“Inevitably,” he says, “over time if not in relatively short order, a parallel society is in place that is utterly at odds with the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution, its precepts, freedoms, and institutions.”10
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE GODFATHER
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America.”
—CAIR founding chairman Omar Ahmad1
THE MUSLIM MAFIA’S FIRST GODFATHER was Ahmed Elkadi, who headed its shura council for a decade before being ousted in 1994 by the other bosses who thought he wasn’t conservative enough.2
Elkadi had also become something of an embarrassment.
A doctor by trade, he set up a medical clinic in Panama City, Florida, where he was accused of performing unneeded stomach surgeries on at least nine patients. State regulators also found that he had performed a mastectomy and other major operations at his clinic without proper precautions, such as an adequate blood supply, and they took disciplinary action against him.3
He eventually lost his medical license and his clinic, and moved to Sterling, Virginia, where he and his wife live in a condo and attend ADAMS Center, a Brotherhood mosque, and still pine for an Islamic America.4
Federal Election Commission records show he and his wife are fans of Lyndon Larouche, the Holocaust-denying, Israel-bashing ex-convict, and have given Larouche thousands of dollars in campaign donations during his many fruitless runs for president.5
It remains unclear who replaced Elkadi as godfather, but federal investigators suspect Abdurahman Alamoudi took over the reins of the subversive, terror-supporting movement.
As head of the Washington-based American Muslim Council,6 Alamoudi rubbed elbows with presidents and their staff in the White House—all the while raising millions of dollars for al-Qaida.
He also infiltrated the State Department, as a goodwill ambassador to Muslim countries, and the Pentagon, where he created the Muslim chaplain corps for the Pentagon.
FBI agents who helped put Alamoudi away say he’s a much bigger player than publicly disclosed. At the time he was arrested, U.S. intelligence intercepted al-Qaida chatter out of Saudi Arabia lamenting that “one of our main financiers has been taken out.” 7
“Alamoudi was involved in a lot more than money laundering,” says a senior FBI officer who was involved in his investigation out of the Washington field office’s counterterrorism unit. “He’s a f***ing terrorist.”8
“U.S. law enforcement was not real proactive. It took years to figure out he was a terrorist,” the officer adds. “No Muslim was invited to the White House more than Alamoudi.”
Investigators say that although Alamoudi is serving a twenty-three-year prison sentence, some of his wealthy Saudi-based relatives remain under scrutiny.
They say his billionaire cousin Mohammed Hussein Alamoudi—who owns a house in McLean, Virginia, and maintains business connections in the area—has pumped at least $350,000 into Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. According to investigators, Mohammed Alamoudi owns a major interest in the port authority in Aden, Yemen, where the USS Cole was bombed.9
ALAMOUDI’S TROJAN HORSE
Abdurahman Alamoudi is now behind bars, but the Trojan Horse he built is still doing damage. Islamists have penetrated the military—including Gitmo—where Muslim chaplains sponsored by Alamoudi, with help from Arabic linguists, have been accused of spying for the enemy.
“Alamoudi placed chaplains throughout our military,” says U.S. Representative Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “He’s now in jail [but] the chaplains, to my knowledge, are still in their current positions. Go figure.”10
She says the politically correct Pentagon has not gone back and investigated the backgrounds of the chaplains in light of Alamoudi’s al-Qaida ties.
Two Muslim Defense Department officials—who together coordinate military outreach with CAIR, its internal records show,11 as well as with ISNA, where Alamoudi once served as president—have infiltrated the upper echelons of the Pentagon. They are Bangladesh-born Muslim chaplain Abuhena Saifulislam, a recently promoted Navy lieutenant commander, and Egypt-born Pentagon special assistant Hesham Islam, who has advised the deputy secretary of defense, who has authorized the release of dozens of Gitmo detainees who have resumed terrorist activities.
Saifulislam (whose name means “sword of Islam” in Arabic) served as the first Muslim chaplain at Gitmo, where he closely ministered to the terrorists and furnished them with copies of the Quran and a full menu of halal meals. More recently, he created the first mosque in Marine Corps history at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.
Saifulislam received his formal Islamic training at the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Ashburn, Virginia, which was raided after 9/11 on terrorism suspicions and is currently run by an unindicted co-conspirator in the al-Arian terror case. GSISS is one of the fronts in the Safa group formerly controlled by Alamoudi.
Alamoudi once told Muslims that, while their goal is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state, they must exercise patience—even if they have to wait “a hundred years.”
“I think if we are outside this country, we can say, ‘Oh, Allah, destroy America,’” he said in one speech at a Muslim conference. “But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it” from within.12
Others have picked up where Alamoudi left off as Muslim mafia godfather. Since landing behind bars, Alamoudi’s heir appears to be Omar Ahmad of CAIR, investigators say, who also serves as a leader of a Northern California mosque started by one of the founding fathers of the movement, Mahboob Khan.
