A critical front in the Islamization of America, not hard to discern and not so hidden, is the establishment of rabats in cities and towns all over the nation—in quiet, innocuous small-town America. A rabat, in Islamic theology and history, is a fortified place, a kind of beachhead for the invasion and conquest of a non-Muslim land by the warriors of Islam. Going back to the time of Muhammad, Muslims have conducted raids on infidel lands, designed to “strike terror in the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Koran 8:60). After the raids, the Muslims would build rabats in the newly conquered land, consisting of a mosque and a military training component. The most obvious modern-day rabat is the proposed Ground Zero Mosque.
The Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is often quoted as saying, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”63 Make no mistake: mosques in America are no different.
September 11 was the Islamic jihadists’ largest-scale raid thus far on the United States of America. And after it comes the rabat: the Ground Zero mosque. But there are also other mosques, other rabats, other beachheads, going up all across the country. These are almost invariably monster structures that are completely out of place with their surroundings architecturally, demographically, and in terms of zoning. These are very deliberate structures that are designed to expedite the advance of Islam into unsuspecting communities. In other words, the people won’t know what hit them. Interestingly enough, however, even the least informed people are now waking up, because they see that their neighborhoods are changing in the blink of an eye.
Take, for example, journalist Sarah Honig, who wrote in the summer of 2008 about her experiences visiting an old high school friend in Brooklyn.64 Her friend, she wrote, “still lives at the same Brooklyn address in the cozy middle-class neighborhood where I sometimes visited her way back then.” However, “when I climbed up the grimy station stairs and surveyed the street, I suspected that some supernatural time-and-space warp had transported me to Islamabad…. Women strode attired in hijabs and male passersby sported all manner of Muslim headgear and long flowing tunics.”
This was not a benign demographic shift. Honig’s friend flew a large American flag on her front lawn, and explained: “We’re besieged. Making a statement is about all we can do. They aren’t delighted to see our flag wave. This is enemy territory.” Indeed: the imam of the local mosque was, up until the mid-1990s, the Saudi-financed Guls-hair el-Shukrijumah, whose “disciple, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an explosives specialist, possibly helped assemble the bomb detonated in the ’93 World Trade Center attack. He was convicted of plotting to blow up the UN, FBI headquarters, and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.” What’s more, “Gulshair acted as interpreter for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the ‘Blind Sheikh’ now serving life for the first WTC bombing, conspiring to use explosives at other NYC landmarks and colluding to assassinate U.S. politicians.”
Honig also noted that her friend’s “ex-neighbor is now a fugitive and subject of a worldwide FBI manhunt.” And then there was the “in-your-face insolence of the immigrants,” including the rooftop loudspeaker that the mosque used to call the faithful to prayer.
Honig’s friend hastened to assure her that she was “not a bigot,” but “the jihadists” weren’t there “to coexist but to conquer…. Muslims call us infidels and want all infidels out. We’re threatened.”
Nor was this a singular incident. Yet we have seen communities take action against these rabats in 2010, not only in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, but also in Staten Island; Rutherford County, Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Sheboygan County, Wisconsin; and elsewhere.65
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is just one of a growing list of medium-sized towns all over the country that in 2010 became the center of controversy over a large mosque planned for a residential area. Besides Murfreesboro, there were controversies over mega-mosques in two other towns in Tennessee as well, along with others in various towns and cities nationwide. They’re separated by thousands of miles, but they share a common element: Muslims are building huge mega-mosques in communities with tiny Muslim populations—raising important questions about their funding and overall goals.
Citizens are rising up against these suspicious new structures, but often their opposition is unfocused and uninformed, making them easy prey for the inevitable charges of “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” that CAIR and the mainstream media always deploy in these situations. That’s why it’s important to know how to fight smart.
I’ve provided a step-by-step guide for folks across America who find themselves faced with a huge monster mosque proposal in their small towns. Here’s how you should proceed.
The vast majority of mosques are backed by groups that are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that is dedicated to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.”66 Mosques with jihadist, terror ties must be fought fiercely and defeated. Look for connections to the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which is the source of funding for numerous mosques around the country, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), from which came the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and other Brotherhood-linked groups. The dossier on the stealth jihadists at CAIR, ICNA, ISNA, MAS, etc., are in the evidence presented at the Holy Land terror trials. Check the group affiliations of the mosque organizers against the list of Brotherhood groups in the captured Muslim Brotherhood strategy document released during the Holy Land jihad charity trial.67
The Brotherhood memorandum contains “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” including the Muslim organizations enumerated above or their parent groups.
