The Terrorist Next Door (29 page)

To gain a better grasp of what motivates Muslims to embrace jihadist ideology, I sat down with a former terrorist operative named Tawik Hamid. As part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the same group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Hamid was in contact with al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Today, Hamid speaks
out forcefully against jihadist ideology. He has written about what transpired in his life as he adopted the jihadi mindset and was conditioned by adherents of Islam's Salafi sect to accept violence:

This radicalization process and its connection to jihadist ideology were analyzed in a report published by the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division in 2007. Reviewing much of the analysis of homegrown terror plots in the United States, the authors of
“Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” identified a four-step process that leads an individual or group to accept jihadist ideology and to act on it:

The report's authors stress that this process can happen over long periods of time, or can occur rather quickly. But there is one essential element that motivates the radicalized individual to justify violence and eventually act on it:

Once a terrorist group draws in a recruit through appeals to “jihadi cool” or other methods, it is the ideology and indoctrination process that transforms
him or her into a terrorist. The sense of community that is forged during this process is aided by what the NYPD report termed as “radicalization incubators”:

What about places like the Halalco supermarket and Islamic bookstore in Falls Church, Virginia, which we discussed in chapter five? This is the largest Islamic supermarket in the Washington, D.C. area, located only a mile away from the notorious Dar al-Hijrah mosque that has produced a long string of terrorists. Not only was wanted al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki the former imam at the mosque, but it was also the spiritual home to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. And a former youth leader at the mosque, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison for his role in an al-Qaeda plot that aimed to assassinate President George W. Bush. Dar al-Hijrah was also the spiritual home of the Fort Hood terrorist, Army Major Nidal Hasan. How many members of the mosque have gone to Halalco to hang out, or pick up a copy of
some jihadist author's books, or purchase a set of Anwar al-Awlaki sermons or
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
?

Another radicalization incubator identified by the NYPD report is the Muslim Student Association (MSA), an organization located on hundreds of college campuses across the country. According to the NYPD, jihadists have used this group as a forum for recruiting and indoctrinating like-minded individuals. Remember the five D.C.-area men who were captured in Pakistan in December 2009 attempting to join the Taliban? One of them, Ramy Zamzam, was the MSA regional president for the Washington, D.C. area. Zamzam was just one in a long line of MSA leaders who have been arrested and convicted on terrorism charges.

Another MSA leader, Tarek Mehanna, is currently awaiting trial in Boston on charges of plotting domestic terror attacks. Mehanna was an MSA bigwig at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, where he attended dental school. He was also a prolific, pro-al-Qaeda blogger who regularly praised jihadist authors and rallied others to the cause of convicted terrorists. Furthermore, Mehanna was an associate of Daniel Maldonado, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for traveling to Somalia to join the al-Shabaab terrorist organization. Finally, Mehanna was a devoted fan of several jihadist ideologues, including two prominent Muslim Brotherhood figures: Abdullah Azzam, who mentored Osama bin Laden and who helped lay the foundations for what became al-Qaeda; and Sayyid Qutb, the “godfather” of modern jihadist ideology who was executed by Egyptian authorities in 1966 for plotting the overthrow of Egypt's government and the installation of a sharia-compliant Islamic state.
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Are you confident that the FBI or your local police know what's going on inside the local MSA in your community? How about in Columbus, Ohio, where I reported in 2007 on the largest known al-Qaeda cell discovered operating in the United States? As many as a dozen men were involved, but amazingly, only three people were ever charged in the case. One of the leaders of the cell, Christopher Paul, was born and raised in
Worthington, Ohio, converted to Islam, and eventually traveled to Afghanistan, where he fought with the Taliban in the early 1990s. When Paul returned to the United States, he began forming his own cell and was hired by the Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab mosque to teach martial arts. Paul even conducted jihadist training in a nearby state park.

One prominent figure at the El Khattab mosque during Paul's tenure there was a Muslim cleric named Salah Sultan. At the same time Sultan was being hailed as a moderate Muslim leader by the local
Columbus Dispatch
newspaper, he was spouting jihadist propaganda on TV programs throughout the Middle East, claiming in one spot on Saudi TV that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. He later appeared on Egyptian television and invoked a notorious Islamic hadith asserting that the Day of Judgment won't come until Muslims kill all the Jews. For good measure, Sultan—who now lives in Bahrain—threatened that the United States was set for destruction and invoked
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to support his belief that the world is controlled by a global Jewish conspiracy. With Islamist firebrands like Sultan holding court, is it any wonder an al-Qaeda cell thrived at a mosque in middle America?

Predictably, the U.S. government's head-in-the-sand approach to jihadist ideology has not been productive in combating homegrown Islamic terrorism, as demonstrated starkly in the failure to act on any of the warning signs shown by Nidal Hasan before he massacred thirteen U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood. The senators who led the investigation into the attack wrote, “The first thing the Defense Department must do now is explicitly identify the threat posed by violent Islamist extremism, rather than cloaking it with vague terms such as ‘violent extremism' or ‘workplace violence.' Then our military must train service members on the signs and stages of violent Islamist radicalization so it can be reported and dealt with quickly and directly.”
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In other words, stop ignoring the ideology.

This willful blindness is a problem throughout our entire national security apparatus, resulting in a long line of baffling statements made by our government's top counterterrorism officials. Take for example a 2010 speech at Stanford University in which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, claimed Islamic terrorism was not going to be defeated by identifying and combating a violent ideology, like we did against Nazism, but through education programs:

As explained above, most al-Qaeda leaders are highly educated and come from privileged backgrounds. Would an educational program have turned Osama bin Laden, a trained engineer and the son of a billionaire, into a peaceful philanthropist? Let's not forget that bin Laden was indoctrinated while he was studying at the University of Jeddah under the instruction of top Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood figure Abdullah Azzam. And when bin Laden fled from Saudi Arabia, he took refuge in Sudan under the protection of another top Muslim Brotherhood leader, Hassan al-Turabi, who has been called “the Pope of Terrorism” and who holds advanced law degrees from the University of London and the University of Sorbonne in France.
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No doubt we'll soon hear that the State Department has started a rehabilitation program for jihadist leaders to earn their Ph.D.s.

We saw another risible example of the Obama administration's “see no evil” approach to Islamic ideology when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress in February 2011 that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular” organization. Again, this is the “
Muslim
Brotherhood,” which should have been his first clue. Clapper uttered this inexplicable falsehood as the Egyptian revolution unfolded and the U.S. government confronted the possibility that the Brotherhood could ultimately gain power in the country with the largest army in the Arab world.
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But perhaps the most stunning display of naïveté concerning the jihadist threat came in a speech by President Obama's top national security and counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, that was hosted by two Islamic groups at New York University. The debacle began when Brennan was introduced by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, then-president of the Islamic Society of North America—a Muslim Brotherhood front group named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding case. But that designation didn't stop Brennan from effusively praising Mattson and her tainted organization, extolling her “leadership as an academic whose research continues the rich tradition of Islamic scholarship, and as president of the Islamic Society of North America, where you have been a voice for the tolerance and diversity that defines Islam.”
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