Muslim Mafia
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“Mein Kampf means my struggle,” he adds, skeptically. “Jihad means something more than that, but they’re not telling us.”24
‘THEY ADMIRE OUR VALUES’
A review of the government-produced video, which runs roughly thirty minutes, reveals several fallacies in consultant Nydell’s presentation.
Referring to all Muslims, Nydell maintains that “certainly they don’t approve of terrorist acts,” adding that Islam “is a perfectly decent religion with good moral teachings or it wouldn’t have survived.”25
Her conclusion flies in the face of several major polls that show a sizable number of Muslims around the world support violent jihad, including Muslims in America. A 2007 Pew Research Center poll, in fact, found one in four younger Muslims in the U.S. believe suicide bombings are justified to defend Islam.
Nydell also claims that jihad does not mean holy war. She defines it as “a word that means effort” or “the daily struggle to keep yourself on the true path.” If a Muslim attacks you, she says, “they’re just trying to regain their honor” after suffering some form of indignity at the hands of infidels. Nydell completely glosses over the hardcore militancy codified and mandated in Islam’s holy texts.
What of all the Muslim terrorists invoking Islam? She posits that these are primarily young, uneducated Arabs or South Asians who are “disenfranchised” by government oppression and poverty, and are lashing out for reasons other than religion. Never mind that most of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the 7/7 bombers in London, were well-educated adults from affluent families.
Nydell also places a fig leaf over Shariah law and its call for Islamic domination, arguing it’s no threat to Western institutions or the West’s way of life.
There is no reason to question the motives of Muslim immigrants, Nydell lectures border agents in the training video. “They’re not here to change us,” she assures them. “Don’t believe they’re jealous, and they’re going to try to come over here and make you and me go to the mosque and all this kind of stuff.”
“They admire our values,” Nydell continues, as orchestral music soars in the background of the video. “Don’t let anyone tell you they hate freedom.”
She asserts that it’s incumbent upon agents to treat Muslim travelers with the utmost respect. For instance, if they come across a copy of the Quran in their belongings, “don’t put something on top of it,” because that could offend them. Nothing can sit on top of their sacred book.
And if they find a Muslim praying, she advises, “Don’t walk in front of them,” and be sure to “keep quiet.”
Another Customs and Border Protection official says the video is virtually useless as a terror-fighting tool for border agents, who are the first line of defense against Islamic terrorists sneaking into the country.
“Just teaching Islam 101—you know, they pray five times a day, they face Mecca—without any inside analysis is like teaching a college graduate sex education,” he says. “It’s a waste of time.”26
LOSING THE LEXICON WAR
After British authorities disrupted 2006’s transatlantic skyterror plot, then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff distributed a memo to department staff oddly bereft of any reference to the terrorists’ religion.
“Over the last few hours,” he wrote in the one-page “MESSAGE FROM SECRETARY CHERTOFF TO ALL DHS EMPLOYEES,” “British authorities have arrested a significant number of extremists engaged in a substantial plot to destroy multiple passenger aircraft flying from the United Kingdom to the United States.”27
The so-called “extremists” were known at the time to be British Muslims of Pakistani descent, yet Chertoff neglected to identify them as such—or even address their motive for attacking America. Yet the plot was serious enough for him to raise the nation’s threat level to severe, or red, for commercial flights.
It turns out that he and other homeland security officials have sanitized the language used in the war on Islamic terror following years of mau-mauing from CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, and other Muslim Brotherhood pressure groups about the language causing “offense” and “insult” to Muslims.
Both Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC, have issued staffwide memos imposing Orwellian speech code. It is no longer advisable for staff to use terms such as “jihadist,” “Islamist,” or even “Islamic terrorist.” Acceptable alternatives include “violent extremist” or just plain “terrorist.”
The terms “jihad,” “Islamofascism” and “caliphate” are also out. “Don’t invoke Islam” in any way, says the new directive from NCTC, which was issued early in 2008.28 Avoid “inflating the religious bases” for Islamic terrorism and make “no overt reference to Islam,” lest you “cause offense,” advises Homeland Security in its nine-page memo, also issued early in 2008 and marked “For Official Use Only.”29
The FBI has followed a similar speech ban. And now, as a supposed gesture of goodwill to Muslims the world over, the Obama administration reportedly has dropped the already generic “war on terror” altogether from the Homeland Security vernacular.
The irony of allowing groups that want to censor debate over their own ties to terrorism to censor our language in the war on terror is not lost on FBI agents. They lament that the bad guys are winning the lexicon war.
“Political correctness has darn near beaten common sense police work to death,” says Ben R. Furman, a retired FBI agent who led an international multiagency task force that investigated chemical and nuclear terrorism threats.30
How can we defeat the enemy if we can’t even define it? Furman and others ask. This is a war on Islamic terrorists, yet it won’t be won if agents have to stop every five minutes to make sure they’re being PC. It won’t be won if they’re forced to put up blinders to the religious motivation of the enemy.
Such political correctness is the handmaiden of terrorism, agents say, because it appeases terrorism, and enables it to operate in the shadows.
