Muslim Mafia (17 page)

“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This same Muslim agent had no problem secretly tape-recording Fox News host Bill O’Reilly before suing him for libel, however.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

“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 Christians
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D
OES
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.
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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 alongside the Bosnians.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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A Canadian immigrant, Hooper was known as “Dougie” before he converted to Islam. His birth name is Cary Douglas Hooper, according to government records.

He became a member of the Cairo Foreign Press Association while working for computer periodicals in the Egyptian capital, which happens to be the global headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. He also worked for local TV stations in Minnesota.
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As CAIR’s national communications director, Hooper a couple of years ago attempted to rebut the groundswell of charges against CAIR. He put out a ten-page document “de-mystifying ‘urban legends’ about CAIR” which only obfuscated the truth about CAIR. It’s riddled with half-truths, deliberate omissions, and outright falsehoods about the size of the group’s membership and the source of its donations, among other things.

CAIR and Hooper have had to climb down from many of the statements contained in the document—statements which are “no longer operative,” as they say in Washington. In fact, it seems the entire document is no longer operative, because it’s vanished from CAIR’s Web site.

“We remain an open and transparent organization,” CAIR says. Really? Then why did it take down the document after it was exposed as a tissue of lies?

Hooper authored another slurry of falsehoods called “A Journalist’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Muslims” after recent polls showed a majority of Americans associating Islam with violence and intolerance. Sent to some forty thousand editors, reporters, and producers across the country, the publication is supposed to “educate” the media about Islam and disabuse journalists about “commonly held misconceptions” about the faith.

According to the fifty-five-page guide, common myths include:

At least it got the last one right—Muslims are also predominantly Asian and African. Four of the other so-called myths are in fact truths (as examined in detail later). Which means CAIR is batting .200 in the accuracy department—in a publication advertised to, ironically enough, “help improve coverage of Islam in the American news media.”

Once again, Hooper is the one spreading misinformation. But it’s all part of the Brotherhood’s strategy to guilt the media into writing glowingly about Islam and defer independent research and analysis that would expose the religion’s dark underbelly and CAIR’s own hidden agenda.

CAIR hopes to train a legion of young Hoopers to infiltrate the nation’s newsrooms and reeducate the public about Islam.

“Whenever I speak to Muslim groups, I urge students to become majors in journalism, law, or political science,” Awad says. “Journalism is especially important, and we urge Muslim adults to establish scholarships in that field. Muslims must become active in the nation’s offices where news reports and headlines are written.”
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Hooper isn’t the only one at CAIR who stretches the truth. It’s the habit of CAIR’s entire leadership. They’ve been caught telling countless whoppers, but we’ve narrowed them down to the top ten. Consider the following tall tales they’ve told, counting down to the most pernicious:

WHOPPER NUMBER
10
: In a prepared statement to Congress, Awad in 2003 asserted that it was “an outright lie” to say that CAIR had received any seed money from the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic charity recently convicted of funding terrorism.

He also insisted there was not “a shred of evidence” to support what he called the “ridiculous” charge originally made by terror expert Steve Emerson that CAIR had received thousands of dollars in such funding.
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That same year then-CAIR Chairman Omar Ahmad also denied receiving such funds from the Hamas charitable front.
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Subsequent smoking-gun evidence puts the lie to their denials, however. Less than three weeks after CAIR was incorporated, bank records produced by Emerson reveal it had received a check for $5,000 from the “Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.” A copy of the check—No. 1881—shows it was paid to the order of the “Council on American-Islamic Relations” of Washington, and debited from Holy Land’s expense account with Bank One Texas. It’s signed by Holy Land president Shukri Abu Baker, who’s now a convicted terrorist. It was Abu Baker who coordinated the Philly meeting with Ahmad. He also met with CAIR executives in Washington before 9/11, the group’s visitors logs reveal (see Appendix).

No wonder Awad skipped the hearing that senators held in part to afford him the opportunity to answer these and other charges against CAIR. Apparently he felt it was safer to courier over his demonstrably false denial than testify under oath and risk perjuring himself.

WHOPPER NUMBER
9
: Dismissing the idea that CAIR or its leaders have had anything to do with Hamas, former CAIR chairman Parvez Ahmed claimed: “That’s one of those urban legends about CAIR. It’s fed by the right-wing, pro-Israeli blogosphere.”
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Recent court documents, of course, validate the bloggers—while making a liar of Ahmed and CAIR.

In the Holy Land Foundation case, federal papers officially list CAIR and its founder as important figures in the conspiracy to fund Hamas terrorism.