U.S. prosecutors recently fingered Ahmad as a key Brotherhood figure and an unindicted terror co-conspirator.13
Ahmad insists he’s a moderate and patriotic American. But last decade he told a group of Muslims in Northern California they are in America to help assert Islam’s rule over the country.
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” a local journalist reported Ahmad saying. “The Quran should be the highest authority in America.”14
MUSLIMS SHOULD RUN AMERICA
CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad seems to agree. Speaking at an ISNA conference ten years ago, he said Muslims should be running America:
“Muslims in America are in the best position to show Islam and to show action and to show vision, not only for a Muslim school how it should be run, but for the entire society—how it should be run. Who better can lead America than Muslims?”15
CAIR’s top spokesman Ibrahim “Dougie” Hooper has also expressed his wish to overturn the U.S. system of government in favor of an Islamic state.
“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future,” Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
That moment of unguarded candor has come back to haunt him—as it should, Islamic terror expert Robert Spencer says.
“You have to understand, he’s not just saying something like ‘Well, I really wish there would be more Methodists and fewer Baptists,’” Spencer warns. “He’s saying that if the United States government becomes Islamic, then the political elements of Islam—and Islam is a political and societal system, not just a religious faith—should be applied to America, and that means the end of the United States Constitution.”16
Though conceding he made the remark, Hooper argues that he’s not advocating violence. He says he and Muslims like him should work instead through the media and political system, and use “education” to help turn America into an Islamic state.
What a relief.
Even today, Hooper does not disavow his unpatriotic dream.
“I do not get up in the morning and think about this,” he recently said on a North Carolina radio show when asked
if he still wanted an Islamic America. The host pointed out that his answer wasn’t exactly a denial.17
These anti-American sentiments expressed by CAIR officials dovetail with those revealed in the Muslim Brotherhood manifesto calling for a “grand jihad” to destroy America and the West, “so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who is now an author and terrorism expert at the NEFA Foundation, says the manifesto reveals the “true agenda” of CAIR and other major Muslim organizations in the U.S.—which is “the abolition of the United States government as we know it.”18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
INFILTRATION
“Members of the Group should be able to infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies or the embassies in order to collect information and build close relationships with the people in charge in these establishments.”
—Secret U.S. Brotherhood charter found in possession of Brotherhood underboss and convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian1
ALI “THE AMERICAN” MOHAMED was a loyal member of the Muslim Brotherhood who emigrated from Egypt to spy for the Brotherhood in America. After failing to penetrate CIA operations, he infiltrated the U.S. Army as a sergeant and wound up at Fort Bragg training with U.S. Special Forces, where he obtained secret security clearance.
Although he was not a Green Beret, he worked alongside the elite Berets learning unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency operations. The military trusted him, and before long, he was teaching soldiers about the Middle East at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School—commonly referred to as “Swick”—where unbeknown to his superior officers, he was stealing classified military secrets.
During weekends and other leaves from Fort Bragg, Mohamed would travel to New Jersey to train al-Qaida operatives in weapons and warfare tactics, which they would later use against the country Mohamed had sworn to protect. In a search of one terrorist’s home, authorities found U.S. Army training manuals, videos of Swick warfare instruction, and other classified materials.
After his honorable discharge from the Army, Mohamed moved to Santa Clara, California, where he set up a communications cell for al-Qaida while fronting as a computer engineer.
In 1995, he brought Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri to California for a mosque fundraising tour, reportedly raising half a million dollars for the al-Qaida leader. A large chunk of it was raised at CAIR founder Omar Ahmad’s mosque in Santa Clara, a key Brotherhood hub. (Ahmad is employed as a computer engineer in the Silicon Valley.)
Five years later, the feds finally got wise to Mohamed, and after his arrest on terrorism charges, he pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy for his role in planning the al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa.
The Mohamed case marked the first in a series of instances in which dangerous Muslim Brotherhood figures have successfully penetrated key U.S. institutions.
After the FBI was called in to break up a Muslim spy ring at the al-Qaida prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, officials from the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control gathered with FBI officials to discuss the infiltration of the U.S. government by Brotherhood agents. The high-level Washington meeting—which took place in October 2004—was the first formal discussion of the espionage threat posed by the Islamist enemy since the 9/11 attacks.2
Until then, counterintelligence efforts had been directed chiefly at old Cold War threats, such as Russia and China. But authorities have realized, if belatedly, that the new spy threat is potentially more dangerous—and more insidious. Unlike the Communists, the Muslim Brothers can infiltrate under the cover of a religion protected by the First Amendment. And as spies go, they are extremely slick.