RECRUITING ARABIC LINGUISTS AND AGENTS
To be fair, top FBI brass have to deal with things that are well above the pay grade and concern of agents. Besides the liberal press, they have to contend with the EEOC. Internal FBI records show the agency has been sued by no fewer than fourteen Arab and Muslim employees since 9/11, and the last thing headquarters wants is more accusations of discrimination, even if most of them are frivolous.31 It’s absolutely petrified of the bigot-branding machine deployed by CAIR and other Muslim-and Arab-rights groups—as well as the ACLU, which has asked CAIR for “FBI ethnicity related cases,” according to a copy of notes obtained from a meeting between the ACLU and CAIR in Washington.32
But its solution could not be more wrongheaded: Hiring even more Arab and Muslim employees, while promoting the existing ones who are complaining.
FBI director Mueller has launched a national hiring blitz that includes setting up recruitment booths at ISNA conventions and placing full-page recruiting ads in ISNA’s magazine Islamic Horizons. That’s right, the FBI is recruiting among Muslim Brotherhood fronts that support jihad.
Republicans in Congress have rebuked the Justice Department for allowing such an unholy alliance. The evidence naming ISNA as a leading branch of the American Muslim Brotherhood is overwhelming, argue U.S. Representatives Sue Myrick (R-NC) and Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and its links to U.S. fundraising efforts on behalf of Hamas are equally strong.
“Establishing a partnership with ISNA is exactly the wrong approach at this critical juncture in history, setting a precedent that radical jihadists should be the conduit between the U.S. government and the American Muslim population,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the former attorney general.33
At the same time, the FBI is sending recruiters into Muslim Brotherhood mosques, including the CAIR-endorsed ADAMS Center, a Muslim Brotherhood hub singled out by the Freedom House as one of the top distributors of Saudi-sponsored anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma.34
“One of the things the FBI believes
in is diversity. Diversity is important. We are critically seeking special agents and support staff who are Arabic speakers,” an FBI recruiter last year told Muslims gathered at the Sterling, Virginia mosque. “We also need folks who candidly are familiar with Islam. We’re learning, many of us.”35
While the FBI actively solicits applications from Muslim Brother zealots, it has rejected scores of applications from Jewish Arabic speakers seeking to become translators and analysts.36
And it’s expanding the role of Arabic linguists in the bureau to include intelligence reporting and analysis, while promoting these mostly Muslim translators and giving them even higher security access—even though some have been disciplined for “misconduct related to mistranslating wiretaps and/or documents, or omitting information or withholding information from agents” and other security breaches since 9/11, according to Kevin Favreau, assistant director of intelligence for the FBI’s national security branch in Washington.37 And it’s doing this even after FBI translator Nadia Prouty was busted for spying for Hezbollah.
One Arab agent who sued the bureau is a suspected Muslim Brotherhood “plant” who refused to tape-record Muslim suspects under terrorism investigation.38 This same Muslim agent had no problem secretly tape-recording Fox News host Bill O’Reilly before suing him for libel, however.39 O’Reilly won the case. What’s become of the Muslim agent? The FBI now has him—get this—recruiting other Muslim agents and language specialists.
In fact, Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, an Egyptian-American and the first Muslim FBI agent, encouraged fellow Muslims at a recent American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee convention to join the FBI with the following pitch: “We will never change what we don’t like unless we take part.”40
ANOTHER ‘DIRTY’ MUSLIM AGENT
More recently, another Muslim FBI agent in Los Angeles allegedly compromised a multi-agency terrorism investigation by tipping off the ringleader of a Pakistani-based terror cell that the Joint Terrorism Task Force had under surveillance for more than two years.
According to a JTTF official, the agent is embedded with the bad guys through family businesses, and fed them critical information detailing the investigation. He allegedly not only tipped the cell leader off to a so-called “trash cover” investigators performed outside his home, but also identified surveillance vehicles for him.41
The cell leader has trained about a dozen young Muslim men in firearms use and hand-to-hand combat on the grounds of his mosque in Los Angeles, while arranging for more sophisticated training at camps inside Pakistan’s northwest province that are run by the Taliban.
The allegedly “dirty” Muslim agent—an Egyptian-American married to an Afghan woman—allegedly compromised several investigations across the country, including ones in New York and Boston. The espionage was so extensive that FBI director Mueller has been briefed regarding the mushrooming scandal.
For this very reason, most career FBI agents are not thrilled about the bureau’s post-9/11 policy of aggressively recruiting Arabs and Muslims. They say it’s fraught with risk. In fact, a recent study conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice found that only one agent among hundreds of agents surveyed at sixteen FBI field offices across the country thinks it’s a good idea to recruit more employees from the Muslim community.42
Headquarters does not learn from experience, even recent experience, however.
Agents complain the FBI still seems more worried about offending groups with proven ties to terror, such as ISNA, than infiltrating and investigating them. Time and time again, political correctness has overridden the better judgment of those on the ground and in the trenches. And PC red tape is handcuffing their efforts to dismantle the terror-support network in America (although, remarkably, they’ve still managed to disrupt more than thirty terrorism plots since 9/11, which is a testament to their dedication, professionalism, and skill).
