Tag Archives: Anwar al-Awlaki

February fundraiser for convicted terrorist supporter in Al-Awlakis mosque

On Saturday, February 13, the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia– about 20 minutes from the White House–  held a fundraiser dinner to raise money for Sabri Benkhala‘s various legal appeals. (They’re holding an even bigger fundraiser in April, which may be attended by some well-known elected officials.) Benkhala is serving a 10-year term in a federal prison for perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI.

According to a February 5, 2007 statement from the Department of Justice: "Benkahla was convicted of making materially false statements both in his grand jury appearances in 2004, as well as to the FBI in 2004. These false statements included his denial of his involvement with an overseas jihad training camp in 1999, as well as his asserted lack of knowledge about individuals with whom he was in contact."

If you want to fundraise for a jailed jihadist, Dar Al-Hijrah is definitely the $40-donation-for-a-halal-chicken-dinner venue of choice. 

In fact, their original Constitution required their Board of Directors to  include  leaders of  Muslim Brotherhood front groups who would later be identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: "the Current Secretary General of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Current President of Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), the Current General Manager of North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the Current President of Muslim American Society (MAS)." 

Dar Al-Hijrah’s  jihadist credentials are impeccable:

  • Dar Al-Hijra is the mosque where Anwar al-Awlaki was Imam  between January 2001 and April 2002. Al-Awlaki (bio here and here) was the senior al-Qaeda recruiter and motivator for various terrorists, including three 9/11 hijackers, the accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up  Northwest Airlines Flight 253.  Al-Awlaki may still be alive in Yemen, and after some concerns about his civil rights, reportedly the Obama administration now has him targeted as a terrorist.
  • And who can forget that earlier Dar Al-Hijra Imam from 1995-1999, Mohammed Al-Hanooti,  named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1999, when he was still Imam at Dar Al-Hijra, he testified in support of Ihab M. Ali, who had refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the 1998 United States embassy bombings.   Al-Hanooti told the federal judge that Islamic law "gives him [Ihab M. Ali] the right to abstain from giving testimony in case it hurts him or it hurts any other Muslim."
  • Or the Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Studies teacher– and Dar Al Hijra Islamic Camp Counselor–  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, convicted in 2005 of providing material support to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and conspiracy to assassinate President Bush, now serving a life sentence.  Abu Ali was also valedictorian of his class at the Saudi Islamic Academy, the Saudi Embassy-backed 900-student school in the Washington, DC suburbs, that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly urged the US State Department to shut down on the grounds that it teaches religious intolerance.
  • Or the Dar Al-Hijra Imam between August 2003 and May 2005, the memorable Sheikh Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, formerly a Muslim Brotherhood member and Shariah judge in the Sudan, and one of the founders of both the mosque and the Muslim American Society (MAS), who left the mosque to become the executive director of the Fiqh Council of North America.

That’s the same Fiqh Council that on February 9, 2010 issued a legal opinion– a fatwa – against the use of full body scanners in airports for Muslims.  He’s also active in bringing Shariah law to America, as the head of the Islamic Judiciary Council of the Shari’ah Scholars’ Association of North America (SSANA).

  • And we cannot neglect to mention the member of Dar Al-Hijrah’s Executive Committee, Abelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, convicted in November 2007 of contempt and obstruction of justice for refusal to testify before a grand jury with regard to Hamas, and sentenced to 135 months in prison.  A major Hamas operative since at least 1988, Ashqar was accused of opening bank accounts and maintaining U.S. records for Hamas.
  • Shaker Elsayed, the current Imam, and founder and Chairman of that "United Justice Foundation" fundraising organization for convicted terrorists,  is a dual citizen of Egypt and the U.S.  He stated in  a sermon at the Dar Al Hijrah in 2005, shortly after becoming Imam there and stacking the Board of Directors with Muslim American Society leaders,  that "Islam forbids you to give allegiance to those who kick you off your homeland, and to those who support those who kick you off your homeland… We do have license to respond with all force necessary to answer our attackers."  And in the same sermon he stated, "The call to reform Islam is an alien call."  He is also an outspoken supporter of Hamas and their objectives, including the destruction of Israel.

