Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  “We strive for a ‘new Córdoba,’ ” Rauf wrote, “a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like.”

  Rauf had been preaching twelve blocks from the World Trade Center since 1985. He located his new Córdoba there. At 45 Park Place was a mid-nineteenth-century building left vacant after undercarriage debris from the doomed planes cratered several floors of what had been a Burlington Coat Factory. Aided by Sharif El-Gamal, a real estate developer and self-described “shark,” Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, purchased the property for $4.85 million in July 2009. They planned to restore it as the thirteen-story Cordoba House, which would feature a community center, pool, restaurant, performance space, mosque, and culinary school. Rauf conceptualized it as a Muslim version of the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish space on the Upper East Side that plays a cherished role in the intellectual life of New York City. The site of the new Córdoba struck Rauf as poetic, even sublime. It was a chance, he said, to send “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

  But to Rauf’s horror, several in New York’s 9/11 survivor community did not believe the project was sending a different statement at all. When Khan unveiled Cordoba House to a Manhattan community board’s finance committee early in May 2010, Rosemary Cain, mother of fallen 9/11 firefighter George Cain, said it was “atrocious that anyone would even consider allowing them to build a mosque near the World Trade Center.” Khan, shaken, explained to the committee that she and her husband felt “an obligation as Muslims and Americans to be part of the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan.”

  Fanning the flames was Pamela Geller, who blogged that a “monster mosque” was coming to Ground Zero, an “insulting and humiliating . . . victory lap” celebrating terrorism. A veteran of the business side of ruling-class broadsheet The New York Observer, Geller was radicalized by 9/11. She told New York Jewish Week that she was embarrassed not to have known who it was that attacked America, so she turned to authors and journalists who revealed that the culprit was Islam. Geller was also a birther, though not one tied to any particular theory of Obama’s origin; she once published a reader’s theory positing that his real father was Malcolm X. Her ally against Cordoba was Robert Spencer, whose books lined the FBI library at Quantico. Spencer claimed Rauf was erecting a “victory mosque.” Together, they created a pressure group called Stop Islamization of America. Asked by The Washington Post if he was being deliberately provocative, Spencer replied, “Why not? It’s fun.”

  Soon the New York Post ran columns about “mosque madness” generating anger from “fed-up New Yorkers.” Fox News crusaded against it. By the end of May protesters holding signs reading show respect for 9/11. no mosque! packed a four-hour-long public hearing on Cordoba House. “This is humiliating that you would build a shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11!” Geller lectured. Rauf, who had the support of New York’s power structure, was left pleading that they had “condemned terrorism in the most unequivocal terms.” El-Gamal described the anger at the meeting as “the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  By now the right-wing media, setting the tone for their mainstream counterparts, didn’t call Rauf’s project Cordoba House at all. They called it the Ground Zero Mosque. The demonization of Rauf followed. Rudy Giuliani told a radio host that Rauf had “a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism,” which was a complete fabrication. A Republican candidate for governor in New York, Rick Lazio, called Rauf a “terrorist sympathizer.” Trump, meanwhile, portrayed himself as saving the city from the Islamist menace while operating as a shakedown artist. He wrote one of Rauf’s investors, “As a resident of New York and a citizen of the United States,” with an offer to buy out his share at a 25 percent markup. Rauf would have to move to an admittedly worse location, Trump said, “because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse.”

  The protests began that summer. Demonstrators carried signs reading sharia in a dripping blood-red font and spoke of a “hijacked Constitution.” A puppet dressed like a jihadi hung over a mock missile, advertising, obama, your middle name is hussain, we understand. bloomberg, what’s your excuse. The twenty-five-year-old nephew of a fireman who died at the World Trade Center seethed at the “level of defiance” he considered Muslims to be showing. “They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not,’ ” he told the Times. At the end of August a cabbie named Ahmed Sharif, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a father of four children, picked up a blond film student named Michael Enright. Enright, drunk and wielding a Leatherman knife, asked if Sharif was Muslim. “ ‘This is the checkpoint, I have to take you down,’ ” Sharif recalled Enright saying as he slashed and stabbed, “talking like he was a soldier.”

  As thousands filled the streets on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to denounce the Ground Zero Mosque, local Muslims rode out a terrifying moment. Geller led a protest at the site featuring signs objecting to “Obama’s Mosque.” One of the speakers was Geert Wilders, a Dutch legislator and Islam’s premier persecutor in Europe, whom Geller introduced as a “modern-day Churchill.” He urged the protesters to “draw the line” against Rauf, “so that New York, rooted in Dutch values, will never become New Mecca.” Another speaker, by teleconference, was Bush’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who, Geller enthused, spoke “bluntly and unequivocally” about the “affront to American values” the “mosque” represented. One protester told Time that it was “the first stage of Saudi Wahhabist takeover of the United States.” He might have been more extreme than most, but by then, a CBS poll recorded 71 percent of Americans objecting to the “mosque.”

