The New York Times reported Thursday that “in the last two or three months,” the Chattanooga gunman Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez “had begun showing up rather regularly at Friday Prayer at the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga, a large mosque and cultural center, said Dr. Azhar S. Sheikh, a founding member of the center’s board.”
“Dr. Sheikh said that he showed no signs of extremism. He said the family regularly worshiped at the mosque,” the NYT reported.
What is being taught at that mosque? Are investigators simply going to assume that the mosque is “moderate” and that Abdulazeez was “radicalized” elsewhere? If that is true, why couldn’t the peaceful teachings he heard at the mosque withstand the appeal of the “radicals”?
This mosque should be investigated. And it is not the only one. All the mosques linked to jihad attacks and plots should be investigated.
The Islamic Society of Boston, which the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, attended has numerous connections to jihad terrorists. The Islamic Society of Boston was founded by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the leading “moderate Muslim” in Washington throughout the 1990s. Alamoudi turned out to be an al-Qaeda financier and is now in prison. Alamoudi was also a close associate and financier of Republican power broker Grover Norquist. Convicted jihad terrorists Aafia Siddiqui and Tarek Mehanna had also been members of the Islamic Society of Boston.
The former imam of the Islamic Society of Boston, Suhaib Webb, is revered in the mainstream media as a “moderate,” but he has actually denounced secularism as a “radical lunatic ideology.” Webb also once headed up a fund-raiser for a cop killer with arch-terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. That didn’t stop the Boston Globe from running a piece several days ago titled “Inclusive spirit reassures Muslims after bombings,” as if Muslims had been the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, not its perpetrators.
This was the same mosque about which Fox News reported after the bombing “has a controversial history, with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, terror funding and frequent fiery sermons.” USA Today added, “Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews.”
And now Usaama Rahim, who plotted to murder me in June for violating sharia blasphemy laws, is yet another Jihadist in Boston with ties to the Islamic Society of Boston, just like the Tsarnaev brothers and numerous other Muslim terrorists. Usaama Rahim worked as a guard at the Islamic Society of Boston.
Then there is the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City (ISGOC), which first denied knowing or being familiar with Jah’Keem Yisrael, aka Alton Nolen, who faces trial for the beheading of one of his coworkers in Oklahoma in September 2014. When pictures emerged of Jah’keem praying at the mosque on his Facebook page, their story radically changed. The media seamlessly reported the morphing narrative without question. The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City went into full damage-control and victimhood mode. Their response to the beheading? Leaders of the ISOGC wanted security protection from the phantom “Islamophobia” and the “backlash” that never happens.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Nolen was a regular at Friday prayers at Masjid An-Nasr, a mosque in Oklahoma City that is part of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City. Saad Mohammed, director of Islamic information at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, said: “There was nothing about him that alarmed us at all.”
And the jihadis who tried to commit mass murder last May at our free speech event in Garland, Texas, Ibrahim (formerly Elton) Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were members of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix. Simpson’s friend Courtney Lonergan remembers, according to the Arizona Republic, that “Simpson would never waver from the teachings he picked up in the mosque and elsewhere.” Lonergan said: “He was one of those guys who would sleep at the mosque. The fact that he felt personally insulted by somebody drawing a picture had to come from the ideological rhetoric coming out of the mosque.”
According to the Republic, “When he sought a Muslim wife, Simpson turned to the men in the mosque to find a suitable woman, and his way of earning their respect was to show his devotion to Islam by quoting teachings verbatim.”
Contradicting mosque claims after his jihad attack that he was not a member, Simpson had been featured in a mosque fundraising video posted on the mosque’s YouTube channel in 2012. It identified him as a member.
Two other Muslims who attended the ICCP — Hassan Abu-Jihaad and Derrick Shareef — are in federal prison on jihad terror charges.
Yet the imam to the jihadis claimed that he was shocked by Simpson and Soofi’s jihad attack — that they were gentle fellows. Are we supposed to believe that they learned peaceful Islam at the mosque but were “radicalized on the Internet”?
Again, why aren’t the supposedly peaceful teachings of Islam that are supposedly taught at American mosques not able to withstand the jihadis’ appeal?
The FBI should be surveilling this mosque, impounding their phone records. Was anyone from the mosque in contact with Muslim groups in Garland? Was there any communication between Phoenix and Garland?
These mosques and others ought to be investigated. Several surveys have shown that 80% of mosques in the U.S. teach hatred of infidels and the necessity to replace the Constitution with sharia. No one cares. How many “homegrown domestic terrorists” must there be before the mosques are monitored?
There have been over 26,000 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11 — each one with a mosque behind it and the imprimatur of a Muslim cleric, and what are we doing to monitor these hotbeds of jihad activity?
The media darlings over at the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) made a statement condemning the “deadly attack in Chattanooga, Tenn.” And the media was broadcasting it all over the news, never mentioning that CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in America’s largest terror funding case, or that the United Arab Emirates designated them a terrorist organization. CAIR’s statement is deception. Do they condemn the ideology? Do they condemn jihad? And while Muslims in the US condemn the Islamic State, where are they teaching against the ideology that gave rise to it?
Groups such as CAIR have called for and celebrated the dismantling of counter-terror programs that monitor the mosques. Is it mere coincidence between the dismantling of these counter-terror programs and the rise of jihad in America?
Right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in U.S. mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the US have gone to wage jihad for the Islamic State.
What radicalized Muhammad Abdulazeez? The Quran. If the moderates really reject extremism, let them show it by instituting genuine programs to reject the violent teachings in Islam. And to make sure they do it, monitor the mosques.
How many more Americans must die in this “holy war” before we start to defend ourselves, our nation, our very way of life?
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.
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