The Terrorist Next Door (31 page)

That memo also lists what Brotherhood leaders call “our organizations.” This list reads like a “Who's Who” of the U.S. government's Muslim outreach partners, including:

That the Muslim Brotherhood has the United States in its sights is hardly old news. As I described in chapter one, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Badi, gave a sermon in October 2010 in which he openly declared war on America and Israel. The animosity of the Muslim Brotherhood toward the West and Israel goes
back to the group's earliest days. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt maintained a special unit, called the “Secret Apparatus,” which launched terror attacks against Western targets, hoping to purge Egypt of all Western influences. In 1948, a member of this “Secret Apparatus” gunned down the Egyptian prime minister. That was also the year that Israel was reborn as a Jewish nation, and Muslim Brotherhood founder and leader Hassan al-Banna sent troops to fight alongside Arab nations in an effort to crush Israel's nascent democracy. The animosity toward Israel and the West, and the burning desire for a Muslim conquest of both entities, has been a cornerstone of the Brotherhood's ideology ever since.

The Brotherhood's targeting of Israel took on a new level of intensity with the formation of Hamas in 1988. In fact, the Hamas Covenant specifically identifies the group as the Palestinian faction of the Muslim Brotherhood. That same covenant invokes
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and the notorious Islamic hadith that claims that Judgment Day will not come until Muslims rise up and murder all the Jews. As we'll see in the next chapter, this brand of eliminationist anti-Semitism is a bedrock of jihadist ideology, whether Sunni or Shia. That means, for U.S. government officials, it's just one more inconvenient truth that must be ignored at all costs.

CHAPTER NINE

I
t's time for another round of “Who Said It? The Anti-Semitic Version.”

Our first statement is a withering assault on the “Zionist entity” that would make any Iranian ayatollah proud: “I am telling you that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is genocide....It is worse than the Holocaust, of course.”

So who said it? Was it Iranian “president” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? A leader of Hamas or Hezbollah? Or perhaps a spokesman for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood?

Try none of the above. The man behind this dose of anti-Semitic bombast is actually a pillar of his Dearborn, Michigan community and publisher of the largest Arab-American newspaper in the United States.

His name is Osama Siblani. And while he professed to be a nonpracticing Muslim when we spoke in the Dearborn offices of the
Arab-American News
in late 2005, his anti-Israel rhetoric would have fit quite nicely at a Hamas rally in Gaza.

“Is Hezbollah a terrorist group?” I asked Siblani.

“No, they are not terrorists,” he answered, deadpan. “Absolutely not. No. They are freedom fighters.”

“What about Hamas?” I countered.

“Freedom fighters as well,” Siblani responded emphatically.

Siblani, a native of Lebanon, began publishing the
Arab-American News
in 1984. He picked the perfect place to do it; Dearborn, located just outside Detroit, boasts one of the largest concentrations of Arab Muslims in the world outside the Middle East—comprising over 30 percent of the city's total population of roughly 100,000. A large chunk of those Arab residents hail from Lebanon, although there are significant numbers of Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians as well. Accordingly, Dearborn is home to several sizeable mosques, including the nation's largest, the sprawling Islamic Center of America, which is located near the headquarters of the Ford Motor company.

I had journeyed to Dearborn with a CBN camera crew to investigate reports of widespread support among the city's residents for the Lebanonbased terrorist group, Hezbollah. I spent my first day in town walking the gritty streets of Dearborn's east and south sides—which were lined with row after row of businesses whose signs were written in Arabic, not English—to try to gauge the local pulse. Veiled women and men in Islamic garb were a common sight, and there was a distinctly Middle Eastern feel to the place.

Since my trip there a few years back, Dearborn's reputation as “Dearbornistan,” an isolated Muslim enclave that is unfriendly to infidel outsiders, has only spread further. Several local residents have been arrested for aiding Hezbollah, and intelligence sources have confirmed to me that the city is, in fact, viewed as one of the epicenters for Hezbollah support in the United States. Unsurprisingly, aspects of sharia law, including the stifling of free expression and freedom of religion, have taken root. In June 2010, four Christian evangelists were arrested by Dearborn police for daring to engage a group of young Muslim attendees in a respectful religious discussion at the city's annual Arab International Festival.