“I am sad to note that the bureau remains awash in political correctness and risk aversion,” says former FBI special agent George Sadler, who resigned in frustration from the Washington field office, where he worked counterterrorism cases in the wake of 9/11.43
While CAIR might want to savor its past tete-a-tetes at the Hoover building, its sister organization ISNA continues to enjoy entree there. The FBI’s disengagement policy only applies to CAIR, even though ISNA was also named as a Muslim Brotherhood front and an unindicted co-conspirator with a charity convicted of funding terror.
Fresh on the heels of the Holy Land charity conviction, FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni this March sat on a Yale University panel on civil rights with ISNA director Louay M. Safi.44 That same month, ISNA says it met with the FBI to voice outrage over undercover agents in mosques and to badger headquarters into re-engaging with CAIR.45
In other words, the FBI is still engaged with the Wahhabi lobby, if not CAIR. And CAIR still has Congress. It continues its outreach and lobbying activities on the Hill with little shunning, an issue we’ll explore in depth in a later chapter.
The late Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, one of the founding fathers of the international Muslim Brotherhood, argued that outreach and interfaith dialogue with the West should only be done to benefit the ummah. Outreach must not benefit non-Muslim states, he said, and certainly not kaffir police investigating the Muslim Brothers.
Build “a bridge” to the West, he said, but only so the infidels can cross over to Islam, bringing concessions with them.46 The Brotherhood bridge, despite all the conciliatory rhetoric, is really a one-way street. The group’s secret U.S. manifesto, which calls for eliminating America’s Judeo-Christian society and making “Allah’s religion victorious over all other religions,” also calls for the creation of phony “Friendship Societies with other religions, and things like that.”47 Such olive branches are clearly a ruse.
The real outreach objective of CAIR and the other Brotherhood front groups in America, then, is to convert Americans to Islam, while registering grievances and extracting accommodations from the government. Another goal is gathering intelligence about law enforcement plans to investigate the Muslim community.
If confronted, the Brotherhood counsels the faithful to lie and deny—something CAIR does exceedingly well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CAIR’S TEN BIGGEST WHOPPERS
“Believers should lie to People of the Book to protect their lives and religion.”
—Sunni Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyah, referring to adherents of the Bible, the Jews and Christians1
DOES CAIR LIE? A better question is, when doesn’t it?
At CAIR, lying is an instrument for communication. It’s been caught trafficking in countless falsehoods, and as Beltway interest groups go, CAIR is arguably the least reliable and credible media source in Washington.
Its propaganda machine is run by Ibrahim Hooper, a belligerent Islamic convert who bullies and attacks journalists he considers a threat with a smashmouth style that resembles more a Chicago street tough than a professional spokesperson for a nonprofit organization.
Even Muslim members of CAIR don’t trust or respect him. “I am alarmed at Brother Hooper’s breezy unthinking attitude and loose talk,” complains Jameila al-Hashimi in a letter to CAIR’s board of directors.2 She suggests Hooper should be sidelined for someone more professional.
“His language skills are grossly inadequate for undergraduate work, and [yet] somehow he is allowed to present himself as a spokesperson for the ummah? Please stop him. He does not possess adequate skills for a Muslim advocate,” al-Hashimi wrote in a three-page letter obtained from files in CAIR’s main office. “How did it happen that Brother Hooper, who clearly cannot express thoughts with depth, clarity, or compelling language, is our unilateral official spokesperson?”
The answer is cronyism. Hooper was a friend of CAIR co-founder Nihad Awad. The two activists met in Minneapolis where they worked in support of Bosnian Muslims in their jihad against the Serbs. At the time, Osama bin Laden was actively recruiting and training jihadists to fight alongsi
de the Bosnians.3
Hooper also worked closely with Awad when he was running propaganda operations for Hamas at the Islamic Association for Palestine, where he published a rag that celebrated Hamas suicide attacks on Israelis and publicized Hamas calls for the death of Israel.
“Ibrahim and I had worked together for years,” Awad told a pro-Palestinian publication.4
In 1993, during their secret Hamas summit in Philadelphia, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood discussed the need to form a new political front for public relations and media spin. Awad gave a report arguing for recruiting qualified English-speaking flacks to interface with the American press and gain their sympathies.
“We need to speak about the necessity of finding reporters to do media work,” he said.
The participants agreed they needed someone who was good at manipulating public opinion and could “camouflage” their true activities and agenda with “a media twinkle.” In short, they needed a slick spin-doctor—because as Awad noted, “media is stronger than politics.”5
Not long after the meeting, Hooper was drafted to run the Brotherhood’s new propaganda wing at CAIR.
“I contacted my friend Ibrahim Hooper, a professional journalist and communications genius,” Awad recalls, “and tried to persuade him to move to Washington.”6
Today, Hooper is a fierce advocate for Hamas and militant Islam, and they pay him well for it—more than $95,000 a year in total compensation (not including the thousands of dollars he has borrowed in personal loans from his nonprofit employer), tax records show. He also commands a six-figure annual budget for conducting opposition research against CAIR’s enemies. 7
A Canadian immigrant, Hooper was known as “Dougie” before he converted to Islam. His birth name is Cary Douglas Hooper, according to government records.