  Rauf had few allies. Obama gave a statement of support for religious freedom, but several national Democrats reverted to their Dubai Ports World posture. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the “mosque” ought to be “built someplace else.” Three Democratic congressmen from New York declared their opposition. Michael Arcuri, a Utica centrist, argued that the project, rather than the mob opposing it, “will continue to fracture the faiths and the citizens of our city and this country.” New York’s Jewish community, which Rauf had supported, either kept silent or joined in the denunciation. As the High Holidays approached, B’nai Jeshurun’s Rabbi Rolando Matalon chose a sermon dwelling on “the tremendous polarization in our society” rather than the persecution unfolding downtown. Judea Pearl said Rauf’s project reflected “anti-American ideologies of victimhood, anger and entitlement” within American Islam and should relocate.

  Rauf tried accommodation. He apologized for calling American policy “an accessory” to 9/11, conceding it was “insensitive” of him to suggest as much. Had Rauf known the outrage that Cordoba House, now rebranded as “Park51,” would generate, he wouldn’t have chosen the same location. But if he moved, he explained, “the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse.”

  It turned out capital was his biggest enemy. “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a capitalist,” said Rauf’s partner, El-Gamal, who had not expected to become a pariah. He ousted Rauf from what would now never be Cordoba. By January, Rauf was marginalized. He remained a member of Park51’s board but no longer served as a spokesperson for the project. El-Gamal deemphasized and ultimately abandoned the community center aspect of the property in favor of, eventually, luxury condos. The protests dissipated.

  Rauf continued expressing hope for reviving the sentiments animating Cordoba, but hope was all he had left. Rauf had discovered an invisible border marking the hard limit of American acceptance. America would not permit a new Córdoba, not even in the city Rauf already thought of as one. The transformation of Cordoba House into the Ground Zero Mosque marked the moment a presidency like Trump’s became inevitable.

  “There are individuals who are working very hard to promot
e fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It’s fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have,” Rauf said in 2012. “Obama’s father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him. A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment.”

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  A THEORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL replacement took hold on the right. Islam was not in America because Muslims sought a better, freer, more prosperous life. It was here to wage “civilization jihad.” It aimed to replace the Constitution with sharia law. This had nothing to do with stopping terrorism. Islam itself, as Gawthrop instructed at the FBI, was the real problem. Accepting its role in civic life was “accommodating sharia,” Spencer said. An infrastructure developed to besiege American Islam—with public pressure, law, and, if necessary, violence.

  Nashville had seen a growth in its Muslim population since the city became a gateway for resettling refugees who fled the carnage America unleashed in Iraq. Forty miles southeast, the thirty-year-old Islamic Center of Murfreesboro became so crowded that worshippers had to pray outside. In the summer of 2010 it planned an expansion onto a fifteen-acre plot of fallow land. Fox News began to report on anxiety among local non-Muslims that the construction of the center and others like it “went far beyond their need.” Prayer vigils accompanied hearings at the county commission, at which residents argued that the expansion was part of a plot against the Constitution. “I don’t want them here,” a vigil attendee named Evy Summers told local news. “Go start their own country overseas somewhere. This is a Christian country. It was based on Christianity.” In late August unknown assailants poured gas on the construction equipment at the expansion site and set it aflame. The very next day, as CNN filmed a segment about the arson, gunshots rang out.

  Four residents sought an injunction, claiming they were suffering harm from “the risk of terrorism generated by proselytizing for Islam and inciting the practices of sharia law.” Those practices, they said, included child abuse, misogynistic and homophobic violence, “Constitution-free zones, and total world dominion.” They were horrified to see the Justice Department intercede on behalf of the center. Islam, the residents contended, was not a religion, but rather a political agenda, entitled to no religious protection under the Constitution. To bolster their case they brought in the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney, who averred from the witness stand, “I am not an expert on sharia, but I have talked a lot about it as a threat.”

  When the judge ruled in favor of the center, a new cycle of resistance crested. Construction faced numerous delays as contractors and subcontractors refused to take on the project, something opponents had urged at the county commission hearings. With the arsonist still free, the center’s answering service filled up with anonymous threats demanding its members leave the country or heralding the coming destruction of Islam. In early September 2011 one of those calls informed the mosque that it would receive a bomb on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The bomb never manifested, and a twenty-four-year-old Texan was later indicted for the threat. For Muslims in the town of barely a hundred thousand people, menace came from powerful figures as well. “You mark my words,” warned Pat Robertson, “if they start bringing thousands and thousands of Muslims into that relatively rural area the next thing you know they’re going to be taking over the city council.” Sally Wall, an influential real estate broker who helped fund the suit against the center, added, “Here is this enormous building which is going to be occupied by people who are of the same religion that the people are who we’re fighting in Afghanistan, who we have been fighting in Iraq.” Litigation continued until the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2014. The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro remained the target of suspicion and vandalism for years afterward.

