American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

by Steven Emerson

  Blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric spewed from another session at which the Jordanian Sheikh Ahmed al-Kufahi stated, “Jews are the enemies of humanity even before they are the enemies of Muslims, therefore it is necessary to remove them from power.”

  As recently as the 2000 IAP Annual Conference, convened in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, fundraising for Hamas was on full display. Imam Jamal Said from Bridgeview, Illinois, put it like this:

  I appeal to you, on this night that is ushering in the holy month of Ramadan, to be generous and give plenty, to keep the light in the houses of our martyrs burning. We have boxes here that say “Help us, help the Aqsa cause, Islamic Association for Palestine!” We want you to fill those boxes. There is no better charity than to pay for the family of a martyr.34

  Renowned Kuwaiti sheikh Tariq Suweidan added incendiary comments for his rapt audience: “Palestine will not be liberated but through jihad. Nothing can be achieved without sacrificing blood. The Jews will meet their end at our hands.”35

  A fundraising session was held to raise $200,000 for the Islamic Association for Palestine. As an impetus for giving to the organization, the fundraiser read aloud the Arabic will of “martyr” Hamdi Yasin, who died while killing an Israeli officer by driving his car into a military checkpoint.

  I say, it is not correct when some people say that we commit suicide because we do not value life. We love life, but life in dignity…. I cannot allow God’s houses to be violated without defending them…. At the Law Faculty of Al-Azhar University I was about to receive a certificate in law, but in this phase I prefer another kind of certificate, the other life, martyrdom in the path of God, the other certificate is martyrdom in the path of God. There is a big difference between the two certificates…. Finally I pray to Almighty God that my action may result in the death of the greatest number of God’s enemies possible. Let them know that our hallowed places, and our brains, and our blood are not cheap. I profess that there is no god but the One God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God. [emphasis added]36

  There are other means by which IAP spreads its violent, pro-Hamas rhetoric. One avenue of expression has been the use of an Internet e-mail list which provides news from “Palestine” and press releases from the IAP. In May 2000, IAP president Rafiq Jaber wrote in one of these e-mail postings that the Palestinian Authority must recognize that the only means to deal with the Israelis is through violence. Lauding the success of the Hizballah terrorist organization in prompting an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Jaber wrote, “Maybe the PA [Palestinian Authority] will take a hard look at the slippery road it is now traveling and join the resistance to Zionist occupation in order to liberate the land of Palestine. I firmly believe that Palestine will never be liberated by any other means.”37

  On August 28, 2000, IAP distributed a Hamas communiqué on its e-mail bulletin that praised the Hamas terrorist mujahid Mahmoud abu Hannoud for killing Israelis. It stated, “He was able, all praises to Allah, to kill three enemy soldiers and wound nine others, one of whom sustained serious injuries.”38

  Another avenue of expression for the IAP has been through its publications. The IAP currently publishes a biweekly newspaper called Al-Zaitonah which, like its now defunct English-language counterpart the Muslim World Monitor, celebrates successful Hamas terrorist attacks. In 1994 one headline proclaimed: “In its greatest operation, Hamas takes credit for the bombing of an Israeli bus in the center of Tel Aviv.” Other articles warn of “anti-Muslim conspiracies,” for example by denouncing the first World Trade Center bombing as a Mossad-FBI plot (designed, of course, to discredit Islam). Sometimes, IAP simply republishes extremist articles from the right-wing Liberty Lobby plus a stable of left-wing conspiracy theorists. More recently, articles have run in which different organizations have competed for credit in promoting Hamas in the political arena. In one interview in Al-Zaitonah, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the former executive director of the American Muslim Council (AMC), stated, “I request the brothers [in the IAP] not to demand too much from us in terms of Palestine. Our position with regard to the peace process is well-known. We are the ones who went to the White House and defended what is called Hamas.”39

  Across the IAP’s many venues, explicit references to Hamas have dwindled since antiterrorism legislation prohibited the provision of material support or resources to Hamas from the United States. But the lack of mention of Hamas has made little difference in practice. Raeed Tayeh, an IAP representative, explained the organization’s agenda at a rally held at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on October 28, 2000:

  I come with three messages that the Islamic Association for Palestine would like to reiterate. I am going to say them in Arabic and then in English. Number one:kul philastin min Nahar il al-Bahar, all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Number two:Kul Philastin Quds, all Palestine is sacred, not just just al-Quds, and number three, Aqsa al alahi eluhum, our Aqsa is not their temple.

