ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (17 page)

Before he was fired, Nolen had tried to convert others at the plant to Islam—and on the same day that he beheaded Colleen Hufford, he had allegedly engaged in an argument with co-workers in which he praised the Islamic practice of stoning female adulterers. He also reportedly shouted “Islamic phrases” as he severed Hufford’s head.
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Those facts, combined with his Facebook page glorifying jihad and beheading—not to mention his ISIS hand gesture and the very ISIS-esque nature of his crime—seem to leave little doubt that Alton Nolen’s murderous outburst was motivated by Islamist ideology. That is, unless you’re the Obama administration. The FBI is treating Nolen’s case as an act of—brace yourself—“workplace violence.”
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That is the same description, of course, that the Pentagon infamously used to describe the actions of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan—who yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he was gunning down thirteen American soldiers on November 5, 2009.
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Hasan, who had communicated via e-mail with al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki prior to carrying out the shootings and carried business cards that read “Soldier of Allah,” has spent the past few years doing his best to refute the Pentagon’s assessment. In August 2014, he wrote a letter to ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi asking to become a citizen of the Islamic State caliphate.
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Nevertheless, since the Obama administration’s official line is that the Islamic State is “not Islamic,” I suppose its “workplace violence” explanation for Nidal Hasan’s actions still holds up just fine.

As for Alton Nolen’s decapitation of Colleen Hufford, the Cleveland County prosecutor said, “There was some sort of infatuation with beheadings. It seemed to be related to his interest in killing someone that way.”
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One wonders where Nolen would acquire such a sudden fascination with violently separating the head from the body. He had served two years of a six-year prison sentence after being convicted on drug charges and assaulting a police officer in 2011.
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Serious crimes, to be sure, but not the type that would suggest that a beheading spree against middle-aged women would one day be in the works. It’s no stretch to conclude that Nolen’s macabre “infatuation” with beheading developed only after he converted to Islam and began watching ISIS slice and dice its way across the Middle East.

As the previously mentioned Koranic verse extolling Muslims to “smite” unbelievers “above their necks” shows, beheading infidels is not a novel concept in Islam. In 627 AD, after conquering the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in the city of Medina, Islam’s prophet Mohammed ordered every man above the age of puberty to be decapitated. According to Muslim historical accounts, some seven hundred Jewish men of the Banu Qurayza tribe were promptly beheaded, and their wives and children were sold into slavery.
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Likewise, the brutal Muslim conqueror Tamerlane—who called himself “the Sword of Islam”—left a trail of headless bodies as he rampaged across Central Asia and the Middle East during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One biographer said of Tamerlane, “The dreadful hallmark of his military campaigns, his battlefield signature . . . were the huge towers built from the severed heads of his slaughtered enemies and set alight as warnings to other cities not to oppose him.”
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And the heads just keep rolling today. Tamerlane’s strategy of intimidation-by-decapitation lives on in what ISIS is doing in Syria and Iraq. And Saudi Arabia, which the Obama administration has enlisted to aid in the fight against ISIS, is the only country to still regularly carry out execution by beheading, including for non-violent crimes such as “receiving drugs.” In August 2014, the same month that ISIS began publicly sawing off the heads of American journalists, the Saudi government executed eight people by beheading.
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In the West, in addition to Alton Nolen’s murderous frenzy and the 2013 killing of British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street by Islamic fanatics, there have been other, less publicized incidents in which Muslims have murdered by decapitation in recent years:

          
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In 2011, Muzzammil “Mo” Hassan was convicted of second-degree murder in upstate New York after savagely beating and then beheading his wife. Hassan was founder and CEO of Bridges TV, an Islamic TV network “aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes”—such as, presumably, wife beating and beheading.
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In February 2013, an Egyptian Muslim from Jersey City, New Jersey, was arrested and charged with murdering two Egyptian Coptic Christians who lived nearby. Yusuf Ibrahim reportedly shot both men dead and then cut off their heads and hands, burying their remains.
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Eyebrows were raised by the grisly nature of Ibrahim’s alleged crime—which occurred during a period when supporters of Egypt’s then-president, Muslim Brotherhood stalwart Mohammed Morsi, were intensifying attacks against Coptic Christians in a country already known for the frequent violent persecution of Copts by Muslims.

