The Terrorist Next Door (28 page)

My interview with the UK's most notorious Islamist mouthpiece, Anjem Choudary, whom we met in chapter six, demonstrates the folly of ignoring what our enemy says. Choudary has led several pro-jihad groups in the UK that have been banned by the British government. But he is no marginal figure in the British Muslim community—he and his organization have a wide following, particularly among students and young professionals. And he makes no apologies for why he believes attacks against the West are justified.

Choudary's life, like that of most of the terrorists discussed in this book, contradicts the liberals' “poverty-breeds-terrorism” meme. He was raised in England and has hardly led an impoverished life, as evidenced by his law degree from a leading British university. And he bluntly attributes his beliefs to a single source: the Koran. “You can't say that Islam is a religion of peace,” Choudary told me, contravening another left-wing shibboleth. “Because Islam does not mean peace. Islam means submission. So the Muslim is one who submits. There is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam.”

So we've noticed—at least some of us.

Choudary seeks to bring about a unified Islamic super-state, or caliphate, with one all-powerful leader, or caliph, at its helm. Once this caliphate is established, Muslims will turn their attention to violently subjugating the non-Muslim world. From China to America, Choudary told me, “We believe that one day the entire world will be governed by the sharia.” This is the endgame for Choudary and his group, just like it is for virtually every Islamist organization, from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood. Choudary elaborates on the methods of global conquest:

And where might Choudary get that idea? How about Sura 8, verse 39 of the Koran, which says, “And fight with them until there is no more persecution and religion should be only for Allah.”

At the end of the day, Choudary told me, Islam itself is “not just a spiritual belief. It is, in fact an ideology which you believe in and you
struggle for and you are willing to even die for, because you believe in that: that is your whole life.”

In other words, it's the ideology, stupid.

The Obama administration and the mainstream media still keep their heads in the sand about jihadist ideology, even as empirical research confirms its centrality to Islamic terrorism. An article published in
The Economist
magazine in December 2010 reviewed recent academic studies on homegrown terrorism and found that economic or educational factors are rarely related to the radicalization process.
¹

These studies simply corroborate what is apparent from even a cursory study of the topic. We only need to remember that Osama bin Laden is the son of a billionaire and that his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a trained medical doctor who comes from one of the most prestigious families in Egypt. Or that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, who attended university in the United States and obtained an MBA, had a well-paying job in the financial sector and lived in an upscale Connecticut community. What drove him to attempt to kill hundreds of American citizens? The 800-pound gorilla in the room that everyone wants to ignore: ideology. Indeed, the examples of well-educated, middle-class Islamic terrorists are plentiful, from Hamas leaders to the 9/11 hijackers to Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and beyond.

Yet to make any mention of the Islamic doctrine of jihad, the Koranic injunctions to wage war against the infidels until they are subdued, or the nearly universal Jew-hatred that is preached from Islamic pulpits all over the world results in cries of “Bigot!” and “Islamophobe!”

The sad truth is that the “extremist” element of “radical” Islam is anything but extreme or radical to a true believer. The ideology that drives jihadist movements around the world is found in the Koran and in the traditions and history of Islam, and is preached daily in mosques and
madrassahs all over the world. Far from being “isolated,” this is the
mainstream
interpretation of Islamic scripture. For instance, a fatwa was issued in early 2011 by Dr. Imad Mustafa of Egypt's al-Azhar University, the oldest and most respected Islamic institution in the world, endorsing al-Qaeda's doctrine of “offensive jihad.”
²
According to Mustafa, Muslims may wage war against non-Muslims whenever Muslims are prohibited from exercising any element of Islamic law, including polygamy, wife-beating, child marriage, or apostate killings—meaning virtually anywhere in the West.

Was the Muslim world outraged by Mustafa's fatwa? Better yet, did Muslim-American groups uniformly condemn Mustafa? The answer, on both counts, is: of course not. And how dare you even ask?
Islamophobe.

And there is hardly any condemnation from Muslims anywhere of the widespread anti-Semitism peddled throughout the Middle East and in many Islamic communities in the West. A widely celebrated purveyor of Islamic Jew hatred is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the world's most well-known Islamic scholars. The jihadist equivalent of a televangelist, al-Qaradawi broadcasts a weekly program on al-Jazeera,
Shariah and Life
, which is the network's most watched show. Virtually any week you can see al-Qaradawi railing against the “treacherous Jews” or invoking any number of anti-Semitic blood libels. Qaradawi, a spiritual leader of the terrorist group Hamas and of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was also the first prominent Sunni cleric to endorse suicide bombings, an edict that was followed by a wave of terror attacks against Israeli civilians in buses, pizzerias, university campuses, discos, and elsewhere.

It's crucial to understand that Qaradawi is not some marginal figure—he is one of the world's most well-respected Islamic scholars and controls one of the most popular Islamic websites,
Islamonline.net
. Shortly after returning from exile to his native Egypt following the overthrow of Mubarak, a massive crowd of between one and two million people turned out in Tahrir Square to hear him lead Friday prayers. During his sermon, he beseeched Allah to allow for the conquest of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque
³
—a thinly veiled call for the destruction of
Israel. Riled up by his words, more than a million Egyptians chanted in unison, “To Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the million.”
⁴

Having been back in Egypt only a few days, Qaradawi enticed more than a million people to vow to sacrifice their lives in a war to wipe out Israel—that's some power. And where did Qaradawi receive his Islamic education? Al-Azhar University, the same school where Imad Mustafa, who issued the recent “offensive jihad” fatwa, now teaches.