In 2005, when the current Imam Shaker Elsayed became Imam, he amended the mosque’s constitution to give precedence to the Muslim American Society, and now the mosque Board is run by the "Current President of the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Current MAS DC Area Chapter President, the Executive Director of MAS National Office."  Elsayed had been Secretary General of the Muslim American Society before becoming Dar Al Hijrah’s imam.  The Muslim American Society was founded in 1993 as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was Imam Shaker Elsayed who sent the email invitation text for the February 13, 2010 fundraiser for Sabri Benkhala:

Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:22:48 -0700
From: legaladmin@universal-justice.net
Subject: Mark Your Calendar (2/13/10): Dinner

Dear Friends of Justice,

Assalamu Alaikum. The Universal Justice Foundation is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a fundraising dinner to support Br. Sabri Benkahla by contributing to his legal fees. The event will feature Dr. Jamal Badawi from Canada, Imam Rodwaan Saleh from Texas, and Br. Sabri’s attorney John Sheldon, Esq. and will be held at Dar Al Hijrah IslamicCenter’s Main Courtyard. Tickets are only $40 and registration will be at 5:30. The program will begin promptly at 6:00 P.M., and dinner will be served early. Please arrange to purchase tickets as soon as possible because space is limited! You may buy tickets at our website www.universal-justice.net or from Sh. Shaker at Dar Al Hijrah. If neither option is convenient, please email us at legaladmin@universal-justice.net and we will arrange your ticket sale…

May Allah reward you greatly for your efforts in serving justice!

Sincerely,

Shaker Elsayed
Founder and Chairman, UJF

  • And let’s not forget the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan attended Dar Al-Hijrah periodically when he lived in the Washington, DC area, up to 2009 when he was transferred to Texas, and his now infamous powerpoint presentation, "The Koranic Worldview as it Related to Muslims in the Military" is closely in line with the 2005 preaching of the current Dar Al-Hijrah Imam, Shaker Elsayed.    See for example slide 11 in that series: "It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims"; the examples in slide 13; or the quote that appears to track exactly with Elsayed’s 2005 sermon, on slide 49:  "Fighting to establish an Islamic State, to please God even by force, is condoned by the Islam."

Dar Al-Hijrah has been staffed by a series of Imams who radicalize their members– the members don’t "self-radicalize," as Major Hasan was said to do in the negligent report on the Fort Hood Shooting put out by the Pentagon.  The U.S. intelligence community missed the warning signals from Dar Al-Hijrah’s earlier Imam Anwar al-Awlaki; they should heed the warning signals from the current Imam, Shaker Elsayed.

More on this in days to come, including which invited elected officials could be coming to dinner at Dar Al-Hijrah in April, at their gala annual fundraiser.

 

Originally posted at BigGovernment.com

None dare call it submission

Sometimes out of tragedy can come great good. If it costs no more than 13 lives at Fort Hood finally to recognize and correct the systemic errors in our national understanding of, and response to, what animates Muslims who seek our destruction, the sacrifice of those who lost their lives will not have been in vain.

In the wake of their murders, it is now clear that the United States government has thus far failed utterly in these respects. To understand just how complete that failure has been, consider — based on the particulars of the case of the alleged shooter, Army Major Nihad Malik Hasan — what is now deemed permissible on the part of Muslim members of the armed forces:

  • They can associate in person or via e-mail with known al-Qaida sympathizers and recruiters as long as some excuse can be found to construe such contacts as consistent with, for example, their “research.”
  • They can attend mosques that promote the most virulently intolerant and supremacist theo-political-legal program — what authoritative Islam calls “Shariah” — which requires its adherents to engage in jihad (holy war).
  • They can actively try to convert other servicemen and women to Shariah, including individuals whose service to their country has left them scarred, debilitated, or otherwise susceptible to such recruitment.
  • They can publicly decry the war effort, vilify the United States, and insist that it is engaging in a “war against Islam.”
  • They can be suspected of approving of suicide bombers.
  • They can violate their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” by asserting that that foundational document should be subordinated to Shariah.

