American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (15 page)

Deek was born in 1958 in the village of Nazlit Issa on the West Bank, which was at the time a part of the Kingdom of Trans-jordan. He first came to the United States to pursue university studies in computer science in 1981. In 1991, Deek became a naturalized citizen living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California. In either 1997 or 1998, Deek moved to Peshawar, Pakistan. In the second week of December 1999, he was arrested in Pakistan and subsequently extradited to Jordan on December 17, 1999, in order to stand trial for participating in a conspiracy to carry out terrorist attacks in Jordan and for the possession and manufacturing of explosives to use unlawfully in cooperation with a number of other suspected terrorists who were arrested in Jordan. In an odd twist Deek, after being in prison in Jordan for seventeen months, was released without charge on May 23, 2001. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

The other suspected terrorists who were arrested in Jordan were convicted of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks during the millennium celebrations. Some of these individuals were even sentenced to death. At the same time, in the United States, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who received training in camps operated by bin Laden, was arrested when he tried to smuggle explosives, and materials used to construct explosives, over the Canadian border into Washington state. Ressam was intercepted by U.S. Customs officers at the border. After his conviction, Ressam confessed to U.S. authorities of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium celebrations.

One of Ressam’s accomplices was an individual named Abu Doha. In a sealed complaint filed against Abu Doha in the Southern District of New York, it was alleged that he had conspired “to use a weapon of mass destruction…against persons within the United States….”
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Ressam, in compliance with a cooperation agreement with the government, stated that while training in Afghanistan, an Algerian cell was formed and that he was one of its leaders.
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Abu Doha was to facilitate the travel of members of the cell in and out of Afghanistan and into the countries where terrorist activities were to take place.
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Deek was doing something similar, according to the complaint: “by Deek’s own account…Deek has helped facilitate the travel of various individuals to training camps in Afghanistan so that they may participate in Islamic jihad terrorist activities.”
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The complaint elaborated:

Recovered from Deek at the time of his arrest were various papers, computers and computer disks. Contained within this material were various terrorist training manuals as well as sketches and formulas for various explosive devices and materials. The computers were downloaded and several e-mails were retrieved. At least two of the e-mails, dated September 25 and 29, 1999, discuss providing funds, personnel, and material support for the Afghan training camps.
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In fact, one of the documents found in Deek’s possession at his arrest was a CD-ROM version of the 7,000-page
Encyclopedia of Jihad
which provided unparalleled detail of how to conduct terrorist activities of every type. Deek was actually aiding terrorists in Afghanistan in gaining access to the training camps there, and also to different countries throughout the world. The question arises: what was he doing in the United States prior to his departure to Pakistan, and why did the Jordanian authorities release him?

As one of the first people to investigate Deek, I was able to determine that he had changed his name in 1996 to Joseph Adams. According to Deek’s brother, Tawfiq Deek, who lives in Anaheim, California, this change was to facilitate Khalil’s procuring a new passport in order to be able to travel to Jordan where he would be able to enter the West Bank to visit his father.
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Deek’s brother insisted that he had last been in the United States in 1997; however, information surfaced that Khalil Deek was a “crew leader” for an organization called Charity Without Borders from March through August 1998 on a contract procured from the State of California. One of the purposes of this entity, according to their own documentation, was to “educate, feed, clothe, and shelter anyone in any country that is in need of our help.” In addition, Charity Without Borders received grant money from the State of California for waste disposal. Joseph Adams’s name was listed on invoices submitted to the state long after he had allegedly left the United States.

Authorities suspect that some of the monies flowing through this entity might have made their way to bin Laden’s organization. Deek shared a bank account with Abu Zubaydah, an alleged close associate of bin Laden. Was money from the Charity Without Borders projects with the State of California used to fund terrorist activities? We may never know the answer to this question.

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If bin Laden himself considered coming to the United States, it was in connection with Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, a Jordanian resident who is bin Laden’s brother-in-law. In April 1994, Khalifa was implicated by Jordanian authorities in the bombing of a theater on the outskirts of Amman. Accusing Khalifa of financing the operation, a Jordanian court put out a warrant for him. On December 1, 1994, Khalifa entered the United States after successfully applying for a visa. Even though he was under sentence of death in Jordan, he had no trouble slipping through U.S. immigration. It was not until two weeks later that U.S. officials realized their mistake. Khalifa was arrested on December 16 in Morgan Hill, California, and held without bond during deportation hearings. He was eventually extradited to Jordan and forced to stand trial with ten other defendants. While the other ten defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, Khalifa won acquittal.

