* * *
ORCHESTRATED STUNT?
Timeline of events surrounding removal of six imams from US Airways Flight 300:
Sat., Nov. 18
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN) speaks via video at annual CAIR fundraising banquet in Washington.
Sat., Nov. 18
North American Imams Federation (NAIF) holds private conference in Minneapolis organized by imam and NAIF President Omar Shahin, who holds workshop on “Imams and the Media.”
Sun., Nov. 19, 10 am
Ellison speaks to NAIF in Minneapolis about “Imams and Politics.”
Sun., Nov. 19, 7 pm
Ellison meets with Imam Shahin.
Mon., Nov. 20
Shahin and five other imams from NAIF conference are bounced from US Airways flight for “odd” and “suspicious” behavior and are detained by police at Minneapolis airport.
Tues., Nov. 21
Shahin returns to US Airways ticket counter with media to claim discrimination.
Tues., Nov. 21
CAIR, a sister organization to NAIF, calls for federal investigation into incident and other alleged Muslim profiling.
Wed., Nov. 22
Ellison sends letter to US Airways CEO and Minneapolis airports commission director demanding a meeting to discuss possible “discrimination” and airline and airport policy for removing passengers from flights.
Mon., Nov. 27
Shahin travels to Washington and organizes with CAIR and congressional officials a protest of US Airways at Reagan Washington National Airport. CAIR attorneys prepare discrimination lawsuit for Shahin against US Airways.
Sources: Police and wire reports; CAIR press releases; NAIF brochure.
* * *
Shahin, who has raised funds for the Holy Land Foundation and other charitable fronts for Hamas, was the public face of the Slighted Six imams who returned to the US Airways ticket counter at the Minneapolis airport to scold agents before the cameras, and then staged a protest at Reagan International Airport in Washington.
CAIR quickly signed legal retainer agreements with Shahin and the other imams, while promising them “large compensation,” according to notes taken during one of CAIR’s conference calls.25 “CAIR is taking care of our case,” Shahin told the press.
But it hasn’t gone as smoothly as CAIR would like. Viewed internally as a “big case,” the suit has raised tensions at CAIR headquarters. For instance, Awad scolded CAIR’s former legal director Arsalan Iftikhar for initially dragging his feet. “You are not doing your job on this matter,” he told the attorney in an email complaining about delays.26
NATIONAL SECURITY IMPLICATIONS
The suspicious confluence of events—combined with the imams’ deliberate attempts to raise suspicions on the plane—has led some law enforcement officials to conclude that CAIR and NAIF staged the controversy to create public sympathy for Muslims and an outcry against airline profiling and counterterror measures in general. CAIR and Congressman Ellison, a former civil rights attorney, immediately used the incident as a platform to call for the criminalization of such profiling.
In addition, “Acts of staged controversy could also be used to desensitize security personnel by making activity that common sense would deem suspicious instead seem routine and not worth any special effort,” says New York Police Department detective Edward Sloan.27
By suing John Doe passengers, moreover, CAIR intimidated crew and passengers alike, possibly making them more reluctant to report suspicious behavior. Though CAIR later dropped the claims against the tipsters, there may be a residual “chilling effect,” Sloan says.
Engaging in deliberately suspicious behavior in order to distract federal air marshals or other security and law enforcement authorities—a tactic that has been discussed on Islamist message boards—is against the law, the detective points out.
The mainstream media, who regularly book CAIR spokesmen to claim to argue the point of view of Muslims, and weak-kneed CEOs and politicians, who let CAIR mau-mau them into changing workplace policies or reserving rooms in the Capitol to hold court, have been used by the enemy.
The days of legitimizing and mainstreaming CAIR—now an officially designated terrorist co-conspirator—must end before it can lobby against one more anti-terror measure, boycott one more airline for protecting passengers from suspicious Muslim men, or sue one more John Doe tipster who could save hundreds of lives.
PART II
MUSLIM MAFIA IN AMERICA
The first section of this book reveals how the Council on American-Islamic Relations functions as a dangerous front organization. More alarming, however, is that CAIR is part of an organized crime network in America made up of more than one hundred other Muslim front groups. Collectively, they are the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The following section exposes the inner workings of the mob-like Brotherhood, and outlines its broader conspiracy of infiltrating the American government and “destroying Western civilization from within.” For the first time, the constellation of dots in this sinister conspiracy are connected, and connected convincingly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD: TERRORISTS IN SUITS
“Allah is our goal; the Prophet is our guide; the Quran is our constitution; Jihad is our way; and death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition.”