  *

  The FBI believes that Hamas has even gone so far as to set up a for profit American corporation. On September 5, 2001, agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force operating out of Dallas, Texas, executed a search warrant against InfoCom Corporation, an Internet service provider in Richardson, Texas, for its ties to Hamas. Though the affadavit requesting approval for the search of InfoCom’s offices remains classified, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) notified InfoCom that two of its bank accounts, totaling $70,000, had been frozen due to a lump-sum investment of $250,000 provided to InfoCom in 1993 by Nadia Elashi Marzook, the wife of Musa abu Marzook.40 As a by-product of the search instituted against InfoCom, the Bureau of Export Administration had suspended InfoCom’s export privileges based on suspicions that InfoCom had violated U.S. export control laws by making shipments to Libya and Iran, two states listed as state sponsors of terrorism.41 Furthermore, subpoenas were served on two of InfoCom’s clients, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Ghassan Dahduli, a former employee of InfoCom and an officer in the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine (AMELP)—a 501(c)(3) charity with direct links to the Islamic Association for Palestine—was taken into custody by federal authorities on September 22, 2001, after refusing to answer questions.42 Dahduli has also been implicated as an associate of one of the individuals who was convicted for a role in the August 1998 attacks on the United States embassies in Africa.

  InfoCom hosted the Web sites of more than 500 companies and nonprofit groups, including a variety of Islamic groups and charities, including the Holy Land Foundation. Rafiq Jaber, president of the Islamic Association for Palestine, scoffed that InfoCom was “being raided because it’s a Muslim company, like the Holy Land Foundation.”43

  Was InfoCom really just an internet service provider? Or was it providing “material support” for Hamas? Was it involved in technology transfers to terrorist-supporting regimes? It is important to stress that InfoCom has not been convicted of any wrongdoing—yet the confluence of location (Richardson) and personnel (Dahduli and the Marzooks) are troubling.

  With technology, publications, fundraising, and recruiting, Hamas does it all in the United States. Of course, it is still highly active in the Middle East, and it will always target Israelis as its highest priority for actual operations. But as confrontation with the West heats up, Hamas operatives are ready to turn their formidable apparatus against American targets.

  Furthermore, some evidence suggests that Hamas has coordinated with other groups here in the United States. Leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad have spoken of efforts to coordinate with their “brothers” in Hamas (see Chapter 6). Gatherings of multiple groups have helped reinforce their mutual interests.

  Consider the statements of one particular Iranian-American imam, Muhammad al-Asi: “Let me say that Hamas, the [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, and the Islamic Resistance in the Occupied Lands are part of a general Islamic revitalization, political-military reinstatement
in the arena of the world, that is not confined to the Occupied Lands and that strictly belongs to the general Islamic condition throughout the world.”44 He has even gone so far as to say that if Muslims in the United States are not able to take time off to volunteer with these organizations, then they need to “establish contact with these groups and see what aid they want from the U.S.”45