In the wake of the murders allegedly perpetrated by an individual who was not only allowed to remain in the armed forces and ordered to a theater of combat operations (where he could have done even more harm), but was promoted — giving such behavior a pass is appalling to most Americans. Only the Muslim brotherhood and others indifferent to, if not supportive of, its mission to “destroy Western civilization from within” would find this an acceptable state of affairs.

Unfortunately, it is thanks precisely to the Muslim Brotherhood — doing business as various fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), etc. — that we find ourselves in this fix.

The run-up to the Ft. Hood massacre and the official response in its aftermath demonstrates the extent to which U.S. government civilian and military agencies have allowed themselves to be influenced, penetrated, and suborned.

The problem goes beyond political correctness and an attendant, inadequate oversight of an obviously problematic individual. Neither can it be excused away as an isolated instance of incompetence in the chain of command, the intelligence community and/or law enforcement.

What is at work here is, in the words of Stephen Coughlin, a comprehensive and collective failure of the “professional duty to know” our enemy, what animates him, and the nature of his intentions and his strategy for actualizing them.

Coughlin, another major in the U.S. Army (Reserves), used to warn against this practice as a contractor supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Until, that is, he was purged from the George W. Bush Pentagon by an influential friend of the Muslim Brotherhood in then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England’s office.

As National Review Online’s Andy McCarthy has pointed out, the message to those in and out of uniform could not have been more clear: You will jeopardize your livelihood if you are not adequately “sensitive” — which is to say acquiescent to — Muslim sensibilities. No one with any ambition, or simply with a well-developed sense of self-preservation, wants to risk ending a career by being called a “bigot,” “racist,” or “Islamophobe.”

CAIR, in particular, was in a position powerfully to imprint this message on FBI agents (including, presumably, some who found unobjectionable Hasan’s many interactions with the terrorist-tied imam, Anwar al-Awlaki) in mandatory “sensitivity training” sessions it regularly ran for the Bureau until last year when the latter broke off the relationship. (Incredibly, the FBI now uses another Brotherhood front, ISNA, to desensitize our front line of defense against domestic terrorism.)

We are witnessing in the collective cognitive dissonance over Shariah’s role in the Fort Hood massacre the cumulative result of the Muslim Brotherhood’s success in intimidating not only government officials but journalists and the public at large since shortly after the 9/11 attack.

Corrective action is clearly required. The place to start is by calling such behavior what it is: submission — the literal meaning of the word “Islam” and the unacceptable, anti-constitutional status to which Shariah and its adherents intend to reduce us all.

 

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio.

 

Originally Posted at Newsmax

It’s the Jihad, stupid

Poll after poll indicates that official Washington is held in very low regard by the American people.  One reason is that our leaders are seen as out of touch with the realities confronting ordinary folks – and with what those folks’ common sense suggests are appropriate responses to such realities.

There could scarcely be a more graphic example of that disconnect – and its ominous implications – than the contortions the U.S. government is now going through in the wake of the murder of 13 people and the wounding of dozens more at Fort Hood last week.  For example, the FBI declared immediately after the attack that it was not an act of terrorism.  Other officials are promoting the idea that it is simply a case of an individual afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or deranged by the prospect of an upcoming deployment to a war zone.  President Obama insists that we should reserve judgment, evidently because the facts are open to varying interpretations.

Such statements are an affront to most Americans’ intelligence which commonsensically applies a prosaic form of the scientific method:  They look for the explanation that best fits the facts.  The facts – which are becoming ever more numerous by the day – are that the alleged perpetrator of these crimes, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is "a devout Muslim" who, as such, has had to follow at least since 2001 the dictates of the theo-political-legal and seditious program that authoritative Islam calls Shariah.  One of those dictates is that the faithful must engage in jihad, or holy war, to achieve the submission of unbelievers to Islam.

