Muslim Mafia (38 page)

“A logical investigation will confront why four foreign students from Southern Illinois University came to Plainfield
[
Indiana
]
to buy a large land mass and build a multimillion-dollar mosque where there were no Muslims within hundreds of miles.”

—Tim Pitchford, retired FBI agent, Indianapolis field office
¹

I
F THERE ARE ANY DOUBTS
about the financial might of the Muslim mafia, stop by the headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America next time you’re in the Indianapolis suburbs. It reeks of money.

You can’t miss it: There, towering above the prairie, looms a mammoth all-brick structure with two rows of tiny slots for windows. The geometric cluster of cavernous buildings resembles an Islamic fortress, and it’s surrounded by a fiefdom of privately held land.

More than thirty years ago, a handful of Muslim college students and engineers from the Middle East acquired 124 acres of farmland near the Indianapolis airport and moved the offices of the Muslim Students Association there, forming the roots of ISNA.
²

They soon announced plans for a forty-two-acre compound on the Plainfield, Indiana, site to include a $3.5 million mosque, along with classrooms, residences, a gym, and a recreational area. Today, the sprawling ISNA campus also includes an eighty-thousand-volume library and a research facility.

Where did these foreign students get the money to erect such an extravagant religious monument?

“Where they got the money is a key question,” says Tim Pitchford, a retired FBI agent who worked terrorism and counterintelligence cases in Indianapolis. “It came from overseas banks, and the FBI never was able to investigate, as we were talking about a ‘religion’ and bank records,” and religious institutions are generally considered off-limits and bank records the domain of the Treasury Department.
³

However, such restrictions may be easing, he says, now that ISNA has been named a co-conspirator in the war on terror and now that FBI headquarters is better educated regarding the Muslim Brotherhood threat.

“A logical investigation will confront why four foreign students from Southern Illinois University came to Plainfield to buy a large land mass and build a multi-million-dollar mosque where there were no Muslims within hundreds of miles,” Pitchford says.
⁴

Like CAIR, ISNA was developed as a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood and bankrolled by shady, terror-tied partners in the Middle East.

The massive ISNA complex was funded with a whopping $21 million raised in part from radical Brotherhood figures Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Saudi-tied Youssef Nada, as well as the
emir
of Qatar, where Qaradawi is based.
⁵

Nada, a Brotherhood bigwig originally from Egypt, founded Bank al-Taqwa (“Fear of Allah”), which funneled money to Hamas and al-Qaida through a close associate of Osama bin Laden. Nada is a specially designated global terrorist.

Saudi money also was funding ISNA from the very beginning of the organization.

Muslim Students Association co-founder Jamal Barzinji was business partners with Nada and was working for one of his companies in Saudi Arabia during the time ISNA’s headquarters was being planned, funded, and built. Barzinji also headed the financial arm of ISNA—the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT.

In 1981, ISNA was founded as “a nucleus for the Islamic Movement in North America,” according to an internal Muslim Brotherhood document.
⁶

It’s now the umbrella organization for the Brotherhood, controlling several front groups and hundreds of mosques and schools. While CAIR enjoys more notoriety and is more visible in the media, ISNA is more venerable and ingrained in U.S. society.

Its predecessor, the Muslim Students Association, still serves as the main recruiting tool for the Brotherhood in the U.S.

MSA’S CAMPUS JIHAD

With 150 campus chapters, MSA is one of the nation’s largest college groups. CAIR chief Nihad Awad, for example, got his start as an MSA activist at the University of Minnesota.

MSA also organizes anti-Israel student rallies and hectors college administrators into Islamizing campus facilities.

MSA chapters from New York to California have extolled suicide bombers and other terrorists as “martyrs” and the “only people who truly fear Allah.” And they are a big reason why, according to a recent Pew Research poll, one in four college-age Muslims in America support suicide bombings.

MSA is also the catalyst behind
Shariah
creep on college campuses.

The militant group has set up a national task force to pressure college administrators into accommodating Muslim students with, among other things:

ISNA’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

After MSA and ISNA established their beachhead in Indianapolis, Pitchford says he noticed that immigrants from the Middle East began pouring into the state. He and other agents observed a pattern: many of the immigrants were in the country illegally, and they were sponsored by ISNA.

“Six-month visitor visas started coming into Indiana sponsored by ISNA by the thousands over the years,” Pitchford says in an exclusive interview.
⁷

Unfortunately, “the visa fraud cases we presented were not prosecuted by Washington,” he says. “These same visa visitors are still here illegally.”

ISNA denies any wrongdoing. And it has fought its recent inclusion on a list of co-conspirators in the terrorism case against the Holy Land Foundation. ISNA argues it was “unjustly branded by the government,” a move that has “profoundly harmed” its reputation and “adversely impacted the organization’s efforts to advance its mission.”
⁸

The blacklisting may indeed have hurt ISNA. Attendance at last year’s ISNA convention was low, and even ISNA’s flagship mosque in Plainfield has been drawing fewer and fewer Muslims. Attendance at Friday services is down sharply, local observers say.

ISNA, which promotes itself as a voice of moderation, insists it “has not now or ever been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, or supported any covert, illegal, or terrorist activity or organization.”
⁹

In a separate statement on its Web site, the group goes even further, arguing it has never been “influenced” by the Muslim Brotherhood.
¹⁰

Of course this is a blantant falsehood. The evidence designating ISNA as a leading branch of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood is overwhelming, and ISNA’s links to fundraising on behalf of Hamas are equally strong.

TWO DOZEN COURT EXHIBITS

In 2007, the Justice Department officially labeled ISNA and its financial subsidiary NAIT a U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and listed both entities as co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror case. When ISNA protested, federal prosecutors pointed to nearly two dozen court exhibits that establish:

For starters, the U.S. Brotherhood’s own internal memos confirm that ISNA and NAIT were among those groups created by the Brotherhood. A 1991 memo identified twenty-nine front groups. Topping the list was the Islamic Society of North America.

Another Brotherhood document confirms the relationship by stating that the secret group exercised leadership and direction over ISNA, including “setting expectations for ISNA for the next decade.”
¹²
Yet another Brotherhood document, in the form of a spreadsheet, lists ISNA under the heading: “The Apparatuses.”
¹³