  Al-Asi is a controversial figure. He was previously the imam of the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Maryland46 and the director of the Islamic Education Center there.47 At one time he was the imam of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., but in 1983 he was forced out; nonetheless he still preaches on the sidewalk outside on Fridays. The Islamic Education Center in Potomac has received substantial funding in the past by the Alavi Foundation, which the FBI claims is “entirely controlled by the government of Iran.”48 According to an article in the December 1995 edition of The American Spectator, the Islamic Education Center in Potomac “offers Farsi-language primary school classes that are fully accredited with the Iranian national educational system. It also offers religious education classes for adults and children, and distributes Iranian government propaganda. At the center’s bookstore, interested parties can purchase the original version of Khomeini’s fatwa—or religious order—condemning British author Salman Rushdie to death for having blasphemed against Islam. The fatwa instructs Muslims throughout the world that it is a ‘religious duty’ to assassinate Rushdie. The bookstore also sells videotaped speeches by anti-Semitic fanatics such as the Swiss-based Ahmed Huber, who extols Ayatollah Khomeini as the living continuation of Adolf Hitler.” In short, al-Asi is strongly pro-Iranian, yet that has not stopped him from praising Hamas and linking up with other organizations.

  Al-Asi has been present at a number of radical Islamic conferences through the years including those held on behalf of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, where he made incendiary statements regarding striking at American interests worldwide (“If the Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim World, and specifically where American interests are concentrated—in Egypt, in Turkey, in the Indian subcontinent, just to mention a few. Strike at American interests there!”). When the United Association for Studies and Research convened a conference including radicals from groups ranging from Hamas to Hizballah to the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, al-Asi appeared and gave a presentation on the issue of “The Islamic Movement and the Need for a Comprehensive Political and Intellectual Organization.”49 He has also appeared at conferences of the Islamic Association for Palestine. Al-Asi has even been hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran; on January 30, 1990, he was hosted by Ayatollah Khamene’i, the religious leader in Iran who succeeded the Ayatollah Khomeini after he died.50

  *

  In meeting after meeting here in the United States, the same people and organizations mix and match. Through some people, connections are forged with Iran; through others, with Osama bin Laden; through others, with countries like Sudan. America’s role in facilitating these connections is more than peripheral.

  Having looked at a single organization with several American tentacles, it may be helpful to next flip the microscope around, and look at a single tentacle of a different organization. Perhaps the most disturbing story of American terrorist infiltration is the story of one unusual tentacle that reached its way into the University of South Florida in Tampa.

  Chapter Six

  Jihad in the Academy

  ON A FORMER SANDY AIRSTRIP near Tampa sits a remarkable, very contemporary Sun Belt college campus. The University of South Florida, founded with only 2,000 students in 1960, has grown rapidly during its short four-decade life. With branches in St. Petersburg, Sarasota-Manatee, and Lakeland, it now sprawls across 164 buildings and boasts an enrollment of 37,000. While drawing students from far and wide, its main constituency is from the Tampa region, including many Latinos.

  Few large urban universities are as academically competitive. The average SAT score of entering freshmen hovers around 1100. The university’s graduate programs are broad and deep, including specialties in medicine and biotech. Meanwhile, the Tampa area has emerged as a top southern hi-tech center, with many entrepreneurial ventures growing out of town-gown relationships in the familiar pattern of Stanford in Silicon Valley or M.I.T. in Cambridge. On its Web site, the university calls itself “one of the great legacies of the watershed social and intellectual developments of mid-twentieth century America.”1

  Unfortunately, the University of South Florida has also been a center of the American jihad movement.

  It all began innocently enough. In 1989, on narrow, dead-end 130th Street, a sign was affixed to the last house on the block memorializing “Izz al-Din al-Qassam…[who] declared Jihad against the British and Zionist invasion of Palestine. He was martyred on November 19, 1935 in Yabrod, Palestine. Al-Qassam has become a symbol of heroism, resistance, occupation, and invasion of steadfast Palestine.” In fact, al-Qassam may be the most exalted figure in recent Palestinian history. As noted by scholar Ziad abu-Amr, he is “the main source of inspiration for the Islamic Jihad movement. Al-Qassam is considered the movement’s first pioneer. He is viewed as the first leader of the Palestinian armed resistance in the history of modern Palestine and the true father of the armed Palestinian revolution.”2 The Tampa house—being used as a mosque—was named by USF professor Sami alArian.