Consider the following, partial but illustrative listing of behavior that speak to Hasan’s dangerous proclivities:

  • During his posting in the Washington area, Hasan attended one of the most virulently Shariah-adherent mosques in America, Fairfax County’s Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center.  He publicly expressed admiration for its one-time imam, Anwar Al-Awlaki – an exponent of jihad associated with two of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
  • Hasan repeatedly tried to proselytize his psychiatric patients – many of whom genuinely did have PTSD – to convert to Islam, prompting complaints from a number of those he was treating.
  • He apparently authored blog postings that favorably depicted suicide bombings who go to their heavenly virgins shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" 
  • According to the New York Times, "about a year ago" in the course of his work towards a masters degree at the military’s health sciences university, Hasan "gave a Power Point presentation…titled ‘Why the War on Terror is a War on Islam.’"  The London Telegraph reports he "even told classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution."
  • Hasan gave away his belongings immediately before the shootings, saying to one recipient "I am going away" – an act of charitable form of cleansing consistent with Shariah’s injunctions to would-be shaheeds (martyrs).
  • The New York Times also reports that, in the words of a friend, the night before the shootings, Hasan felt he should quit the military because, "In the Koran, you’re not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell." 

As troubling as these indications of Maj. Hasan’s embrace of Shariah are, even more alarming is the inaction of the Army in the face of those of which it was informed.  Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters scorched the Army’s leadership in a New York Post column last Friday saying: "For the first time since I joined the Army in 1976, I’m ashamed of its dereliction of duty. The chain of command protected a budding terrorist who was waving one red flag after another. Because it was safer for careers than doing something about him."

What is really frightening, though, is the prospect that our civilian and military leaders may think it "safer for their careers" to persist in the politically correct, but mendacious, contention that there is no link between  murderous actions like Hasan’s and adherence to authoritative Islam’s Shariah program.  That is the line of the Muslim Brotherhood – an organization sworn to "the destruction of Western civilization from within."  It is not the truth, however.

If the U.S. government cannot come to grips with the reality that authoritative Islam is rooted in Shariah, that Shariah demands its adherents engage in supremacist jihad, and that jihad is – pursuant to Shariah – intended to inflict terror on its victims, it will be wholly unable to defeat an enemy bent on its destruction.  And official Washington will only further alienate the American people who have the eminent sense to appreciate that, while not all Muslims (in or out of uniform) embrace Shariah and its obligation to wage jihad, those that do are our mortal enemies.  The latter have no more business in our military than does their program in our country.

Sen. Joe Lieberman has the right idea.  Announcing on "Fox News Sunday" that he would launch an investigation in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the Senator declared that, "If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance. He should have been gone."  Under those circumstances, the least the Army can do is ensure that his victims – both those who now are gone and those wounded in his attacks – receive Purple Hearts for the losses they incurred at the hands of the enemy.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio.

 

Let’s not die for timid and misguided political correctness

The fact that the latest suspected terrorist threat involves students should come as no surprise. It is the predictable result of three things: an insatiably violent Islamist ideology; the politically-correct refusal of our political class to admit reality; and the comprehensive neglectfulness of our university authorities. This country has already produced a number of students who have gone on to become jihadist murderers. If this situation is not to get even worse, it is time not just to start asking questions, but to demand answers.

Greedy for the extra cash they bring, our universities desperately seek overseas students and often ask no questions when some of them fail to appear for classes. Following the introduction of tougher visa rules in the United States, the number of visas issued to students from Pakistan since 2001 has more than doubled in the UK. The problems that this brings with it are now being displayed.

In 2007, at Portsmouth University alone, 379 students from Pakistan were unaccounted for. Immigration minister Phil Woolas recently admitted that the student visa system is "the major loophole in Britain’s border controls". It is a loophole that risks becoming a death-trap. Yet those like me who have repeatedly warned about the consequences of our appalling immigration policy and flawed border security policies, and the fact that our universities have become centres of Islamic radicalisation, have been ignored – even as we have been, sadly, vindicated.

Last summer. the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), in conjunction with the polling company YouGov, released a survey of Muslim student opinion in the UK. Forty per cent of Muslim students polled supported the introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims; a third supported the introduction of a worldwide caliphate instituted in accordance with sharia; and a third believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified. This is the sea in which Muslim students who go on to carry out acts of terror are able to swim. But instead of engaging with the problem, Bill Rammell, the Minister for Higher Education, attacked the poll for finding out these things and declared that the problem of radicalism on campus was in fact "serious, but not widespread". It is just one example of a government that cannot make the moral distinction between firefighter and fire.