  As the Murfreesboro clash unfolded, Tennessee’s legislature passed the “American and Tennessee Laws for Tennessee Courts” bill. Its purpose was to forbid “foreign law,” a euphemism for sharia, from influencing American jurisprudence. Within two years anti-sharia bills were introduced in twenty other state legislatures. Rarely did they attempt to explain how something like a religious consultation in a divorce proceeding would infringe on any non-Muslim’s freedom, but to the believers in replacement theory, no explanation was necessary. The following year a Tennessee Republican lawmaker introduced an unsuccessful follow-up bill declaring that “knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government—with the aim of imposing sharia on the people of this state.”

  One reason for the proliferation of the attempted legislation was Gaffney. His think tank, the Center for Security Policy, developed templates for anti-sharia legislation pluggable into any state legislature. A subsequent investigation documented how once Gaffney’s “American Laws for American Courts” initiative received statehouse sponsorship, Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America would urge its membership to flood representatives’ offices with statements of support. Gaffney, Gabriel, and allies like Spencer and Geller believed that the Muslim Brotherhood—the foreign Islamist association whose insufficient radicalism had prompted Ayman al-Zawahiri to found al-Qaeda with bin Laden—was executing a broad infiltration of the United States. They tended to locate their Muslim Brotherhood “operatives” among the civil-rights advocates and attorneys of the American Muslim community. Even where their bills failed, they reduced civic space for Muslims.

  Like Geller, Gaffney was a birther. An infamous 2008 Washington Times column of his railed against Obama’s “dalliance with jihadists”; claimed the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood in America was to establish a “fifth column” of American Muslims to attack the United States; and lied that “there is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.” In 2010, the same year Gaffney testified about not being a sharia expert, his Center for Security Policy published a book, Sharia: The Threat to America. It accused the Muslim Brotherhood of advancing a “civilization jihad” of what amounted to public acceptance of Islam. The Brotherhood “seeks to supplant our Constitution” and had a “very deliberate plan to manipulate the nation into piecemeal submission” to Islamic law. “Its ambitions transcend what American law recognizes as the sacrosanct realm of private conscience and belief,” wrote Gaffney’s “Team B,” a name meant to invoke an intelligence reassessment of the Soviets that neoconservatives regarded as a truth suppressed by a timid Security State. It was imperative that the government “cease their outreach to Muslim communities through Muslim Brotherhood fronts,” by which they meant government cooperation with American Muslim leaders and institutions. Denunciation of sharia ought to be made a requirement for government and military service. Outright sharia advocates—that is, imams, if not every practicing Muslim—should be instructed “they will not be immune from prosecution” for advocating “sedition.” It referenced Muslim “compounds and communities” as actual or potential “no-go zones for law enforcement,” a wholly invented phenomenon, and urged an end to “immigration of those who adhere to sharia.”

  The Muslim Brotherhood held totemic force. Affiliation of any sort with it or its members was enough to spark demonization of Muslim teachers, attorneys, activists, politicians, charities, and civil rights groups. A central piece of the case against the Brotherhood was a 1991 document entered into evidence in a federal terrorism money-laundering case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity. Penned by Brotherhood member Mohammed Akram Adlouni for discussion at a council meeting, it proposed a “civilization jihad” through “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house.” The Adlouni memo appeared to be an Islamophobic fever dream vindicated: black-and-white proof of a replacement conspiracy by a powerful Muslim group—and entered into evidence in a prosecution that treated Muslim civil-rights group CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirato
r. But as researchers for Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found, other documents revealed that the outlandish idea was not entertained in any official capacity by the conference. At one point, Adlouni’s memo implored readers “not [to] rush to throw these papers away,” acknowledging that the Brothers might recoil at this “strange” proposal “without an antecedent.”

  Significantly, the Center for Security Policy attracted a number of veterans of the Security State, usually malcontents and hard-liners who felt their truths had been suppressed by their ignorant superiors. One of the leading figures guiding the Center’s sharia book was Jerry Boykin, the Pentagon intelligence official during Rumsfeld’s tenure who had declared “my God [is] bigger” than Islam’s. Others included the former CIA officer Clare Lopez, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director Harry Soyster, Rumsfeld-era Pentagon inspector general Joseph Schmitz, and the former CIA director Jim Woolsey. Woolsey had been allied with the neoconservatives, and his presence on Gaffney’s Team B heralded that, through Islamophobia, neocons could join the nationalist coalition.

  One of Gaffney’s particular villains was Robert Mueller. Although the FBI director constructed and presided over an apparatus of domestic infiltration of Muslim communities throughout the country, that was irrelevant. Mueller had scrapped the Islamophobic FBI training. “Now we have the Muslim Brotherhood telling us what we can know, what we can train to, who we can use as trainers,” Gaffney complained.

  However distant from respectability the Center for Security Policy and its allies were, their financing came through many respectable right-wing funding channels. By 2011 these groups had received $40 million over the course of a decade from fixtures of the GOP firmament like the Donors Capital Fund, which bankrolled climate denial; Richard Mellon Scaife’s network, benefactor of the major conservative think tanks; and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major right-wing donor network with the funding power of the Scaifes and the plutocratic Koch brothers.