ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (18 page)

A few weeks before the Khan trio’s arrest, another Windy City ISIS supporter ran into trouble with the law. On August 27, 2014, shortly after ISIS beheaded American journalist James Foley, a Muslim man waved an Islamic State flag outside his car window as he led police on a chase through the streets of southwest Chicago. Forty-nine-year-old Emad Karakrah was finally pulled over, but he reportedly threatened officers during his arrest, telling them he had a bomb in his car that he would detonate if they searched the vehicle. Thankfully, he was bluffing.
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Federal authorities say a twenty-year-old Islamic convert from Ohio named Christopher Lee Cornell, however, meant business. In January 2015, he was arrested and charged with conspiring to attack the U.S. Capitol “with guns and pipe bombs in support of the Islamic State.”
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Supporting ISIS doesn’t always mean taking up arms. Pro-ISIS graffiti popped up around Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2014, prompting the FBI to take notice.
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Around the same time, several leaflets bearing the Islamic State logo were found in Quantico, Virginia—site of a Marine Corps installation as well as the FBI training academy, two prime terror targets.
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Maybe the leaflets and the graffiti were just pranks carried out by a few knuckleheads. Or maybe they weren’t. One Houston Muslim who
operates online under the handles “Abdul-Rahman Baghdadi” and “Houston Baghdadi” certainly seems to mean business. He’s become a one-man ISIS propaganda machine, plastering stickers with the group’s logo around the city and tweeting out his support for the caliphate. He has also posted videos of himself clad in ISIS garb and stirring up trouble at Houston mosques. At one mosque, he pledges allegiance to ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in front of a police officer as he’s being escorted off the premises.
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The mosque’s rejection of the pro-ISIS rabble rousing of “Houston Baghdadi” is encouraging. However, opposition to jihad is the exception, not the norm, among the leadership of far too many Muslim houses of worship in the United States.

For a moment, I thought I was staring at Clint Eastwood.

When Abdullah walked into the hotel room where I was scheduled to interview him, he was clad in a poncho and wide-brimmed hat that recalled Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name character from the series of classic Westerns in the 1960s. But Abdullah’s outfit wasn’t meant as a Clint tribute. He had donned the elaborate get-up, which also included shades and a scarf, in order to disguise his appearance. Abdullah (a pseudonym) was about to share, on camera, facts about the activity of radical Islamists in the Boston area; and he feared for his safety. In addition to his disguise, he requested that we blur his face and alter his voice in post-production to add another layer of anonymity.

Abdullah’s apprehension was understandable. A few weeks before our interview, a pair of brothers had killed three people and wounded 264 more when they set off bombs at the Boston Marathon in one of the deadliest Islamic terror attacks conducted on U.S. soil since 9/11. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev later added to their body count by murdering an MIT
security guard. Their trail of terror only ended when Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with authorities and his brother was seriously wounded and taken into custody.

I had traveled to Boston in the wake of the Marathon bombings to get a better handle on how two seemingly Westernized young brothers had become murderous jihadists. A Beantown contact had recommended that I speak to Abdullah, a moderate Muslim who had attended several Boston-area mosques and left horrified at what he witnessed. According to Abdullah, acolytes of the Muslim Brotherhood had gained an influential foothold in several of these mosques.

“They want to go after the young minds,” he told me. “And the way they go after the young minds is, either they start scholarships in high school or they bring them to a certain level of obedience. It is called ‘tarbiyya’ [education and upbringing]. They have classes for them and so on.”

Abdullah explained that tarbiyya sessions were often held in the wee hours of the morning in the mosques, with promising recruits drilled in the finer points of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.

“When some young man is ready to take the oath, he is given an oath so he will never leave the organization. They will do anything [for the Brotherhood],” he said.
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Were the Tsarnaev brothers at some point exposed to the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent ethos of jihad and martyrdom? It would not be surprising. The Brotherhood—the world’s oldest and most influential Islamic terrorist organization—has long served as a gateway to violent jihad. The Brotherhood’s early ideologues such as Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb laid the foundation for the entire modern jihadist movement. The Brotherhood spawned al Qaeda (which in turn spawned ISIS) and Hamas, spreading genocidal anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world. Although their tactics differ, the endgame for the Brotherhood and ISIS is exactly the same: the return of the caliphate and the global imposition of Islamic sharia law. Whereas ISIS knows only one way—violence—the Brothers often aim to accomplish these goals incrementally, through
stealth and subversion. Smiling Western-educated MB spokesmen decked out in designer suits have hoodwinked clueless elites in Brussels and Washington, D.C., for years, deftly masking the Brotherhood’s true, radical face.

