The Terrorist Next Door (4 page)

I've interviewed Islamic jihadists who have told me to my face that Islam is much more than a religion: that it is an all-encompassing ideological system that is destined to achieve global domination. Leading Islamic scholars throughout the ages, up to the modern day, have seconded this notion. Before more Americans needlessly get killed, the U.S. government needs to accept this unpleasant fact and adjust its policies for what the Obama administration has laughably dubbed the “War Against Violent Extremism.” At stake is not only our country but also Western, Judeo-Christian civilization—which, despite its human flaws, has been a gift from God and a gift to the world overall.

That's why I'm writing this book. It's both an educational tool and a call to action to our government and our people.

Too many have forgotten. I never will.

Because I don't want to see my daughters or my wife forced to cover up, confined to the house and deprived of any form of joy or opportunities. I refuse to wear a special badge or pay a special tax that marks me as a non-Muslim “dhimmi.” I want to be able to laugh, dine, and converse with my Jewish friends around the world just as I always have, without fear of them being snatched up by Islamic stormtroopers. I want to be able to read the Bible in public and attend church freely. I want to live in a society where art, education, science, and culture are encouraged and valued. I want to be able to worship, speak, read, and socialize wherever and with whomever I see fit. And I refuse to even entertain the possibility of a day when the state of Israel does not exist. Under an Islamic sharia system—the kind that is slowly gaining traction in Western societies—none of these things would be possible.

To quote my friend, the courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, I want my children to be raised with the values of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and not the values of Gaza, Mecca, and Tehran.

If 9/11 seems to you like a faraway event that happened to somebody else in another lifetime, it's about time you stopped forgetting and started fighting to preserve your way of life.

Believe me when I say the barbarians are not just at the gates: they're inside them. And as you are about to find out, time is shorter—much shorter—than you think.

CHAPTER ONE

W
e were staring down at a shallow, freshly dug grave. And we weren't in a cemetery.

It was August 2010, around the time a nationwide controversy was raging over a proposed $100 million mega-mosque to be built just two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. Yet as the nation focused on the Islamist project in lower Manhattan, I was hundreds of miles away, in rural Murfreesboro, Tennessee, investigating a development every bit as insidious as the one at Ground Zero: radical Islamists had recently gained approval to build a multi-million dollar Islamic center that would cover more than fifteen acres of land in Murfreesboro, in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

I'd been informed by local sources that in addition to a mega-mosque, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, an Islamic school, and living quarters for an imam, the center would feature an Islamic cemetery on its sprawling campus. And sure enough, shortly after arriving at the site of the future Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, or ICM, my cameraman and I found ourselves staring down at an unmarked mound of dirt covering a dead
body. There was no coffin or embalming—just a corpse buried in the dirt in accordance with Islamic law, or sharia. Mind you, ground had not even been broken on the ICM, and a battle over its legality was about to begin in federal court. Yet ICM members had wasted no time burying one of their own at the proposed site, despite the fact that a death certificate had not even been issued.

If you think this all sounds like a bad fit for a small, overwhelmingly Christian town in the shadow of Nashville, you'd be right. But not to worry: according to ICM spokeswoman Camie Ayash, the burial was approved by Rutherford County and Murfreesboro city officials and conformed to all necessary health guidelines.
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As recently as 2007, Ayash, a white convert to Islam, was serving time in federal prison for grand theft.
²
So she may not be a paragon of truth, but in the case of the unmarked grave, sadly, she was on point. The coffin-less Islamic burial at the ICM site, like the mosque itself, had indeed been green-lit by county officials, to the great dismay of many locals with whom I spoke.

In fact, the Rutherford County Commission took just seventeen days to approve the entire ICM project, despite the fact that other religious facilities in the region—mostly churches—have had to wait up to a year and a half and clear numerous hurdles before being approved.
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But the mammoth, 52,000-square-foot site where the new ICM will stand received almost instantaneous approval. This clearly stemmed from a tendency we see time and again in similar cases around the country, be it mosque-building or installing Islamic prayer rooms in public airports: PC-addled local officials, fearful of being labeled “racist” or “Islamophobic,” succumb to pressure from area Muslims and rush to show their boundless tolerance and respect for Islamic values.

Incidentally, I say “new” ICM because its members already owned a mosque in town, a few miles away at the original Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. That site was much smaller, befitting the size of ICM's membership, which consists of no more than 250 families. Yet mosque leaders claimed their modest congregation needed bigger digs. And boy, did they
get them: the new and improved ICM, once complete, will be one of the largest mosque complexes in America.

You would think such a massive facility would warrant healthy discussion among local residents before being given the go-ahead. But county commissioners didn't even open the topic up for debate, and no public forum was held until
after
the mega-mosque had been approved. Once locals got wind of the project, they held large protests in front of the county courthouse demanding answers, while action groups pleaded with local leaders to look into the funding sources and ideology of the mosque's backers—all to no avail. (Sound familiar, New Yorkers?)

I interviewed Rutherford County mayor Ernest Burgess, who told me that the ICM received no special treatment and that the county had also welcomed Buddhist and Hindu temples in the past. I then pointed out the obvious: Buddhists and Hindus aren't seeking to end our way of life as we know it, while untold millions of Muslims are. Big difference.

I pressed Burgess further, asking whether he knew about the rampant Saudi funding and Muslim Brotherhood penetration of U.S. mosques. The Brotherhood, as we'll see shortly, is the granddaddy of them all when it comes to Islamic supremacist groups.

“I'm not informed about that, I don't have any evidence,” he stammered.

“Don't you think you should be informed, though?” I countered. “This is kind of a big deal, right?”

“As a basic citizen, I should be informed about every issue that I can be,” Burgess replied lamely. “But I can only enforce the rules and regulations that the state of Tennessee and the United States and Rutherford County have authorized me to enforce.”
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Before my cameraman and I departed his office, Burgess—who had likely never picked up a Koran in his life, let alone read one—asked me how to tell whether a Muslim was radical; this from a man who had just helped push through a mega-mosque that will, without a doubt, irrevocably change the character of an all-American town. If only Burgess had
shown such curiosity earlier in the process, he may have found some interesting tidbits about the folks behind the ICM that would indisputably qualify them as radical—and then some.

Indeed, the mayor and county commissioners would have discovered that the ICM sponsored a vicious anti-Israel rally in downtown Murfreesboro in January 2009 at which protestors shouted the Islamic exaltation “Allahu Akhbar,” or “Allah is Greatest,” as speakers demonized the Jewish state. In what I'm sure was just a happy coincidence, video of the rally was later removed from YouTube after the ICM gained approval to build their facility. Sounds pretty radical to me, Mr. Mayor. So does the fact that a member of ICM's board and its imam Osama Bahloul are both graduates of al-Azhar University in Egypt, which is infested with anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Another board member, Mosaad Rawash, was suspended briefly from the board after pro-jihad slogans and a picture of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, were found on his MySpace page. But Rawash was soon back on the board and cleared of any wrongdoing after what I'm sure was an even-handed and thorough investigation. (By that time the jihadist materials had, magically, disappeared from his site.) Then there is the literature found at the ICM, which has included pamphlets by Muslim Brotherhood-connected groups. This comes as no surprise considering ICM's official reading list presented a who's who of Brotherhood ideologues before—you guessed it—disappearing from the ICM website.

I was able to ask Imam Bahloul some pointed questions in the parking lot of the old ICM building. Refusing to appear on camera, he told me ICM members were just looking for a quiet place to worship; when pressed, he said that he condemned the actions of Hamas and of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. “For a Muslim leader to condemn those two groups is hugely significant,” I told him. “Why don't you go on camera right now and tell Murfreesboro—and the world—what you just told me? I think that would go a long way toward easing concerns about the new mosque.”

Bahloul declined. His insincerity was further exposed when I pointed out the ICM's reading list and asked whether he or his mosque had any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “They're in this country?” he asked incredulously. “I didn't know that.” Another mosque spokesman laughed nervously when I asked the same question, saying the ICM had no connections to any outside organizations and that funds for its new, multi-million dollar mega-mosque were raised locally. I found this hard to believe; during my stay in Murfreesboro, I paid a visit to Friday prayers in the old ICM building. I saw cab drivers, college students, some professional types—not exactly an affluent crowd.

So where is the money coming from to fund the mega-mosque in Murfreesboro and others that are popping up around the country? The developers behind the Ground Zero mosque have still refused to disclose their funding sources, although one of them has said he would be open to taking money from Saudi Arabia and Iran, two countries that boast arguably the most fundamentalist regimes in the Muslim world (and that's saying something).
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But what about the money for other mega-mosque projects in the works from coast to coast, in places like rural Wisconsin, southern California, northern Kentucky, and Portland, Oregon? Or recently completed, multi-million-dollar mega-mosques in Memphis, Atlanta, and Boston? By the way, did you know that Alaska recently broke ground on its first-ever mosque, a $2.9 million facility covering nearly 17,000 square feet in Anchorage?
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Does anyone else think this might not be a streak of coincidences? The Muslim communities mentioned above are not known for having deep pockets, to say the least. It's almost as if rich Muslim donors in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other wealthy Persian Gulf states are funding a campaign to
Islamize
America. And why not? Mosque building, massive Muslim immigration, and self-segregation comprise a strategy for Islamization that has worked to perfection in Europe. Now that a sympathetic administration is in office in the United States, the time is ripe to up the ante here.

Mosque-building is a crucial component of the strategy. U.S. intelligence sources have told me that most U.S. mosques have been thoroughly infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that strives to establish Islamic sharia law worldwide. Moreover, according to some estimates, no fewer than 80 percent of U.S. mosques receive funding from Saudi Arabia,
⁷
where the official state religion is Wahhabi Islam, a medieval medley of pro-jihad, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-Western virulence that has inspired a long line of terrorists. The dangerous malevolence of Wahhabism was exposed in a 2005 Freedom House investigative report on Saudi publications found in U.S. mosques. The report revealed that Saudi literature spread hatred for non-Muslims, advocated the murder of converts from Islam, promoted the subjugation of women, and denounced America for being un-Islamic. Calling these teachings a “totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence,” the report warned that the Saudis' dissemination of this creed in America “demands our urgent attention.”
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So that's our starting point. But before tackling the Brotherhood/Saudi nexus and sharia any further, let's take a brief tour through Islamic history to examine the roots and implications of America's current mega-mosque onslaught.