The evangelists captured the incident on video. The clip, which they later posted on YouTube, showed that they never once raised their voices during their discussion with the Muslim youths, nor did they hand out Christian tracts or literature criticizing Islam that could incite an altercation.
¹
Nevertheless, Dearborn police confiscated their cameras and led them from the festival in handcuffs. The four spent the night in jail for preaching the Gospel—in the United States of America. Dearborn Democratic mayor Jack O'Reilly, shamelessly seeking to curry favor with his restive Muslim constituency, later defended the arrests, characterizing the evangelists' peaceful activities as an “attack on the city of Dearborn.”
²

In the future, O'Reilly would be well advised to pay greater attention to potential attacks emanating
from
Dearborn against American targets, courtesy of the city's Hezbollah devotees.

As my interviews with Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi (the Iranian-born, Khomeinist cleric discussed in chapter eight) and Osama Siblani showed, support for Hezbollah is not just endemic among average Dearborners, it is also pervasive among acknowledged leaders of the city's Muslim community. Yet according to the
Arab-American News
website, Osama Siblani, the same guy who extolled Hamas and Hezbollah as “freedom fighters” during our interview and accused Israel of surpassing the worst genocide in human history, has been sought out by “successive American administrations” for his “counsel” on the Middle East. He has attended White House lawn picnics for the media and was even present for the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords in 1993.
³
And despite his raw Jew-hatred and public praise for Islamic terrorist groups, Siblani has been honored by various educational institutions and media groups in the Detroit metropolitan area.

How deep does Siblani's support for Hezbollah and hatred of Israel run? As my cameraman and I were packing up our equipment and preparing to leave the offices of the
Arab-American News
, I asked Siblani his thoughts on Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and a man devoted to the destruction of both Israel and America. Siblani's response: “I know of no more honorable man in the world than Hassan Nasrallah.”
Mind you, Siblani purports to be a secular Muslim. One can only imagine how the more devout of Dearborn feel about Nasrallah, who commonly refers to the United States as the “Great Satan” and has said of the Jews, “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
⁴

My encounters in Dearborn helped shape one of my most tried-andtrue principles in reporting on jihad and Islamism. To gauge whether a Muslim is moderate, I simply ask one question, usually near the beginning of the interview: “Do you recognize Israel's right to exist?” If I don't get an automatic, unequivocal “yes,” I know I am dealing with someone who is not only hostile to Western, democratic values, but who is likely sympathetic to our jihadist enemies. It's simple: no Israel, no moderate. That is the ultimate litmus test, and it has never failed me. The question of Israel and its existence as a Jewish state cuts right to the heart of the matter—and straight through the disingenuous “we respect all religions” platitudes of smooth-talking Islamist mouthpieces in the United States.

Typically, these U.S.-based Muslim spokesmen will unreservedly condemn al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden—but that's easy. Dig a little deeper and you'll find they inevitably blame terrorism on America itself—for its “imperialist” Mid-East policies and its support for Israel. Likewise, most American Islamists are shrewd enough to decry 9/11 when asked about it publicly, although one of their favorite lines—that the perpetrators were not “true Muslims”—is always good for a chuckle.

Bottom line: if someone tells you that Hamas and Hezbollah are in a different category than al-Qaeda, and that, unlike bin Laden's group, those two terrorist organizations are “resisting occupation” and their members are justified in blowing up themselves and Israeli women and children, you know immediately that you're not dealing with a moderate. In fact, you're dealing with a willing accessory to the Islamist plan to drive Israel into the sea and, ultimately, to erase the entire Jewish people from the face of the earth. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the most influential Islamic clerics
in the world, articulated that plan in his 2003 book,
Fatawa Min Ajl Falastin
, or “Fatwas on Palestine”:

The hadith that Qaradawi invokes has been cited by jihadists throughout the ages—including by Hamas in their founding charter—to justify Muslim massacres of Jews. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed told his companions:

That infamous hadith may be the most well known of the anti-Semitic references found in Islam's core texts, but it only scratches the surface. Consider the following sampling of Allah-sanctioned, Jew-hating venom from the Koran and hadiths:

In case you still don't get the picture, consider Mohammed's own personal example. Although Jews today are banned from entering Saudi Arabia, the Saudi city of Medina, Islam's second holiest city, was originally a Jewish settlement. Then along came Mohammed. Dr. Andrew Bostom, who's written two authoritative books on Islamic history, has recounted the behavior of Islam's prophet and founder following the Muslim victory over the Jewish Qurayzah tribe of Medina in 627 AD: