The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Booker had, however, been telling all this to an informant. His jihad would not come to fruition.

  The “Real Bad Bitches”

  On April 2, 2015, healthcare worker Noelle Velentzas and preschool teacher Asia Siddiqui, two Muslim women in Queens, were arrested for plotting jihad attacks in the U.S. At one point Velentzas had asked Siddiqui, “Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?” They set out to accomplish that goal by plotting to build a jihad bomb and murder Americans for the Islamic State.69 According to Loretta Lynch, then the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, “the defendants in this case carefully studied how to construct an explosive device to launch an attack on the homeland.”70

  Studying how earlier terrorist attacks had been carried out, Velentzas and Siddiqui began assembling the ingredients of the types of bombs that had been used in the 1993 World Trade Center jihad bombing, the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 2013 Boston Marathon jihad bombing.71

  Velentzas told Siddiqui that people should think of them both as “citizens of the Islamic State.” But she didn’t feel any need to make the trip all the way over there: a citizen of the Islamic State, she said, could “make history” by “pleasing Allah” right here in the United States.72

  Velentzas and Siddiqui had wanted to be a part of the global jihad for a long time. Velentzas loved Osama bin Laden and even had a photo of him as the featured image on her cell phone. She once said, “Killing a police officer is easier than buying food, because sometimes one has to wait in line to buy food.”73 She said that to a man who she thought was a fellow Islamic State sympathizer but who turned out to be an undercover agent.

  She also told him, “If we get arrested, the police will point their guns at us from the back and maybe from the front. If we can get even one of their weapons, we can shoot them. They will probably kill us but we will be martyrs automatically and receive Allah’s blessing.”74 And she called the funeral of the policemen murdered by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, with its huge assemblage of police officers, “an attractive potential target.”75 Time was short: “We are living . . . the last war, the big war before the end of day starts, in English they call it Armageddon, we are actually living in that time, it’s not a joke, it starts in Syria.”76

  Siddiqui, for her part, was in regular touch with jihadis from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In 2009, she even contributed a poem to its magazine, which read in part that there was no “excuse to sit back and wait—for the skies rain martyrdom.”77

  Both of the “bad bitches” were active and respected members of the Masjid Al-Hamdulillah (the “Thanks be to Allah Mosque”) in Brooklyn. The mosque’s imam, Charles Aziz Bilal, confirmed that both women were members in good standing—and he was skeptical of the charges against them: “They have been here five years. I have not seen any signs of them being radicalized or promoting radical Islam, none of that stuff.”78 Velentzas, he said, was simply “a mother who took care of her daughter, normal. Very friendly, nothing political, nothing extremist.”79 There was no possibility, the imam insisted, that Velentzas and Siddiqui learned to be “bad bitches” who were “citizens of the Islamic State” at Masjid Al-Hamdulillah. “That’s not what we promote here.” If Velentzas and Siddiqui had really been involved in jihad terror activity, “they were doing it on the down low.”80

  But then he cast doubt on even that possibility by praising their families, which would certainly have known if Velentzas or Siddiqui had been involved in jihad plotting: “My observation of the families for the last five years,” he declared, “has been impeccable—when it comes to character; when it comes to integrity—has been impeccable.”81 Of Velentzas and her family he said: “They have been an upright family. Very honest, very sincere, very dedicated family. They’re family-oriented. They have children in the community, born in the mosque. Good religious people.”82

  What about those bomb ingredients? The imam insisted that the women had gathered them for innocent reasons: “You go to picnics, right? And what do you have on your [sic] to cook the meat and everything? You have propane tanks, right?”83

  Velentzas’s husband of six years, Abu Bakr, echoed this line of defense: “If anyone who had a pressure cooker in their house would be charged for it, a lot of people would be. It’s like having a butter knife.”84 Like their imam, Velentzas’s husband appeared in the media to be dismayed about the charges, saying of his wife: “I know nobody’s perfect, but she is. . . . I want people to see her how I see her—as a mother, a wife, a friend, a confidant, a sister to the community, a daughter to the imam and the elders.”

  What, then, of the charges? “I don’t believe any of it, period. We are all shocked, the whole community. That’s not who she is.”85 So was she being framed by the authorities? “Yes, I would say yes they are lying.”86 For what reason, he did not explain. And of Siddiqui: “I can’t say anything bad about her. She never showed anything to us like that. They were good friends—very good friends.”87

  Abu Bakr’s credibility took a hit, however, when photos surfaced of him carrying the black flag of jihad at the Muslim Day Parade in New York City in 2007.88

  Taqiyya: Lying for Islam

  Those photos shed light on a recurring feature of these jihad plot cases. American Muslims often express shock and incomprehension when their family members, friends, and members of their mosques are arrested for plotting jihad attacks. No doubt some of them are genuinely clueless, but there is good reason to believe that others understand exactly why the jihadis in their lives are motivated to plot violence, share the same outlook themselves to one degree or another, and are engaging in deliberate deceit.

  The fact is, deceiving non-Muslims isn’t forbidden in Islam—in fact, in some circumstances it may be a religious duty for Muslims. This deceit is justified by Qur’an 3:28, a verse that warns believers not to take unbelievers as friends or helpers “except when taking precaution against them in prudence.” This is the foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for “taking precaution” in the Arabic is tuqÄtan, from the verb taqiyyatan—hence the term taqiyya.

  While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi’ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher has pointed out that while the doctrine of taqiyya was formulated by Shi’ites, “it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur’an 3:28.”89 The fourteenth-century Qur’an commentator Ibn Kathir, whose work is mainstream and still widely read, explains that in that Qur’an verse referred to “those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers.” Muslims in such a situation were “allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly.” He quotes a companion of Muhammad saying, “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them,” and another maintaining that “the Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.”90

  Christopher Lee Cornell: “You Know We See American Troops as Terrorists”

  Another American convert to Islam, Christopher Lee Cornell (who has insisted that trial judges and others address him only by his Muslim name, Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah), was arrested in Ohio in January 15, 2015, after he bought two assault rifles and a healthy supply of ammunition. He had planned to place pipe bombs in the Capitol and shoot various U.S. government officials—including the president.

  Cornell called a Cincinnati radio station after his arrest to profess his allegiance to the Islamic State and give vent to his plans and goals.91 If he had not been arrested, he said, he would have taken a gun, and “I would have put it to Obama’s head, I would have pulled the trigger, then I would unleash more bullets on the Senate and House of Representative members, and I would have attacked the Israeli embassy and various other buildings.”92 Why? Because of the “continued American aggression against our people and the fact that America, specifically President Obama, wants to wage war against Islam
ic State. . . . They might say I’m a terrorist, but you know we see American troops as terrorists as well, coming to our land, stealing our resources and killing our people, raping our women.”93

  Cornell called himself a “lone wolf,” but he had pledged his fealty to the Islamic State, writing to an informant he thought was a fellow Muslim interested in jihad: “I believe that we should just wage jihad under our own orders and plan attacks and everything. I believe we should meet up and make our own group in alliance with the Islamic State here and plan operations ourselves.”94 He claimed that both the Islamic State and jihad mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen in September 2011, had approved of his plot: “we already got a thumbs up from the Brothers over there and Anwar al Awlaki before his martyrdom and many others.”95

  The fervent young convert also boasted to law enforcement officials that America is full of Islamic State supporters, all just biding their time and waiting for the right moment to strike: “We’re here in Ohio, we’re in every state. We’re more organized than you think.”96

  TAQIYYA WATCH

  The Islamic State is “distorting the whole message. So we have to respond to this by saying . . . what you are doing, killing innocent people, implementing so-called ‘Sharia’ or the so-called ‘Islamic State’, this is against everything that is coming from Islam.”

  —Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan98

  Cornell requested a clock and a prayer mat so that he could continue his devout observance of Islam while in prison.97 Prison officials, for their part, saw no incongruity in allowing the jihadi to steep himself in the beliefs and perspectives that had led him into treason and a plot to commit mass murder in the first place.

  #CalamityWillBefallUS

  There were many more threats to spill infidel blood in the United States and all over the West. The audacity and brutality of the Islamic State led Muslims (and even some non-Muslims) to sympathize with it, and even to issue threats in its name. And with ISIS calling repeatedly for lone wolf attacks in the West, the distinction between threats issued by actual Islamic State members and those who were not, but identified with it, was exceedingly fine.

  Just before ISIS declared itself the caliphate, a group of jihadis from Great Britain who had joined the jihad in Syria produced a video in which they vowed that “the black flag of jihad” would soon wave over Downing Street. Another young British Muslim, Muhammad Hassan, threatened more attacks on the scale of 9/11 in the United States if the Americans moved against ISIS. Another, Junaid Hussain, took to Twitter to predict chaos in Britain: “Imagine if someone were to detonate a bomb at voting stations or ambushed the vans that carry the casted [sic] votes. It would mess the whole system up. . . . Watch out. . . . We’ll come back and wreak havoc.”99

  A week before the declaration that the caliphate was restored, an American convert to Islam threatened the president on Twitter, writing, “Obama your days are numbered. You have nowhere to hide. Your family is first on our list. We will find you and remove your filthy heads!!” In another, he added that “soon” ISIS would “encompass the entire world.”100

  And on June 25, 2014, four days before the announcement of the restoration of the caliphate, ISIS supporters began a Twitter campaign featuring the hashtag #CalamityWillBefallUS. In the next four days, this hashtag was used almost twenty-four thousand times, with a large number of tweets featuring threats against the United States.101

