The Terrorist Next Door (6 page)

Ex-Muslims will tell you the same thing, and much more, about what goes on inside mosques. One of the most eloquent is Sam Solomon, coauthor of a handy book called
The Mosque Exposed
. Solomon, a leading expert on Islam who trained in sharia law for fifteen years before converting to Christianity, is a consultant to the British Parliament on Islamic matters. He states:

You can say that again. Read the following exchange I had in late 2010 during an interview with “Reza Kahlili,” a pseudonym used by a former member of Iran's notorious Revolutionary Guards Corps. Kahlili joined the Guards soon after Iran's 1979 revolution, but upon witnessing the Khomeinist regime's systematic rape, torture, and execution of political dissidents, he became disenchanted enough to begin working as an undercover agent for the United States. Kahlili described his time working for the Revolutionary Guards in Europe's Muslim communities in stunning detail:

These are jaw-dropping revelations from a man who spent years working for the most powerful and secretive arm of the Iranian regime. But I can't say I was surprised.

Several of the 9/11 hijackers met and plotted at the Taiba mosque in Hamburg, Germany. The mosque continued to churn out terrorist recruits—including a ten-man cell that traveled to Pakistan for jihadi training—until German authorities finally shut it down in August 2010.
²²
A bit further north, in Sweden, a brave Stockholm City councilman named Daniel Arrpospide went undercover in one of the city's largest mosques for six months in 2010. He told a local television station about the tolerant, peaceful activities he found there, which included al-Qaeda recruitment fully endorsed by the mosque's imam: “They promise lots of money to the family if [a mosque-goer] chooses to die in the name of Allah. Targets are the unemployed, homeless people, those without a future.”
²³

Arrpospide also affirmed that the topics of jihad and killing unbelievers were discussed frequently at the mosque, and he even warned of potential attacks on nuclear power plants in Sweden. Memo to the
Swedes: when a pudgy city councilman, and not Swedish law enforcement, is your best intelligence source in mosques, you may want to rethink your counter-terrorism strategy.

Ditto for the Brits, who have seen numerous terror-linked mega-mosques pop up across their once proud nation over the past several years. Perhaps the most notorious is one still in the planning stages: a sprawling structure that would house tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers, to be built in the shadow of the site of the 2012 London Olympics. An Islamist separatist group called Tablighi Jamaat is behind the plan, and despite being evicted from the site in January 2010, the Tablighis continue to use it as a temporary mosque and have even erected buildings on the grounds without planning permission. After all, the infidel's laws do not apply to Islamic supremacists, and as we see in the conquest of Cordoba, once Muslims claim a site, they consider it theirs forever:
dar-al-Islam
, or the land of Islam. Alan Craig, a former London city councilor who has led local opposition to the Tablighi mosque, told me that British law enforcement officials have expressed to him major reservations about the proposed structure:

Now whatever would give British authorities that idea? Perhaps Turkey's current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was onto something in
1998 when he publicly recited a poem including the lines, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”
²⁴
This ode to jihad earned Erdogan—an Islamist, anti-Israel demagogue who has nonetheless been embraced by President Obama as a moderate—a four-month prison stay for inciting religious hatred.

Speaking of incitement, it doesn't get much more blatant than what went down in Washington, D.C., over Labor Day weekend 2010. That was when an annual Islamo/leftist freak show known as the “al-Quds Day” rally came to town, featuring a rogue's gallery of Jew-hating conspiracy theorists protesting Israel's claim to the city of Jerusalem. Leading the pack was Abolfazl Bahram Nahidian, imam of the Manassas mosque in northern Virginia, which is located near the site of the legendary Battle of Bull Run. That may sound like an odd fit on the surface, but Nahidian quickly showed at the al-Quds event that when it came to “bull,” he had few peers. At the rally, Nahidian claimed the 9/11 attacks were “not done by Muslims. It is done by the plot of the Zionists in order to justify, to occupy, the land of the Muslims such as Afghanistan, such as Iraq, such as Pakistan, now moving on to the rest of the areas. [The Zionists] plot and they scheme and no doubt God is plotting and scheming against them too!”
²⁵

When I called Nahidian to ask him about these comments, he was unrepentant, insisting the 9/11 attacks were carried out in a joint operation by the CIA, British intelligence, and the Israeli Mossad as a pretext to “plunder the wealth and the oil of the Middle East.” For good measure, he added that America “created al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” and that the notion that Muslim nations would ever accept Israel as a neighbor was “impossible.”