In its recently published counter-terrorism strategy, "Contest 2", the Government congratulated itself on its "key achievement" of promoting the UK as "a centre of excellence for Islamic studies outside the Muslim world". Yet – as the CSC again warned, two weeks ago, in a publication on the sources of foreign funding to UK universities – such courses are at huge risk of being sponsored by exactly the type of people who have caused the problem.

The Iranian government recently revealed that it was in talks with British Islamic studies departments – the same ones that the Government has described as a vital component of its counter-terrorism policy – in order to "train and educate experts on Islam". So now the Iranian regime, the world’s largest sponsor of Islamic terror, is funding the very institutions the UK Government says are part of the means of stopping that terror.

Meanwhile, there is a situation on campus which not only radicalises British students, but says to Pakistani and other foreign students that the most backward ideas of their own societies – in relation to women, non-Muslims, homosexuals and others – are entirely acceptable in Britain.

And so figures like the Hamas spokesman Azzam Tamimi repeatedly appear on UK campuses. Last month, after weeks of effort, we finally managed to prevent Hizbollah spokesman Ibrahim el-Moussawi from entering the UK to lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was only eventually barred when I threatened the Home Secretary with the issuing of an international arrest warrant if Moussawi were to enter the country.

Last month, Bilal Philips, barred from entering Australia because of security concerns, was scheduled as guest of honour at the Queen Mary University Islamic Society’s (ISOC) annual dinner. The annual dinner of City University’s ISOC last week had advertised guest speakers including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual leader of three of the 9/11 hijackers.

During the Gaza conflict, Islamic and far-Left student societies up and down the country held "sit-ins" to protest against Israel’s defensive action. During a tense period some universities – including Cambridge – stood up to the protesters. Others – including Oxford – caved in and gave into the demands of the "occupying" students. Such small acts of appeasement on behalf of university authorities give the radicals the idea that right is on their side and that, given time, everyone will see this.

Muslim students who don’t care about foreign conflicts are made to feel un-Islamic unless they endlessly whip themselves up into a fury against Israel and America. At the time that the Gaza demonstrations were going on up and down the country, I was due to fulfil a longstanding commitment to chair a discussion at the London School of Economics. Shortly before the event, I was contacted by the university and told not to come to campus because there was a threat of violence if I did.

Just as, internationally, the Islamists give us the offer "say my religion is peaceful or I will kill you", so domestically we are told "say there’s no radicalism or we’ll be radical".

Like the Government, the Conservative Party refuses to identify – let alone deal with – the problem. Our politicians are stuck in what some think is complacency but which is in reality simple cowardice. David Cameron and shadow security spokeswoman Dame Pauline Neville-Jones try to make the Tories appear tough by saying a Conservative government would ban the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. But Tony Blair said exactly the same thing in 2005. Our politicians are keener to position themselves than to take vital decisions.

The Government knows that three quarters of all terror plots being investigated in Britain originate in Pakistan. With such a colossal Pakistani community in the UK it is unsurprisingly tough working out who poses a problem and who is part of the non-extremist mainstream. They could make a start by working out who is actually here.

In February, it transpired that the Foreign Office is spending £400,000 on television adverts to be aired in Pakistan, explaining that Britain is not "anti-Islamic". Even by the standards of this Government, that strikes one as ignoble as well as ineffectual. This country should look like a less attractive proposition than it currently does, not a more attractive one.

As it is, any aspiring jihadi would not only currently find it easy to come to Britain, they would find in our universities the ideal place to take cover and, indeed, inspiration. It is why you are more likely to become a terrorist in this country if you have been to university.

There are many messages that we should be giving out. But one in particular should go straight away to our political class: political correctness may be something that they are willing to fight for, but it is not something that most of us are willing to die for.

Originally published in The Telegraph

Douglas Murray is director of the Centre for Social Cohesion