          
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On September 4, 2014, a deranged Muslim convert named Nicholas Salvadore attacked and beheaded an eighty-two-year-old woman in the back garden of her north London home. Salvadore—who, according to locals, had recently converted to Islam—hacked cats’ heads off before encountering grandmother Palmira Silva and lopping her head off with a foot-long machete.
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The above incidents, in the context of ISIS’s beheading fetish and the various foiled terror plots discussed in
chapter three
involving beheading, all point to a disturbing trend. Indeed, just a few days after Alton Nolen
beheaded his co-worker at the Vaughan processing plant, another Muslim man was arrested for threatening to decapitate a female colleague at a nursing home in nearby Oklahoma City. Jacob Mugambi Muriithi, a Kenyan native, allegedly told the woman that he “represented ISIS and that ISIS kills Christians.” According to the police detective’s affidavit, Muriithi then told the woman he would behead her with a blade and post the images on Facebook. When the woman asked Muriithi why ISIS kills Christians, he reportedly replied, “This is just what we do.”
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So we’ve noticed.

THE BODYBUILDING BRAWLER

For some, failure is a great motivator—it only makes them stronger. They learn from their failures along the way to achieving success.

For others, failure is deflating—even a temporary setback can leave a permanent scar. They become depressed. Discouraged. Angry. Bitter.

They may even do something criminal.

Donald Morgan, a country boy who grew up Catholic in North Carolina, suffered through a long string of personal disappointments and failures, after which he converted to Islam. Morgan told NBC News, “Islam presented this package that said: ‘this is, this is it . . . this is the path and this is the way you’re going to go. There is not going to be this way, that way.’”
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Morgan’s “path” led him to the Middle East on a quest to enlist in the Islamic State’s genocidal terrorist army. When NBC caught up with him in Beirut in the summer of 2014, “he was trying to figure out how to get into Syria and join ISIS.” He had already attempted to enter Syria through Turkey but been stopped at the airport in Istanbul. “My reason for the support of ISIS is because they’ve proven time and time again to put Islamic law as the priority and the establishment of an Islamic state as the goal,” Morgan explained.
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Morgan’s upbringing in North Carolina would seem an unlikely beginning on the path to jihad. But throughout his life, he had gravitated
toward jobs and activities that would enable him to channel his obvious aggression.

As a youngster, Morgan dreamed of joining the 82nd Airborne and U.S. Special Forces and serving “dutifully—duty, honor and country.” He attended a military academy and then a boot camp that would have enabled him to deploy with the National Guard to Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. Morgan, however, did not make it past the boot camp.

Failure number one.

His lifelong dreams of military heroism dashed, Morgan went on to become a sheriff’s deputy for local law enforcement, a job that would still give him the opportunity to serve with honor and distinction. Yet he was fired after only a year and a half.

Failure number two.

After losing his job as a sheriff’s deputy, Morgan went on a wild drinking and partying binge that led him into frequent brawls. During one fracas, he fired a gun into a crowded restaurant. He was arrested and served over two years in prison.

Failure number three.

Following his release from prison, Morgan seemed to get his life together, at least for a few years. He acquired a job in the auto business as a finance manager and became a devoted amateur bodybuilder. In 1999, he married a female bodybuilder and the couple had a son together. By 2007, they had divorced.

Failure number four.

A year after his divorce, Morgan converted to Islam, apparently drawn to its structured system of absolutes and, more than likely, the aggressive ideology of violent jihad. By 2012, he was on the road to radicalization thanks to “[p]ersonal disappointments and desires and exposure to increasingly radical social media.”
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Morgan began posting pro-jihad sentiments on Facebook and founded a small Islamic Center near downtown Salisbury, North Carolina.