I couldn't help but marvel at how closely Nahidian's comments mirrored the rhetoric of the hard Left. I was also struck by the thought that Imam Nahidian is not just a member of the Manassas mosque—he
runs
the joint. If he is that outspoken in public about his hatred for America
and for Jews, one can only imagine what he tells his congregation behind closed doors.

One thing we know for certain
has
gone on behind closed doors in U.S. mosques is terror fundraising. In June 2009, a local counter-jihad activist went undercover to videotape an event held at the Masjid al-Rahman mosque in Orlando that would benefit British parliamentarian George Galloway's anti-Israel group, Viva Palestina. Galloway, a radical leftist and longtime Islamist collaborator, raised $55,000 at the Orlando mosque and $1 million worth of aid overall during his American tour, supposedly to benefit needy Palestinians in Gaza. Galloway was later shown on al-Jazeera TV presenting the funds he garnered in the United States directly to Hamas leaders at a ceremony in Gaza—in open violation of U.S. sanctions.
²⁶

These are not isolated incidents, as U.S. federal agents will tell you off the record. I am not saying all mosques are havens for jihadi sympathizers or terrorist fundraising and plotting. But given that enough of them have hosted such activities over the years, and that their rapid construction in the West represents a strategic display of Islamic dominance, Americans have good reason to be alarmed. Yes, Muslims have the right to build mosques in America, so long as those mosques are transparent about their funding sources and do not promote a violent anti-Western, pro-jihadist worldview. Local residents who are seeing multi-million-dollar mega-mosques erected in their communities also have every right not only to demand answers about funding sources and the ideology of the mosques' leaders (Do they recognize Israel's right to exist? Place the U.S. constitution above Islamic sharia law? Disavow Islamic supremacist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah?), but to protest their construction for reasons of national security.

At the end of the day, though, the firestorms erupting across America over the construction of sprawling mosque compounds boil down to plain common sense. Average, everyday Americans realize—after 9/11, the Fort Hood massacre, and an endless barrage of homegrown jihad plots—
that a large and aggressive slice of the Muslim world is at war with the United States and seeks its destruction. Why then, they wonder, is the U.S. government not only admitting more Muslims into the United States than it did before 9/11, but allowing them to erect giant, in-your-face mosques in America's heartland where they congregate in large numbers? It is no coincidence that poll after poll show that roughly 70 percent of all Americans oppose the Ground Zero mosque. They understand what the organizers are up to and realize that the mosque complex, as some have pointed out, is indeed the equivalent of the Japanese building a towering Shinto Temple at Pearl Harbor ten years after those attacks.

Americans also realize it is horribly wrong for a U.S. president to bow to a foreign dignitary, particularly one who has been instrumental in spreading radical Islamic ideology and mega-mosque-building worldwide. But that's exactly what President Obama did at the G-20 Summit in London in April 2009, prostrating himself before the King of Saudi Arabia as cameras flashed and other Western leaders looked on in shock. Obama's shameless act of groveling, performed in one of his first forays onto the international stage, signaled that debasing America and exalting Islam would be key elements in achieving his oft-stated goal of improving America's image in the Muslim world.

The Bow sent a clear message of subservience not only to King Abdullah—a tinpot monarch presiding over a backward, Islamo/petrodictatorship—but to Islam itself. Saudi Arabia—land of the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, and the birthplace of its prophet, Mohammed—is a nation with major symbolic significance to Muslims, and one of Abdullah's titles as absolute monarch is “Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques.” Accordingly, he and a long line of Saudi royals have always considered themselves the global standard bearers of Islam: defenders and propagators of the faith
.
The Saudi government has invested untold billions of its oil wealth to spread Wahhabi Islam worldwide through the building of mosques and
madrassahs
(Islamic schools) on six continents.

Furthermore, leaked U.S. diplomatic cables have revealed Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, and that Saudi officials have shown little interest in stopping the jihadi money flow. Add to this the fact that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 hailed from Saudi Arabia—all of them weaned on state-sanctioned Wahhabism—and Obama's bow becomes even more unforgivable. Forget presidential protocol, which was shamefully broken: the Saudi royal family is the
enemy
in the war against global jihad.

And the enemy is very big on imagery. From Riyadh to London to Jakarta and beyond, Islamists saw Obama's bow to Abdullah and smiled broadly. To them, The Bow—and the steady stream of pandering, pro-Islamic policies that have followed from the Obama White House—represented a green light to further expand their tentacles into the United States. With a sympathetic administration in office, why not go for broke and propose what not too long ago would have been unthinkable—a mosque at Ground Zero? Sure enough, Obama took the side of the Islamists and endorsed the project: just as The Bow signaled to them, early on, that he would.