In March 2008 Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders released a short internet film,
Fitna
, that sparked protests by Muslim groups worldwide. Wilders was subject to scores of death threats, and today he requires 24/7 protection by bodyguards. The movie was originally scheduled to be released on YouTube, but the online giant refused to post it after threats were made against the company and its employees. And what exactly did Muslims find so incendiary about
Fitna
? The film interspersed Koranic verses with video clips of Islamic clerics citing those verses to promote violence, Jew-hatred, and Islamic supremacism. All Wilders did was turn a mirror on the Muslim world to expose the ideology that has taken hold of Islamic communities, including in the West. As a result of such truth telling, Wilders is now on trial for criminal “hate speech,” an Orwellian charge that has been cheered on by leftist Dutch politicians and their media sycophants.

While the problem of violent Islamic ideology is deeply entrenched in the Middle East and Europe, Islamists in the United States are working hard to catch up. In 2006, I broadcast a CBN report on a visit I made to Dearborn, Michigan, a city outside Detroit that boasts America's largest Arab-Muslim community. While I was there I sat down with Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, a prominent Iranian cleric in Dearborn's Shia community and leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom, one of the largest mosques in America (and formerly home to a Christian church). Elahi began our interview with the standard odes to interfaith cooperation and tolerance, and made sure to condemn the 9/11 attacks. But when I asked about the terrorist group Hezbollah, the conversation dramatically changed. Gone were the paeans to moderation and interfaith harmony,
and in came the defense of Hezbollah and justifications for their acts of terrorism against Jews. And while Elahi condemned the 9/11 attacks, he couldn't bring himself to admit that al-Qaeda was behind the carnage, suggesting instead the Israeli Mossad may have been involved.

In my report, I featured photos of Elahi taken from the Islamic House of Wisdom's website that showed him with Iran's jihadist godfather, Ayatollah Khomeini, and other leaders of the Iranian regime. (As of this writing, the website features a video of Elahi's February 11, 2011 homily titled “Imam Khomeini: More than a Political Leader”—an entire sermon dedicated to Elahi's praise for the late Iranian terrorist supremo.)
⁵
I also highlighted a picture of Elahi talking to Hezbollah's late spiritual leader, Sheikh Fadlallah, whose death in July 2010 occasioned a large gathering in the Islamic House of Wisdom to mourn his passing. Yet none of Elahi's associations with Iranian leaders and Hezbollah ideologues have prevented local politicians or the FBI's Detroit Field Office from courting him as an “interfaith” leader. In fact, when I met in late 2005 with then-Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Detroit field office, Daniel Roberts, he asked me to pass on his personal greetings to Elahi after I informed him I'd be meeting with the longtime shill for the ayatollahs.

Remember that Elahi's Islamic House of Wisdom is one of the largest Islamic centers in America. It's also just one example of how deeply jihadist ideology has made inroads in the American Muslim community.

In chapter one I discussed the 2005 Freedom House report that detailed the Saudi-financed hate literature found in U.S. mosques. Promoting hatred of Christians and Jews, bizarre conspiracy theories, the subjugation of women, and anti-American screeds, the materials advocated the precise jihadist ideology that our political class insists is only followed by a few isolated cranks who misunderstand their own religion. But the literature was collected from some of America's largest and most respected Islamic houses of worship across a wide range of cities, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, and Oakland. Some of the worst propaganda was found at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., which is located about a mile from
the White House and was visited by President Bush just three days after the 9/11 attacks. That means the kind of jihadist promulgations that inspired the 9/11 terrorists were being distributed right under the noses of White House officials and the media pool covering the event.

The centrality of jihadism in America's Islamic communities is borne out in the disturbing saga of Jamal Miftah. A Pakistani-born Muslim, Miftah came to the United States with his family in 2003 to escape the jihadist violence plaguing his home country. But when he sent a letter to the editor of his local Oklahoma newspaper, the
Tulsa World
, in October 2006 condemning al-Qaeda and calling on Muslims to denounce terrorism, he was shocked at the response from the leaders and members of his mosque, the Islamic Society of Tulsa. Shortly after his letter was published, he arrived at the mosque and was surrounded by an angry crowd of worshippers who called him an anti-Muslim traitor. The confrontation was so unnerving that Miftah later filed a police report.

Miftah, whom I interviewed in his Tulsa home in 2007, was told by mosque leaders that he had betrayed the Muslim community by speaking negatively about it in front of infidels. He was accused of slandering Islam, expelled from the mosque, and told he could only return when he publicly apologized and retracted his letter. During our interview, he was in fear for his life. He told me that under Islamic law, anyone who slanders Islam can be killed. Is it any wonder there has never been a widespread reform within Islam when anyone who questions 1,400 years of Islamic law and tradition is threatened with death? And remember that Jamal Miftah was not in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but in America's heartland in Tulsa, Oklahoma.