First Morgan had thrown himself into his dream of becoming a military hero. He then went all out as a drinker and partyer, with no apparent concept of moderation. Later he became an obsessive bodybuilder. In short, Donald Morgan was a man of extremes. His embrace of Islam was no different.

In January 2014, Morgan made his way to Lebanon, with plans to ultimately enter Syria and wage jihad. By June of that year, Morgan had pledged allegiance to ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Twitter, where he branded himself a
mujahid
or Islamic holy warrior and went by the handle, “Abu Omar al-Amreeki.”

For some reason, possibly lack of funds, Morgan tried to reenter the United States in August 2014. Upon arrival, he was promptly arrested by U.S. officials at New York’s JFK Airport on a weapons charge and held without bond.
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For Morgan, it was massive failure number five. For the United States, it was a dodged bullet. Who’s to say whether, frustrated in his attempts to infiltrate Syria and join ISIS, the former military academy student and aspiring paratrooper, once home, wouldn’t have targeted the United States—the same country he once dreamed of serving “dutifully”?

THE PIZZA MAN AND THE PUNKS

The affidavit said that Mufid Elfgeeh wanted infidel blood. And whether through recruiting jihadists for ISIS or striking American targets himself, he aimed to get it.

The thirty-year-old Elfgeeh, a food mart owner in upstate Rochester, New York, allegedly recruited three men with the intention of sending them to Syria to join ISIS. Two of the recruits were FBI informants.
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Over the course of late 2013 and early 2014, Elfgeeh “helped them by doing things like paying one of their passport costs, coordinating travel arrangements and setting them up with contacts in the terror group under the guise of
going ‘to the university,’ which was code for joining ISIS.” Elfgeeh also allegedly sent $600 to another potential ISIS recruit. Referring to U.S. troops, he told informants, “We want . . . to start shooting those who were in the Army who went to Iraq.” He fantasized about killing soldiers and civilians on U.S. soil himself: “five or ten already, 15, something like that.”
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His targets reportedly would have included Rochester-area Shiite Muslims—regarded as infidels by radical Sunnis like ISIS.
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At the same time that he was allegedly planning jihad, Elfgeeh owned and operated Halal Mojoe’s, a Rochester pizza-and-chicken joint where, in December 2012, health inspectors found “insects [and] rodents present,” along with several other health code violations.
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One former employee would describe Elfgeeh, a native of Yemen, as “a crazy guy” who “should be in prison.”
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When Elfgeeh began posting inflammatory material to his Twitter account—including a declaration that ISIS “will one day rule the world with the will of Allah”—then purchased two handguns, silencers, and ammunition from an informant, federal authorities made their move. He was arrested in May 2014 on multiple charges related to his attempts to aid ISIS and kill U.S. citizens.
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If the health inspection of Mojoe’s was any indication, Elfgeeh may have also left a trail of damaged digestive systems in his wake.

Had Elfgeeh come across Mohammed Hamzah Khan prior to being arrested, the erstwhile pizza flipper would have thought he had struck the jihadi-recruiting jackpot. Khan, nineteen, was a committed, ISIS-worshiping fanatic and a U.S. citizen to boot. He lived in Bolingbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, but yearned to reside in the Islamic State. To Mohammed Khan, relocating to the caliphate was a religious obligation. During a search of his home, federal agents found a notebook containing pro-ISIS writings and drawings and also uncovered a letter Khan had written to his parents saying that Muslims must “migrate” to the caliphate. He invited his mother and father to join him there and warned them not to tell authorities about his travel plans.
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In the end, Khan never made it to the Islamic State. He was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on September 27, 2014, before boarding an Istanbul-bound flight. From Turkey he had planned to make his way to Syria to link up with ISIS. He later told authorities that he had met a terrorist recruiter online who paid for his $4,000 round-trip plane ticket to Turkey and gave him a phone number to call once he arrived in Istanbul.
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Although the plane ticket covered a round-trip journey, Khan told authorities he did not intend to return to the United States.
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It later emerged that Khan had been accompanied to the airport by his two younger siblings, aged sixteen and seventeen, who apparently planned to make the trip with him and wage jihad with ISIS.
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