Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Ahmed’s family laughed in the courtroom when the charges were explained, insisting Ahmed was innocent. “Everything the government has said is lies upon lies upon lies,” Ahmed’s father told the Washington Post, describing his son as a peaceful student of Islam who was arrested while taking his final exams.225

  The jury didn’t buy it. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted on November 22, 2005, and sentenced to thirty years in a maximum-security federal prison.

  Stopping the Next Ali

  Now meet Fred Schwien.226

  Born in 1957 in WaKeeney, Kansas, a town of only two thousand people today and far smaller then, Fred grew up watching the counterculture revolution of the ’60s and ’70s at home and horrific wars and revolutions unfolding abroad, including the trauma of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Raised in a Lutheran home, Fred was an evangelical Christian by the age of sixteen.

  Fred saw the turbulence of the times and felt a calling to defend his country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He received an appointment to attend college at the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduated in June of 1979 during the early stages of the Iranian Revolution, and began his active duty in the Army the following month.

  Over the course of the next two decades, Fred served as an Airborne Ranger infantry officer and in various command and staff positions in the U.S., Europe, and Panama. He served at the Pentagon on the Army Staff, working on counterterrorism issues. He served on the Joint Staff, working on arms-control issues. Later, he worked at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters in Mons, Belgium, as the deputy U.S. national military representative. Along the way, he was blessed with a wonderful Christian wife, and together they began to raise a family. Fred retired from the Army in 1999 as a lieutenant colonel, and he and his family eventually moved back from Europe to D.C.

  That’s when Lynn and I met them. Actually, Lynn first met Fred’s wife and family in a kids’ ministry they were involved in at our church. At the time, Fred was serving as an aide to U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, but in 2005, he was hired as a senior advisor to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

  “You’ve really got to meet this guy,” Lynn kept insisting. “His wife thinks you two would really hit it off, and I think she’s right. He’s read your books. He’s given them to the secretary and others in the office. Plus, he’s not writing about the War on Terror, he’s actually living it.”

  As is almost always the case, Lynn was right. Fred and I began to get together for an occasional lunch or cup of coffee, and the more I got to know him, the more impressed I became. Whether jumping out of planes as a Ranger or flying into Baghdad on a Black Hawk helicopter to coordinate Homeland Security operations with his Iraqi counterparts, Fred Schwien had spent all of his professional life protecting people like my family and me from people like Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, and I was deeply grateful.

  In the winter of 2008, I sat down with Fred and asked him to take me inside the Revolution from his vantage point—a world few Americans ever really see.

  First of all, I asked Fred his perspective on the threat that America faces today from radical Islam. “Just how serious is that threat to the American people?”

  “The threat is very real,” he replied. “In the past few years, there have been a number of attacks that were successful in London and Madrid. And then there have been a number of attacks that we disrupted abroad. An airline plot in the summer of 2006 was disrupted before the terrorist could blow airliners up coming across to the U.S. from the U.K. There was a case at JFK airport where some Radicals were planning to blow up the fuel lines, hoping to cause really mass destruction near JFK. We know that al Qaeda and like-minded groups would love to cause great damage and cause massive casualties within the United States. So the threat is very real, and the ones that I’ve mentioned are ones that have been in the press, but there are others that the public doesn’t know about. There are people at the border that are stopped every day trying to come into the United States that have something about them in their background, or with their connections, that the Customs and Border Protection agents look at and say, ‘This person isn’t coming in the United States.’ Or we deny people visas when they apply . . . because we believe they have some connection [to terrorism].”227

  “Can you give me an example,” I asked, “of a case where Homeland Security denied someone entry into the U.S. and that action actually saved lives?”

  “Absolutely,” he replied. “One guy we stopped coming across because a border agent didn’t feel that he was legitimate. We didn’t know what this fellow was up to, but he was stopped at the border. We denied his entry into the country, and he was sent home. Two years later he was found to have been a suicide bomber. His hands were found attached to the steering wheel after a suicide truck bombing in Iraq.”

  U.S. authorities in Iraq took the fingerprints from those hands and ran them through the Homeland Security database to see who he was. The system worked. They not only tracked down the bomber’s identity, they were able to confirm that he had tried to enter the U.S. at one point but had been refused.

  Thank God, I thought, for that alert border agent—he may have only been going by instincts at the time, but those instincts had proven right.

  “When it comes to the threat of radical Islamists,” Fred noted, “you have to keep in mind the stakes are very high. We have to be right every time; they only have to get it right once.” A Radical that slips into the country would be poised to carry out his murderous and possibly genocidal objectives.

  “What worries you most these days, Fred?” I asked.

  “The worst-case scenario that we worry about is some type of nuclear or improvised nuclear device, or some type of biological weapon,” he explained. “Those are our two biggest fears. We have fifteen planning scenarios and a number of plans applied against those planning scenarios to react to them if something were to happen. These could involve a pandemic influenza. They could involve a nuclear device. They could involve a chemical attack. So if, God forbid, one of those things happens, the government is in a much better position now to respond than we were before September 11.”