—Muslim Brotherhood credo
FORTY YEARS AGO, radical Muslim immigrants began organizing in America and developing a criminal underworld that largely escaped federal law enforcement scrutiny. They incorporated nonprofit organizations with benign-sounding names and told anybody who asked they were simply forming a social network or “cultural society” for Muslims.
But in the wake of 9/11, Washington allowed skeptical case agents to start connecting the dots, and they began to see a lot of overlap in the operations of the Muslim groups and their leaders, and a lot of suspicious activity, confirming the hunches of veteran counterterrorism investigators.
Although the groups appear independent of one another, many of them co-mingle funds and even share the same staff and office space. For example, some forty active Muslim charities and businesses have operated at one time or another out of the same office building in Herndon, Virginia. And several others have been headquartered in the same non-descript office park in Alexandria, Virginia, in the shadow of the nation’s capital.
Both nexuses are located within Fairfax County. “There’s only three degrees of separation between international terrorism and what happens in Fairfax County,” observes a senior Fairfax County Police Department detective. “Our society here is totally infiltrated by the bad guys.”1
Investigators also discovered the groups have interlocking boards of directors. One leader, Abdurahman Alamoudi, sat on the boards of no fewer than sixteen Islamic organizations, including CAIR. Many of the leaders live next door to each other on private, secluded streets.
“When we started to really look at this thing, we found it’s all the same people. It’s all the same guys,” says an FBI official in Washington.2
Investigators also confirmed that many of the groups were laundering terrorist-bound funds through a maze of shell companies and fronts. They even used religious charities and think tanks as cover to carry out their illicit activities.
Soon federal prosecutors realized they were dealing with a vast criminal conspiracy and began to look for ways to roll up the entire network of bad guys.
Their first big break came a few years ago with the search of one of the leaders’ homes in Annandale, Virginia, following his arrest on suspicions he had cased the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and other bridges for possible terrorist attack. There, in a sub-basement of suspect Ismail Elbarasse’s basement, agents uncovered a stash of secret manifestos, charters, and other documents revealing the depth of the conspiracy.3
After translating the Arabic-written papers into English, investigators realized they had seized the archives of the U.S. branch of the militant Muslim Brotherhood
.
GERM OF JIHAD
Established eighty years ago in Cairo, Egypt, where the “mother group” is based (think Sicily), the Muslim Brotherhood is a secretive society that gave birth to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. It’s also the parent organization of al-Qaida. In fact, it is the germ of the entire global jihadist movement now threatening the West.
Before joining al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Blind Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman, and other notorious terrorists were all adherents of the trans-national Muslim Brotherhood—or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, as it is known in Arabic. All remain members in good standing—including bin Laden.
The Supreme Guide of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Akef, recently was asked: “Regarding resistance and jihad, do you consider Osama bin Laden a terrorist or an Islamic mujahid (freedom fighter)?”
Akef’s answer: “In all certainty, a mujahid, and I have no doubt in his sincerity in resisting the occupation, close to Allah on high.”
While the Brotherhood now claims to eschew violence against the government, it changed its tune only after Cairo jailed its leaders and banned the group as a terrorist front. The movement still operates semi-openly in Egypt, with some members serving in parliament. And it still supports violent jihad, if clandestinely, while reportedly maintaining a well-armed wing of thousands of trained fighters.
Even in America, it has set up a network of front groups to underwrite suicide bombings carried out by Hamas and other terrorists—mass murders that Brotherhood leaders here have described as “beautiful,” according to covert FBI recordings.
“The Muslim Brotherhood has figured that they can be successful promoting radical change from within the U.S. while supporting the armed struggle outside the U.S., primarily through fundraising and closely associated Palestinian terrorist organizations,” says former FBI Special Agent George Sadler, who after 9/11 investigated the Brotherhood from the bureau’s Washington field office.4
While its secret writings call for conquering this nation through political infiltration and mass conversion, it does not rule out violent jihad when the time is right and all its “infrastructure” is in place and strong. To that end, the Brotherhood has set up jihad training camps inside America where its foot soldiers conduct paramilitary exercises, including firearms and other weapons training.
In other words, despite recent attempts to slap a happy face on its movement, the Brotherhood is still an extremely dangerous and subversive organization, investigators and prosecutors agree. It has stated clearly in its recently declassified U.S. charter that it considers the United States to be its enemy.
And the Islamist cult has spent the last four decades infiltrating America. Like a colony of termites, it has become deeply entrenched in our society, undermining it from within.
THE SMOKING GUN
One secret document found during the raid of Elbarasse’s home lays bare the Brotherhood’s ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover, replacing the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.