‘OUTRAGEOUS PENETRATION’
“These guys are good,” says veteran FBI special agent John Guandolo, who was involved in the Gitmo espionage investigation and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases after 9/11. “They’ve achieved outrageous penetration at senior levels of our government.”
He says infiltration is the key to the Brotherhood’s “massive subversive movement in the U.S.,” and they’re following a plan established years ago.
In fact, documents show the Brotherhood movement is now decades into a North America-wide espionage operation that includes running infiltration operations against governments to collect classified intelligence.
One document, seized by federal agents in a raid of Brotherhood boss Sami al-Arian’s home in Florida, is especially instructive. Translated from Arabic, it reveals a comprehensive plan for “spying” on U.S. agencies.
“Our presence in North America gives us a unique opportunity to monitor, explore and follow up,” it states. “Members of the Group should be able to infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies or the embassies in order to collect information and build close relationships with the people in charge in these establishments.”3
They should also use every opportunity to “collect information from those relatives and friends who work in sensitive positions in the government.”
Unfortunately, our “sensitive intelligence agencies” have not made it very hard for the bad guys to put Muslim agents in place, hypersensitive as they are to complaints of Islamophobia by CAIR and other fronts that run interference for them.
Another al-Arian document explains that the Brothers are at war with the West, and war requires espionage and sabotage.
“We are in a battle of life and death, in a battle of fate and future against the Western hegemony,” it says. “What is needed is the dismantling of the cultural system of the West.”4
Al-Arian managed to penetrate the White House along with his pal Alamoudi before federal authorities caught up with him. He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, served time in jail, and is now under house arrest on separate contempt charges for refusing to cooperate in the Safa group investigation, despite a federal grand jury subpoena.
The Brotherhood also has a less covert strategy to infiltrate the political system.
“The Muslim strategy for change from within incorporates the secretion of loyal Brothers into political office,” warns former FBI agent Sadler.
Groups like CAIR, MPAC, MAS, along with the Islamic Institute and American Muslim Alliance, have aided in this project. Some of them recently formed an electioneering umbrella group—the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, or AMT—to promote candidates into public office.
And not just at the federal level, but state and local levels as well.
THE LIBRARY PROJECT
CAIR’s Ahmad, for example, landed a position on the Santa Clara City library board. He was a library trustee for ten years while CAIR launched its so-called Library Project, successfully targeting some eight thousand neighborhood libraries across the country with packages of books, videos, and other Brotherhood propaganda sanitizing Islam.
Brotherhood leaders, meanwhile, are actively recruiting engineers and other experts for local planning boards to remove roadblocks to expansion for Brotherhood schools and mosques.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, a Muslim traffic engineer who works for the county recently testified on behalf of the radical Islamic madrassa run by the Saudi Embassy during a heated county hearing over the school’s planned expansion.
His testimony—along with an outpouring of some six hundred local Muslim supporters—helped the Islamic Saudi Academy win approval of its plan, even though it has been cited by the U.S. government for promoting violence and intolerance through its textbooks, and has acted as a breeding ground for terrorists, graduating even al-Qaida operatives. (Ismail Elbarasse, the Brotherhood figure and terrorist suspect who hid Brotherhood documents in his basement, served as the school’s chief financial officer.)
While the Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed in other countries, the U.S. has not yet designated the group a terrorist entity or foreign threat, even though it has sta
ted clearly that it supports violent jihad and is dedicated to replacing the U.S. with an Islamic theocracy.
The Brotherhood continues to perplex policymakers in Washington.
Some have argued for openly including it in politics to draw it out of the shadows. They say there may be moderate elements that could be co-opted. Others argue that once in power, even a politically accountable Brotherhood would pursue policies counter to U.S. interests.
“The complication is they are a political movement, an economic cadre, and in some cases terrorist supporters,” says Juan Zarate, former chief of the Treasury Department’s terrorist finance unit. “They operate business empires in the Western world, but their philosophy and ultimate objectives are radical Islamist goals that in many ways are antithetical to our interests. They have one foot in our world, and one foot in a world hostile to us. How to decipher what is good, bad, or suspect is a severe complication.”5
Zarate adds, however, that “the Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”6
After 9/11, federal investigators noticed that most of their leads traced back to the Brotherhood. In fact, almost every terrorism case, active or inactive, ties into the Brotherhood nexus, whether directly or indirectly.
“You can’t call the enemy just al-Qaida anymore,” says an FBI counterterrorism agent in Washington who’s actively investigating Brotherhood figures and their front groups. “It’s something else: it’s the Muslim Brotherhood.”7
ISLAMIC REVOLUTION
Indeed, many of the suspected Brotherhood figures identified here in this chapter (see table) have either been convicted or named as unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism-financing and other cases.
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