  “Based on all your years of experience, Fred, help me understand the mind-set of the radical Islamic jihadist that makes him so dangerous to the American people.”

  “What makes jihadists so dangerous is that they really do hate us and in many ways they hate our way of life,” he replied. “And they work very hard at recruiting other people to believe their ideas. When I’ve spoken with Muslim leaders, with Imams—the moderate ones, Reformers—they believe that Radicals take the Qur’an completely out of context and use it to brainwash young people, in many cases, to believing in a cause that really is very, very violent and very anti-Western, very anti-American.”

  Fred then pointed to the two countries he worries about most for Radical recruiting: Iraq and the United States.

  “In my personal view, there is nothing the Radicals want more than to see the United States fail in Iraq,” he told me. “They want us to fail to show that they can beat us. And we really have to get Iraq right. We need to get a functioning democratic society working there. It may take Iraq years to get it right, but we have to make sure that it’s a success, because the consequences of Iraq becoming a failed state and a massive breeding ground for terrorists are too horrific to even imagine.”

  Then he added, “Self-radicalization by Muslims living in the United States is also something that Homeland Security is very concerned about. Young men in particular are vulnerable if they feel marginalized in society. In fact, when I was visiting Morocco, one of the officials said young jihadists are like the Columbine shooters. These kids are out there. They get on the Internet, they get on a jihadist Web site, and they look at something and they go, ‘Ah, that’s something I can belong to,’ and they get sucked into Radical thought and a jihadist mentality. And that’s when they can become very dangerous because they, in essence, self-radicalize right where they
are, and it’s tough to know who they are and tough to find and stop them.”

  Indoctrinating the Next Ali

  Which brings us back to Ahmed Omar Abu Ali.

  Yes, he was an American citizen. Yes, he was bright. Yes, he was a high school valedictorian. But what was he learning? What was he being taught? And what are the chances that there are others like him out there being indoctrinated or self-radicalized?

  Ahmed graduated from the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), a private Muslim elementary and secondary school located in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the White House and the Capitol building, the epicenter of American democracy. The school opened its doors back in 1984 with a handful of a students but a passionate mission to educate a new generation of Muslim young people capable of studying at American universities, working in American jobs, and influencing American society with the values of the Qur’an. It soon became a highly prestigious institution, sought out by Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the U.S. “The Saudi ambassador to the United States is chairman of the school’s board of directors,” reported the Washington Post, “and the kingdom subsidizes expenses beyond the academy’s $3,000 annual tuition for non-Saudi students. Saudi students attend free.”228

  By 2008, ISA had two campuses—the original in Alexandria and another in Fairfax, Virginia—educating about a thousand children from pre-K through twelfth grade. Al Jazeera has called it “the largest institution teaching the Arabic language and Islamic education on the East Coast of the U.S.,” but its critics have since dubbed it “Terror High.”229

  Why? Aside from the fact that its most famous graduate was convicted of trying to assassinate the president, a Washington Post investigation also found that ISA “used textbooks as recently as 2006 that compared Jews and Christians to apes and pigs, told eighth-graders that these groups are ‘the enemies of the believers,’ and diagrammed for high school students where to cut off the hands and feet of thieves.” Saudi officials admitted to the Post that “the textbooks used at the Islamic Saudi Academy had contained inflammatory material since at least the mid-1990s.” They claimed to have ordered revisions in 2006, but the Post found that in the 2006-07 school year, “at least one book still contained passages that extolled jihad and martyrdom, called for victory over one’s enemies, and said the killing of adulterers and apostates was ‘justified.’”230

  ISA administrators and Saudi officials now insist they are doing everything they can to change the textbooks and safeguard the curriculum against violent teachings. But some experts say what has been happening there is just the tip of the iceberg. The Saudi government and radicalized Saudi clerics, such experts claim, are actively exporting their vision of the Revolution to the U.S. and Europe and using Islamic training institutes known as madrassas at home and abroad to indoctrinate young people and prepare them for recruitment into terrorist cells.

  Exporting the “Wahhabi Islam” Way

  “It is not an accident that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on September 11, 2001, were Saudis,” noted former CIA director James Woolsey during congressional testimony in 2002. “A poll conducted by Saudi intelligence and shared with the U.S. government [found] that over 95 percent of Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41 have sympathy for Osama bin Laden.”231 Such sympathies, combined with extremist ideology being taught in Islamic schools, are creating a breeding ground for a new wave of radical Islamic terrorists.