Written by a U.S. Brotherhood boss, Mohammed Akram Adlouni, the strategy paper describes the group’s long-term goal of destroying the U.S. system “from within” by using its freedoms and political processes against it. It is a blueprint for stealth jihad. Under the heading: “The role of the Muslim Brother in North America,” it states:
The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and “sabotaging” its miserable house by the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.5
Jihad. Sabotage. Eliminate. Destroy. The miserable West. Sounds like the latest screed from Osama bin laden. But it’s from the Muslim establishment in America.
The same eighteen-page document lists as confederates some thirty major Muslim organizations in America—all of which are considered “mainstream” and “moderate” by the media and many politicians, but are in fact U.S. franchises of the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
Many more Brotherhood front groups have been incorporated since the manifesto was written in 1991. (See Figure 13.1 for list.) It and other seized Brotherhood documents are smoking-gun proof that CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America—along with the Muslim Students Association, North American Islamic Trust, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim American Society, and the rest of institutional Islam in America—were established with a markedly different purpose from what they publicly claim. And they’ve gone through decades of deceit to conceal their true identities and purposes.
Their secret manifesto is “a clear threat statement of hostile intent,” says Pentagon terror expert Major Stephen Coughlin, “with stated objectives that overlap with al-Qaida’s.”6
U.S. prosecutors entered the documents as evidence in the recent Holy Land Foundation terror trial. The chilling courtroom exhibits were unopposed by the defense, further attesting to their authenticity.
Prosecutors outlined the broader conspiracy by listing the entities and individuals named in the Brotherhood documents as unindicted co-conspirators in the case. The government list totals more than three hundred.
As it turns out, “every major Muslim group in the United States is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood,” veteran FBI agent John Guandolo says, who has spent years investigating the subversive group. It’s not just a loose network of people sharing a common ideology, he says, but a centrally controlled and directed insurgency.
“It is a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the government, and they have organizations to do it, and they have written doctrines outlining their plan,” Guandolo adds.
“And they’ve got our number.”7
ORGANIZATIONAL JIHAD
By that, the investigator means the bad guys have closely studied how America works and how it’s structured and have determined that it is built on institutions and organizations. America respects formal structure. So the Brotherhood constructed an elaborate covert as well as public organizational structure—a dual internal and external infrastructure that with few exceptions continues to function today.
As CAIR boss Omar Ahmad bragged: “We can have as many organizations as we want,” no questions asked, thanks to America’s tolerant and pluralistic culture.8 The only thing the Brothers have to worry about, he advised, is covering up “orders” from abroad, as well as the “financial connections,” so that their organizations appear independent.
“If you cover these two bases, you will find that you, as an American organization, can do whatever you want,” the FBI recorded Ahmad saying during his secret jihad summit in Philadelphia.9
The more organizations, the more legitimacy, the Brothers agreed. And the more legitimacy, the more political cover to infiltrate the government and the more legal cover to protect the group from prosecution.10
America’s democratic freedoms have allowed the Brotherhood to put up a tremendous front, behind which it hides its subversive and criminal activities. In fact, the Brotherhood privately refers to its own organizations as “fronts.”
“The Brothers in Egypt don’t have fronts in the same broad way we have in America,” Zeid al-Noman, leader of the organization office of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, confides in one document seized by authorities. Though the organization is banned over there, it still operates relatively openly—something the Brotherhood is loath to do here, especially after 9/11.
RELIGIOUS CRIME SYNDICATE
The U.S. Brotherhood even set up a committee to study the legal aspects of establishing charities in America. The charities are critical because the Brothers have used them as a “side” or “facade,” as they put it in their writings, to launder illegal payments to terrorists.11 Most of their charitable fronts have been shut down, their leaders convicted. However, they continue to search for clever new ways of funneling cash to jihadists.
The Justice Department earlier thi
s year put away several Brotherhood leaders on conspiracy charges in the case against the Holy Land Foundation charity. Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, and CAIR founding director Ghassan Elashi were sentenced to, in effect, life terms for funneling millions to Hamas. Three other Brothers caught up in the investigation have also been imprisoned.12
The government viewed the charity and its subsidiaries as a “criminal enterprise” as much as a terrorist front. Such federal racketeering and conspiracy laws are more commonly applied to mafia figures.
A federal grand jury in Northern Virginia has been hearing evidence in another possible Brotherhood conspiracy involving the network of business and charitable fronts in Herndon known collectively as the Safa group.
Brotherhood underboss Taha al-Alwani of Safa said he was bound by the “Brotherhood of faith” when he funneled money, wittingly or not, to Palestinian terrorists through fronts in Florida controlled by another Brotherhood underboss, according to court documents.
“The matter of the financial support was never the basis of our relationship, for our relationship added to the Brotherhood of faith,” Al-Alwani wrote Sami al-Arian in a letter, referring to at least $50,000 Safa transferred to the now-convicted terrorist.
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