During his years in the Philippines, Khalifa helped spread terror around the world while serving as president of a branch office in the Philippines of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a charity organization funded by both private Saudi individuals and the Saudi government. Based in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, IIRO, along with its bona fide charitable efforts, provided cover for Osama bin Laden’s efforts around the globe. Through IIRO, bin Laden and Khalifa supported the Abu Sayyaf Group, an Islamic terrorist group in the Philippines.
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After the dual bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the government of Kenya deregistered the IIRO chapter in Nairobi for its alleged connections to the attacks. In January 1999, Indian authorities accused Sheikh al-Gamdin, president of the IIRO offices in Asia, of masterminding a plot to blow up the American consulates in Calcutta and Madras.
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Meanwhile, according to Western intelligence experts, IIRO funneled more than $20 million a year to Islamic extremists in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
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Throughout this reign of international terror, Khalifa managed to stay out of reach of the law.

The intriguing footnote is this. When Khalifa applied for an American visa in 1993, someone else applied with him. We have obtained the visa application from the state department through the Freedom of Information Act. The name is blacked out—but the individual is described as a male Saudi passport holder whose origins were in Yemen. Bin Laden’s families are Yemeni nationals who live in Saudi Arabia only because of the success of his father’s construction company in working with the Saudi government. Is it conceivable that in 1994 he was feeling the heat in Sudan and, like to many other international terrorists, decided to explore the possibilities of seeking temporary sanctuary in the United States? Whoever it was ultimately changed his mind and did not obtain a visa. But even the possibility is tantalizing, and chilling.

D
ESPITE THE FACT
that militant Islamicist voices are heard from a large number of American mosques, and despite the sinister public-relations campaign of radical charitable organizations such as the American Muslim Council, the fact remains that militant Islamist views are confined to a relatively small slice of all American Muslims. Many courageous moderate Muslims have stood up to be counted against the voices of extremism—despite threats of violence. These activists are heroes, since there is no more dangerous thing to do than to denounce the faith of a fundamentalist. They deserve to be celebrated and supported in any way possible.

On January 7, 1999, one of the single most courageous of these heroes, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, appeared before an open forum at the U.S. State Department entitled “Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security.” A panel of State Department officials were present, along with a huge contingent of so-called leaders from the American Muslim community.

Sheikh Kabbani’s testimony was a breath of fresh air. Although he represents a large organization (he is the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of America), he did not pretend to speak for all Muslims. “I cannot speak on behalf of all Muslims, as many nonprofit organizations in America do,” he said. “Immediately when something happens in the Middle East, they send media alerts saying they are speaking on behalf of the whole Muslim community, which is completely incorrect. I will say that it is an opportunity to address you and to give you the authentic, traditional voice of Islam. It is a voice…which [stands for] moderation and tolerance and love…and living in peace with all other faiths and religions.”

Sheikh Kabbani’s most controversial assertions of the day were twofold: 80 percent of all mosques and Muslim charitable organizations in the United States had been taken over by “extremists” who did not represent the mainstream community; and Osama bin Laden represented an imminent threat to America, possibly through his attempted acquisition of nuclear weapons. In the audience were other Muslim leaders whom he was branding as extremists, and the meeting ended amid shouted accusations. Afterward, radicalized Muslim organizations immediately charged that he was slandering all Muslims. A consortium of nine Muslim organizations combined to issue a press release condemning his testimony. There were threats on his life. But in the end his warnings proved to be spectacularly prescient. Only after September 11, 2001, did members of the press belatedly realize that there was substance to what Sheikh Kabbani had been saying.

