of the Bush Administration as an enemy of Islam (significantly mirroring the same accusation that Ayman al-Zawahiri has levelled against
The second major goal is to discredit Americans who understand what Islamism and terrorism are about and who, like Emerson, have uncovered the terrorist networks established in the
Emerson, of all the five faces, is targeted more for what he does than what he says, although he speaks frequently on MSNBC as a terrorism expert and he and his staff are quoted frequently in the national and international media. His presence on TV, as much as his content, sticks in MPAC's craw, even though Emerson's investigations, analysis and statements have invariably been devastatingly accurate. Government agencies and congressional leaders have frequently sought Emerson's input and information because of his vast archives on militant Islamic groups and his key role in laying the groundwork for prosecutions, indictments, asset forfeitures, and major media investigations.
The Islamists, including MPAC with its interfaith sweet talk and moderate posturing, are afraid of the light of day being shone upon their financial resources, their history of associations with extremist groups, their complicity in the radicalization of American Islam, and their accommodation to extreme ideologies and terrorist claims.
Emerson has done more than any other individual to expose these dangers to the safety of our country and of the majority of law-abiding American Muslims. For this, he is targeted for obloquy, and, in fact, for barely-concealed threats. Yet, as MPAC knows, Emerson is uniquely respected by government and law enforcement agencies, by national security journalists, and by the American public.
Emerson's 2002 best-seller, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, is an indispensable manual for every American concerned for the safety of his or her person and family, and for American government. It follows other major contributions by Emerson, including his 1985 book The American House of Saud, which anticipated my own Two Faces of Islam and remains a key volume on the shelf of every Saudi analyst. It also builds on Emerson's 1994 PBS documentary, Jihad in America, which revealed the existence of a secret Islamic terrorist network in the
MPAC has advertised a conference that will be one long recitation of condemnations. Bin Laden will be condemned because to fail to do so would make MPAC even more vulnerable than it already is. Pipes' name will be yelled out as if at a Soviet hate rally, as will that of Robertson. It is doubtful much verbiage will be expended on Rumsfeld, since he is still in office and MPAC is terrified of the Bush administration -- not because of what the administration has done to them or any of their friends, but because of what they imagine the administration would do to them if all their questionable activities were thoroughly investigated.
I predict Steve Emerson's name will be reserved for the most dramatic moments in the stylized theatre of alleged victimization of American Muslims. That is only because, more than even Pipes, to say nothing of Rumsfeld or Robertson, Emerson knows how the terror financing networks function. MPAC knows it can do nothing to impede Rumsfeld or Robertson, so all the noise is really about Pipes and Emerson.
And who has MPAC chosen to present its fatwa-style defamations?
All the big guns of American Islamism, plus a few of their dupes, aligned to foil Pipes and, above all, Steven Emerson! Emerson should be proud. But the Islamists will not prevail. Truth, of which Emerson is an outstanding defender and partisan, will prevail. MPAC should save themselves the trouble and cancel their hatefest. However much they may wish it were not true, Islamism will be defeated in
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http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/fatw2.htm
Pubished in the Arabic Newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi (London, U.K.) on 23 February, 1998, p. 3.
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/266