  To find a mosque similarly memorialized you would have to go to the Gaza Strip. There the al-Qassam Mosque is a recognized hangout for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that has established as its trademark the decapitating and dismembering of both Jews and Palestinian “collaborators.” Islamic Jihad is not just at war with Israel. The movement sees Israel’s existence as part of a larger American-directed plot against Islam. According to abu-Amr, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad sees Israel and America “as two faces of the same coin.”3

  From 1991 to 1995 one of the world’s most lethal terrorist factions used a think tank affiliated with the University of South Florida (along with a separate nonprofit organization) as a base for some of its top leaders. The formula was simple: use the laws, freedoms, and loopholes of the most liberal nation on earth to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world.

  At the center of it all was Sami alArian. A Palestinian professor of engineering, alArian came to USF in 1986 to teach that subject along with computer science. One of his first undertakings was to incorporate the Islamic Concern Project, soon to be renamed the Islamic Committee for Palestine. The ICP’s ostensible purposes were “charitable, cultural, social, educational and religious in which the concept of brotherhood, freedom, justice, unity, piety, righteousness and peace shall be propagated.”4

  AlArian and his brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar were among the founding members of ICP’s Board of Directors. AlArian was also the chairman of the board of another nonprofit organization, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a think-tank organized “exclusively for educational and academic research and analysis, and promotion of international peace and understanding.”5 On March 11, 1992, WISE entered into a formal agreement with the University of South Florida outlining a series of cooperative programs for research and graduate-student enrichment, all in the name of “multiculturalism.” Together, the university and WISE would cohost forums, sponsor USF graduate students, and share resources.

  When I interviewed alArian in the early 1990s, the soft spoken professor denied that either ICP or WISE had any connection to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Rather than being “political,” he said, ICP was a “charitable, social, and cultural type group.” When I asked him who al-Qassam was, he shrugged, “A Muslim scholar.”6 Yet, as I first showed with videotaped evidence in “Jihad in America,” the ICP was already acting as a support group for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The connections between the ICP, WISE, and the University of South Florida would
only grow more intertwined as the 1990s progressed.

  The ICP and WISE were almost identical organizations. For fifteen months both shared office space and a post office box secured by alArian in 1994.7 Even more significant was the match-up in leadership. AlArian, Bashir Nafi, Mazen al-Najjar, and Khalil Shikaki were all executive members of both organizations. Shikaki, one of the first directors of WISE, was also the brother of Fathi Shikaki, secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Khalil negotiated the agreement between WISE and the university. Another member of the circle was Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who served as director of administration of WISE and was a member of the Board of Directors of ICP while also employed as an adjunct professor in Middle Eastern studies at USF. Shallah taught a course on Middle Eastern politics that attracted some student criticisms because he referred to Israel only as “Palestine.”8

  For legal purposes, however, ICP had no connection to the university. Thus it was on his own time that Professor alArian edited Inquiry, the official ICP magazine. Inquiry routinely ran incendiary attacks on Jews and the United States. One article, for example, argued, “The mistake of the Jews of today who occupy Palestine was made as well by the Roman aggressors of 933 A.D.…[It] is to underestimate the faith in Allah of our people in resisting all forms of evil, tyranny and aggression. Our Jihad is the greatest weapon we have which no nation or Zionist can take away. It is greater than the Japanese suicide kamikaze missions for ours is for Allah and He is great.”

  Inquiry also carried many articles about the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In January 1993, the magazine ran a full-length interview with PIJ secretary-general Fathi Shikaki, the brother of its board member. “The movement considers itself an independent, Islamic, and popular movement with Islam as its ideology, grassroots popular action and armed struggle as its means, and the liberation of Palestine as its objective,” Shikaki told Inquiry.9 To this day, a copy of this interview can be found on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Web site.10 When Paul Eedle, Reuters’ Egyptian bureau chief, went to Damascus to interview Shikaki in 1993, the secretary-general gave him a copy of the Inquiry article as background information.11