Kabbani was raised in Lebanon, the nephew of that country’s grand mufti, or religious head. As a boy he traveled widely with a Sufi master (he later married his mentor’s daughter). He went to high school at a French school, and then switched to an evangelical Christian academy, both in Beirut. He graduated with a chemistry degree from the American University there. With Lebanon embroiled in civil war, Kabbani came to the United States in 1991 to enlighten people about the teachings of Sufism. His Islamic Supreme Council of the Americas claims eight thousand contributors and participants, and runs 23 centers. He speaks Arabic, French, and English energetically, gesticulating and pouring words from his flowing white beard. In 1999, in a profile in the
Los Angeles Times,
he told reporter Teresa Watanabe that he planned to form a Muslim antiterrorist council to uncover the links between Muslim organizations in America and international terrorist networks. “We are afraid this [militant Islam] will spread to the United States. We are afraid this kind of doctrine controlling mosques will lead to military actions,” he said.
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As a scholar and student of Muslim history, Sheikh Kabbani frequently enlists the story of Muhammad against modern extremists:

[Muhammad] established his first state after having received the message for thirteen years. He established a state in a city called Medina, located in Saudi Arabia now. First it had Jews, it had Christians, it had people of all kinds of different faiths, and he never fought with anyone. He never killed anyone, but was always educating and giving the message of God, as Moses, as Jesus [did]. For eighteen months [Muhammad] directed his faith to worship God toward the place of Jesus and the place of Moses, where they were born and where they brought their message, in order to show that there is a completion, and a connection between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This was also to earn the respect of the Jews and the Christians in order to educate them about the message of Islam and show them that it is not hostile to Judaism and Christianity. It was one of the main themes in Islamic history that the Prophet tried many times to make peace treaties and to extend his hand to the Jews and to the Christians in his area, wherever he was living. Later, when the religion was well established, he turned his face towards Mecca while Jews and Christians were living in the same town.
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Kabbani is highly critical of the Wahhabism movement that has given birth to many of today’s extremists. “It began in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,” he testified.

The man who brought it to the tribes was a Muslim scholar by the name of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This was in the Eastern part of what we call Saudi Arabia during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. These ideas were going forth and back. Sometimes they were put down and other times they were supported. There was a struggle with the Muslims trying to keep them down with the support of the Ottoman Empire. They were successful until the Ottoman Empire dissolved and finished in the middle of 1920 and the new regime came—it was the secular regime of Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]. They then found an opportunity in the tribes, which no longer had the support of the Ottoman Empire in that area. They had freedom to go and change the ideas and brainwash the minds of Muslims in this area. Slowly, slowly in the many years from 1920 until today they were very successful in establishing a new ideology in Islam that is very extremist in its point of view. It was not so militant [at first], however; it didn’t take the form of militancy, but it took the form of revival or renewal of Islamic tradition.
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Wahhabism was the religion of the al-Saud family when they unified the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s and seized power, establishing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis were fierce puritans and iconoclasts, their origins beginning in the 1700s in the Arabian peninsula. They destroyed many Muslim shrines, including the graves of many of the Prophet’s first followers and the Garden of Khadijah, his first wife. Visitation to tombs, they claimed, was idol-worship, a corruption of “true Islam,” a view with no basis in Islamic law or doctrine.

Modern adherents of Wahhabism are tethered to Islamic militancy. “Their way of thinking is that Islam has to be reformed, and with a sword,” said Sheikh Kabbani. “They think they cannot reform Islam except with the mentality of a sword and the mentality of a gun. Unfortunately, extremism appeared in Islam, but not because of Islam. Islam always presented—and I say it many times that Prophet Muhammad used to act this way with his neighbors or his friends that [were] not Muslims—[giving them] gifts, flowers, and love, not ever holding a sword against them, or ever starting a struggle or a fight against them. There are many events in Muslim history where the Prophet made peace treaties with non-Muslims.”
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Kabbani’s chief message, when he testified to the State Department, was to beware. “These people nowadays are developing two ways of understanding the situation of Islam. From one side they think that they have to reform it; it is a duty on them, they have been brainwashed to think that they have to cleanse the world of devils and demons and of countries that suppress them, oppress them, and try to shut them down…. I am speaking openly to give advice to the government and the U.S. officials in order to open their minds because this is a big danger that may result in a struggle within the United States.”
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Sheikh Kabbani has, not surprisingly, angered the American Muslim establishment by charging that they have backed terror causes. For understandable reasons of self-interest, it was not a message that the American Muslim establishment wanted the American public to hear. “There have been many nonprofit organizations established in the United States whose job is only to collect money and to send it…to extremists outside the United States…. They send it under humanitarian aid, but it doesn’t go to humanitarian aid…. Yes, some of it will go to homeless people and poor people but the majority, 90 percent of it, will go into the black markets in these countries and [to] buying weapon arsenals.”
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He also argued that certain Muslim organizations had “hijacked the mike” in claiming to speak for the entire community.