Given the Brotherhood’s nefarious agenda, I noted with great interest that the Tsarnaevs had attended the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) mosque a few blocks from their home in Cambridge. Convicted terrorists have worshiped at that mosque—including “Lady al Qaeda,” Aafia Siddiqui, who had plotted attacks against New York City, and for whom the Taliban reportedly wanted to trade U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl
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—and it is known for its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, the ISB is operated by the Muslim American Society, an organization that federal prosecutors have called “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Further, the Brotherhood’s worldwide spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is a former ISB trustee. The Muslim American Society also runs a sprawling mega-mosque in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood that serves as sister mosque to the one in Cambridge. Predictably, both mosques espouse the same Muslim Brotherhood worldview.
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Dr. Ahmed Mansour, an Egyptian native who now lives in the U.S., told me that he visited the Cambridge mosque with his wife in 2003 and found flyers and newsletters written in Arabic in its library that “. . . call[ed] for jihad against America and against the Jews and against the Christians . . . at that time, there was also a sheikh giving a sermon, and the sheikh was as fanatical as the written materials.” Mansour, who taught at Egypt’s famed al-Azhar University, was frequently threatened by the Brotherhood because of his moderate interpretation of the Koran. He eventually made his way to America and was shocked to find that the Brotherhood controlled many U.S. mosques. “I escape from them in Egypt and find them here,” he lamented as we sat in his living room. “I say to myself, ‘Where can I go? Can I go to the moon?’”
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We may never know what exactly the Tsarnaev brothers learned during their time at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque. But considering the
mosque’s radical track record and connections, the question certainly seems worth exploring—unless, of course, you’re the Obama administration. As of this writing, the administration, never very enthusiastic in the investigation of radicalized mosques, reportedly has plans to prohibit federal agents from conducting undercover surveillance of American mosques unless they already have evidence that criminal activity is under way.
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According to Steven Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism in Washington, D.C.,

          
The FBI [has been constrained by] the Department of Justice [which] put out guidelines that restricted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies from using religious factors in identifying threats, national security threats to the United States in the homeland. That is so if someone was a religious extremist, though they didn’t plot to carry out an attack, that [indicator] could not be factored into an investigation, into an intelligence investigation, into identifying them as a potential threat to the United States. Therefore, [law enforcement] would have to wait until they actually plotted to carry out an attack. Well, that’s too late.
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It’s no wonder the FBI has missed dozens of radicalized American Muslims who have traveled to Syria to join terror groups like ISIS. While federal agents will likely soon be handcuffed from monitoring mosques—81 percent of which, according to one comprehensive 2011 study, feature Islamic texts that promote violence
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—jihadist recruiters are lining up to get inside. And they have a growing number of options. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of mosques in America increased by an astounding 74 percent—to 2,106 overall, and counting.
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In dozens of cases where local jurisdictions have opposed the construction of new mosques, the Obama Justice Department has intervened, opening investigations that invariably weigh in favor of the mosques and against the will of the people.
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In its full-throated support of mosques, the administration isn’t concerned with offending non-Muslim sensibilities. On October 4, 2014, nine days after Alton Nolen beheaded Colleen Hufford, an administration official traveled to the Oklahoma City mosque Nolen had attended and read a personal letter of thanks from President Obama. “Your service is a powerful example of the shared roots of the Abrahamic faiths and how our communities can come together in shared peace with dignity and a sense of justice,” the letter to the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City reportedly read. The official’s trip and the letter from the president were “seemingly meant to counteract negative attention the mosque . . . received following Nolen’s gruesome murder of coworker Colleen Hufford.”
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No word on whether the administration sent a letter of condolence or paid a visit to Hufford’s family.

Incidentally, following Nolen’s slaughter of Hufford, one former mosque-goer came forward and accused the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City of preaching jihad behind closed doors.
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In light of the Obama administration’s jihad against mosque surveillance, we can only hope that more courageous whistle-blowers step up to share what they know and help stem the flow of recruits to the ISIS cause.

Because the recruits keep coming, thanks in large part to the Islamic State’s prolific social media machine, which is working non-stop—to the tune of a reported ninety tweets per minute—to spread ISIS propaganda.
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All day. Every day.

CHAPTER FIVE

JIHADI COOL: HIP-HOPPIN’ AND HEAD-CHOPPIN’

I NOTICED THE SHOES FIRST.

Old school Nikes. All-white leather. Some with a Velcro strap, others without. Very urban. Very hip-hop. The kind I had seen worn by literally thousands of teenagers and young men while growing up in working-class Philadelphia—and that I had sported myself in my younger years, before ultimately realizing that “Stak Diddy” was not my destiny.

For a moment, it was a whimsical trip down memory lane—until those same old school Nikes began violently stomping on an Israeli flag before my very eyes.

The unhappy feet belonged to members of the Islamic Thinkers Society—ITS for short—a Queens, New York–based Islamist group that, like ISIS, supports the establishment of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. On a day in February 2006, about twenty-five ITSers had gathered at the Danish Consulate in Manhattan to protest cartoons published in a Danish newspaper featuring Islam’s prophet Mohammed—the same cartoons whose publication had sparked deadly riots across an endlessly riotous Muslim
world (and set off a chain of events that, nearly nine years later, would result in the massacre of eleven people at the offices of the French magazine
Charlie Hebdo).
The ITS rally avoided any physical violence but did feature chants of “Death to Israel” to go along with the flag stomping, not to mention warnings of “Allah’s wrath” and threats that Allah would “silence” disbelievers, or “scum,” in the words of one ITS speaker.

As I observed in my 2011 book,
The Terrorist Next Door:

          
My first thought as I watched the ITS event unfold was that it was occurring just a few miles north of where the Twin Towers had fallen four and a half years earlier. My second thought was that I was quite possibly staring at a group of future Islamic terrorists. And sure enough, in the years since that February 2006 ITS rally, at least three men connected with the group have been arrested on terrorism-related charges. One NYPD intelligence analyst has said the group’s “anti-Western, antidemocratic, anti-U.S., pro–al Qaeda message” makes the ITS “almost bug lights for aspiring jihadists.”
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