  But Woolsey argued that this dangerous situation was not isolated to the Arabian Peninsula. “The Saudi-funded, Wahhabi-operated export of hatred for us reaches around the globe,” he warned. “It is well known that the religious schools of Pakistan that educated a large share of the Taliban and al Qaeda are Wahhabi. But Pakistan is not the sole target.” Woolsey noted that “a substantial percentage of American mosques have Wahhabi-funded Imams.” A dangerous ideology of sheer hatred and violence, he said, is being “proliferated by the Wahhabis within the American homeland.”232

  Wahhabi Islam is a strict, purist form of Sunni theology developed by Muhammad Ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century. Today, it is the dominant form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf states, Egypt, and much of North Africa, with the exception of Morocco, and it is an intensely aggressive, missionary religion. While al-Wahhab probably never used such a simplistic slogan, he was in many ways one of the earliest adherents and preachers of the notion that “Islam is the answer, and jihad is the way.”

  In the mid-1700s, just as Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were laying the groundwork for the American Revolution to create freedom and democracy in the West, al-Wahhab and his colleagues were laying the groundwork for their own Revolution in the Middle East. They feared Sunnis were losing their religious zeal, moral holiness, and military effectiveness, and they urged Muslims to rededicate themselves to a radically fundamental version of Islam. For the next century and a half, they and their descendants and disciples after them embarked on a series of military conquests in the region, culminating in the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.233

  Today there are an estimated 1,200 mosques in the U.S., and between 50 and 80 percent are believed to be under Wahhabi control or dominated by Wahhabi theology.234 Between 1990 and 2000, the number of mosques in the United States increased 42 percent, and one in five mosques now run full-time elementary, middle, and secondary schools, meaning that far more attention is being paid by Muslims of all sects and theological distinctions to raising up a new generation of fully devoted Muslim leaders.235

  There are also a growing number of mega-mosques being built in major American cities—full-service, one-stop-shopping Islamic supercenters designed to meet a wide variety of spiritual and educational needs. The 48,000-square-foot Dearborn Mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, not far from Detroit (home of some three hundred thousand people of Middle Eastern descent) is three stories high, takes up an entire city block, and is the largest Sunni mosque in the U.S. Meanwhile, the $12-million-plus Islamic Center of America—also in Dearborn—not only is the largest Shia mosque in the country, it was also described by the Associated Press as “the largest Arab American religious and cultural facility in North America.” Besides a new worship facility, “the center’s 120,000-square-foot complex . . . feature[s] an auditorium, library, and community center.”236

  Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that either of these specific mega-mosques should necessarily be classified as a threat. Nor should those who attend them. Nevertheless, the problem of Radical indoctrination in mosques and Islamic schools is real and widespread. In 2005, the highly respected human rights organization known as Freedom House set out to examine the influence of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi Islam on American life. Their researchers analyzed more than two hundred books and publications collected from more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers throughout American cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston. Ninety percent of the material was originally published in Arabic, though some books and tracts analyzed were in English, Urdu (the major language of Pakistan), Chinese, or Tagalog (the major language of the Philippines). All of the publications had been printed by a Saudi government ministry, distributed by the Saudi Embassy, or distributed through a mosque or Islamic center sponsored by the Saudi royal family.

  What the researchers found was that Saudi-sponsored materials used in hundreds of mosques throughout the U.S. propagated “a religious ideology that explicitly promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations, and in some cases violence, toward members of other religious groups, both Muslims and non-Muslims.” Furthermore, the study concluded that “Saudi-connected resources and publications on extremist ideology remain common reading and educational material in some of America’s main mosques.”237

  Consider a few examples from the researchers’ report:

  “Muslims who convert out of Islam, of course, are apostates . . . and, under Saudi law, they are to
be put to death. An Urdu-language publication, published by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs [and found in a Saudi-financed mosque inside the U.S.] quotes Sheik Bin Uthaimin preaching this policy: ‘[O]ur doctrine states that if you accept any religion other than Islam, like Judaism or Christianity, which are not acceptable, you become an unbeliever. If you do not repent, you are an apostate and you should be killed because you have denied the Qur’an.’”238

  “In a book published by the Ascension Printing House in Saudi Arabia and distributed to a number of mosques in the United States, including the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, California, which was built with $8 million in direct donations from Saudi King Fahd and his son, the issue of Christian missionary activity is linked to a continuation of the Crusades. The Wahhabi text reads: ‘He is wrong who thinks that the Crusaders’ hate for Islam and the Muslims was over with at the end of the Crusades; it remains with us even today if only in a different form from that which it had before. Converting Muslims into Christians is one of the most obvious faces of this malicious movement, which started spreading in some Muslim countries to finally uproot Islam from its people.’”239

  “Saudi state education teaches children from an early age the virtues of jihad. State elementary and high school curricula have been replete with examples of jihad indoctrination, and many of these same writings are now available to an expanding Muslim audience in America. One example is a book for third-year high school students published by the Saudi Ministry of Education that was collected from the Islamic Center of Oakland in California. The text, written with the approval of the Saudi Ministry of Education, teaches students to prepare for jihad in the sense of war against Islam’s enemies, and to strive to attain military self-sufficiency: ‘To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it.’”240