Sheikh Kabbani is a traditional Muslim who practices the discipline of Sufism. Sufism originated in the teachings of Mohammad and was formalized into forty different schools. They seek to uphold the tenets of perfection of character and purification, parallel with the requirements of practical law and doctrine. Sufism is a much more relaxed and tolerant version of Islam, popular in the Eastern Mediterranean. The “whirling dervishes” of Turkey are Sufi Muslims. Sufis are not very popular with Muslim fundamentalists, who see them as just the sort of frivolous offshoot that they are trying to abolish in returning to the True Islam. It is not surprising to find Kabbani and the fundamentalists in disagreement.

But the important thing is this. There are many, many sides to the Islamic religion, and the existence of a strong element of militant fundamentalists is a threat not only to American institutions and lives, but also to moderate Muslims. Tarek Fatah, who hosts “The Muslim Chronicles” on Canadian television, told
The Toronto Star
he has kept his bags packed since criticizing Muslim extremism on television. “I’ve been getting death threats, and moderate leaders in the U.S. have also faced fierce criticism for opposing extremist regimes and North American organizations that condone the actions carried out by extremists in the name of Islam,” he said. “The moderate voice is almost nonexistent.”

“It saddens me that CAIR Canada has become one of the leading organizations speaking on behalf of Muslims,” he added, speaking of the Canadian branch of the Council for American Islamic Relations. “And they won’t even come out and formally denounce the people we know are behind the terrorism, because they have indirect support from the same groups. This nonsense of condemning the act and then wriggling out of their responsibility needs to be confronted.”
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Some of the struggles between the fundamentalists and moderates have been well publicized. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood made an unsuccessful knife attack on seventy-two-year-old Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was deemed “too moderate” in his religious beliefs. But such a visible hero is echoed many times over by less famous victims.

Another American unsung hero was Seifeldin (“Seif”) Ashmawy, an Egyptian-born Muslim and peace activist who immigrated to the United States in search of freedom in 1969. He organized a group of like-minded moderate Muslims to form the Peace Press Association, publishing a monthly newsletter entitled
Voice of Peace.
He also appeared monthly on “Religion on the Line,” a WABC-radio program, and served on the Advisory Board of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. Prior to the first World Trade Center bombing, he debated Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in New Jersey, which shows no small amount of bravery.

Ashmawy’s magazine,
Voice of Peace,
was a voice of reason. He continually exposed the pretensions of Muslim groups and pointed the way toward a more rational assessment of the religion. In 1996, he testified alongside me before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “most of our [Islamic] institutions in the United States are controlled by either extremists or profiteers. Both are abusing the freedom which we enjoy and…are being supported and financed by…the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and the Gulf States.”
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Ashmawy was particularly critical of American Muslim organizations that purported to speak for all Muslims and yet, in certain cases, were radicalized and actively involved with terrorist organizations. In Senate testimony, for example, he argued that “The American Muslim Council is an umbrella group of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and it is actively involved in championing the movements of Hamas, Algerian FIS, Tunisian Al-Nahda movement, Turkish Welfare Party, Jordanian Islamic Action Front and the Sudanese National Islamic Front. The American Muslim Council does not represent American Muslims, it represents the extremists and those that believe in terrorism.”
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In an often-quoted letter headed “Deception in the Media,” published on the MSANEWS Web site (run by the Muslim Students Association) and dated January 17, 1996, Ashmawy took both the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Muslim Council to task for defending Islamic extremism. “It is a known fact that both the AMC…and CAIR have defended, apologized for and rationalized the actions of extremist groups and leaders such as convicted World Trade Center conspirator Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, Egyptian extremists,…the Sudanese Islamic Front, and extremist parliamentarians from the Jordanian Islamic Action Front,” he wrote. “The real challenge for moderates like myself is to prevent my Muslim brethren from being deceived by extremist groups that pretend to represent their interests.”

Ashmawy did more than just expose media spokesmen and argue for a more moderate and tolerant version of Islam. He also tried to warn the U.S. government about the spread of terrorism to its shores. In his Senate testimony he stated,