  Credible Threats

  In October 2014, the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq featured on its cover a photoshopped picture of the black flag of jihad flying over St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican.102

  While many plots have been foiled, supporters of the Islamic State have succeeded in killing enough people in Western countries that it’s not safe to dismiss their threats as fantasies. When the Politico website misreported the words of Republican Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota to give the impression that she was calling for the United States to go to war against the Islamic State, this aroused the ire of ISIS to such an extent that they issued threats to Bachmann; federal officials took them seriously enough to place her under twenty-four hour guard.103

  There was good reason to place such a guard around Bachmann, and to be alert to the general possibility of Islamic State violence in Europe and the United States. Adding to the very realistic concerns about potential terrorist recruits already at home in Western countries, a veteran Turkish smuggler claimed in November 2014 that he had sent “more than ten” Islamic State jihadis into Europe. His claim couldn’t be proven, but it was eminently plausible: he said he charged $2,500 for every person he brought out of the Islamic State and into Europe through Turkey, and that the jihadis he had helped get to Europe were pretending to be refugees.

  But according to the smuggler they are actually jihadis biding their time: “They are waiting for their orders. Just wait. You will see. . . . The Western world thinks there is no ISIS in their countries—that all the jihadis have gone to fight and die in Syria.” He recalled that one of the Islamic State jihadis he helped get to Europe told him about Muslims from Europe who had been killed in Syria, “We are sending our fighters to take their places.” He told the smuggler, “We want you to bring our brothers too.” The smuggler noted that it was easy for them to go to Europe. “They can come to any smuggler and say they are refugees.”104

  In December 2014, Aaron Wieder, an orthodox Jew and member of the Rockland County Legislature in New York State, was opening his mail when he came upon a strange and jarring image: a photograph of an Islamic State beheading with his own face pasted over that of the victim. The photo was captioned simply “Aaron Wieder,” with “Harun” (Arabic for Aaron), written in Arabic script above it. The Arabic writing suggests that the person who was making the threat was not just someone who saw the Islamic State beheadings on the news and thought they were cool. It could have been just someone who thought that the Islamic State’s gleeful evil was worthy of emulation and who happened to know some Arabic—or it could have been an actual Islamic State operative in the U.S.

  Said Wieder, “I opened the letter and I was completely shocked. I literally had shivers running down my spine.” Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco remarked, “We’re taking this very seriously as a threat and will be working with our partners in law enforcement and the FBI to try to track down who sent this.”105

  In March of 2015, a group calling itself the Islamic State Hacking Division helped out Muslims in the U.S. who were thirsty for infidel blood by publishing online the names, addresses, photographs, and units of a hundred members of the United States Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

  OSTRICH ALERT

  One British official dismissed concerns about the possibility that there could be Islamic jihadis among the refugees that European states were accepting from Syria. “We’re talking about millions of people that need help. We should not get to the stage where we start to fear Syrian refugees as a terrorist threat in Europe.”106 In other words, they may in fact be a threat, but it is not politically acceptable to say so.

  The Hacking Division proclaimed:

  These Kuffar that drop bombs over Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Khurasan [Afghanistan] and Somalia are from the same lands that you reside in, so when will you take action? Know that it is wajib [an Islamic religious duty] for you to kill these kuffar [unbelievers]! and now we have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for? Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking they are safe.

  We have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for?

  You crusaders that fight the Islamic State, we say to you: “Die in your rage!”107

  The Islamic State published the photos of these members of the U.S. military in the hope that there would be Muslims in the U.S. who would heed their call to kil
l them.

  #WeWillBurnAmerica

  Combining its penchant for threats with its social media acumen, in April 2015 the Islamic State released a video and simultaneously a hashtag, both with the same theme: “We Will Burn America,” vowing yet again to mount a major jihad attack, on the scale of 9/11, inside the United States (spelling and grammar as in the original):

  America thinks its safe because of the geographical location

  Thus you see it invades the Muslim lands, and it thinks that the army of the Jihad wont reach in their lands

  But the dream of the Americans to have safety became a mirage

  Today there is no safety for any American on the globe

  The Mujahedeen before although they had less resources

  Attacked New York and bombed the twin towers in September Eleven attacks

  That blessed incursion was a fatal blow

  All praise is due to Allah, the American economy was shaken

  In such way Americans lived,

  And By Allahs willing the fear will spread among them again soon

  Here its America now losing billions still to make sure their country is safe

  But today, its time for payback,

  By the grace of Allah, today the Mujahedeen are much more stronger and they have more resource than before

  Thus they are able to burn United States Again108

  With supporters of the Islamic State already having struck in the U.S., and several of its operatives and sympathizers arrested for plotting attacks in America, this threat could not be dismissed.

  Chapter Three