Usually if the mosque in your area is linked to one or more of these groups, this is public and easily obtainable information, since despite their Brotherhood connections these groups are still regarded as “moderate” and wholly benign by most law enforcement and government officials. Nonetheless, if the mosque is indeed a Brotherhood-linked entity, notify local reporters, and persist. If they ignore the story, ask them why they’re not following up on this link between the mosque organizers and the Brotherhood, the parent group of Hamas and Al-Qaeda.
If none of the groups behind your mosque are on the list, find out as much as you can about the groups that are involved: it is part of the Brotherhood’s strategy in the United States to create a dizzying array of groups, so that organizational affiliations are obscured and links to unsavory groups and individuals be easily denied; however, often there is a great deal of personnel overlap between various Islamic groups, and so connections can be established. There may be no connection to Brotherhood groups, but don’t assume there isn’t because there is no obvious connection.
Also find out as much as you can about the mosque’s imam and other leaders, if any. Often imams with “moderate” reputations are anything but. Take, for example, the Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. He was the go-to Muslim cleric for reporters scrambling to explain Islam after 9/11; yet it turned out that he was the same imam who guided the 9/11 Muslim attackers to commit jihad. Al-Awlaki was the “spiritual adviser” to three of the hijackers who attacked America on September 11, 2001. He guided the 9/11 jihadis, the Fort Hood jihadist Major Nidal Hasan, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Ball bomber. He was the imam at the respected Dar al Hijreh mosque in northern Virginia while being the go-to Muslim for big media for information on Islam—and while aiding the 9/11 jihadists and Major Hasan. Exactly like how the un-indicted co-conspirator, Hamas-linked CAIR’s leaders are the go-to guys for media now.
Imams matter. Al-Awlaki wasn’t in Yemen when he was aiding the 9/11 jihadists. He was in Virginia. He was born in America. The problem here is not just immigrant Muslims, the problem is the doctrine of jihad and the ideology of Islamic supremacism, which any Muslim anywhere can hold.
Also, be sure to check out not just the organizers, but who is being brought in to speak. A mosque could have no discernible or public connections to the Brotherhood, but then bring in to speak someone like Siraj Wahhaj (a “potential unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case) or Ingrid Mattson (leader of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America).
This information will most likely be harder to come by, and that should give you an opportunity to ask questions, and to ask the local media why they aren’t asking questions. Most mosques in America are Saudi-funded and stocked with Islamic supremacist Saudi literature. Ask mosque leaders, if they aren’t forthcoming about the sources of their funding, what they have to hide. Call for funding transparency. And if they admit to Saudi funding, ask them what assurances they can give the community that Saudi Wahhabi Islamic supremacism, with its contempt for non-Muslims and desire to subjugate them, will not be taught at the mosque.
The mosque and/or the Islamic school’s curriculum, as well as its funding, should be transparent. As Ayn Rand said, “Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted.” The Mapping Sharia project found that three out of four mosques preach hate and incitement to violence—and that includes the last (chronologically) and most authoritative chapter of the Koran on jihad—chapter nine, “Repentance.” This corroborates the testimony of the Muslim Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999. Kabbani said that 80 percent of American mosques were controlled by “extremists.” Also, the Center for Religious Freedom report in 2005 found that hatred of Jews and Christians, as well as Islamic supremacism, were extensively taught in American mosques.
Those are the only surveys of what mosques in America teach that anyone has ever undertaken, and they all agree. Supporters of mosque construction can’t point to any competing studies that claim to show that mosques in America teach pluralism, free speech, love for non-Muslims, equality for women, etc. There aren’t any.
The Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) in Virginia used textbooks that called for jihad and labeled Jews apes and Christians pigs. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s report criticized ISA textbooks for stating that it was permissible for Muslims to kill converts from Islam and adulterers. The results of this teaching are obvious: former ISA valedictorian Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted in federal court of joining Al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. And former ISA student Mohammed El-Yacoubi was carrying a suicide note and was believed to be planning a suicide bombing attack in Israel.
And check out, for example, the proposed reading list that ties the sponsor of the proposed huge Tennessee Islamic facility to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro (ICM)’s Web site claims that the organization “is not in any way associated or affiliated with any outside organization locally, nationally, internationally or any other way.” However, the investigative Web site Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report has revealed that the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro’s reading list betrays a decided taste for the Muslim Brotherhood perspective on Islam and contemporary politics (GMB = Global Muslim Brotherhood; USMB = U.S. Muslim Brotherhood). The Daily Report notes that the list recommends works by:
• Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (Global Muslim Brotherhood leader)
• Harun Yahya (Turkish “creationist” known for anti-Semitic writings and heavily promoted by the GMB)
• Ahmad Sakr (important figure in early history of the USMB)
• Jamal Badawi (USMB leader)
• Akbar Ahmed (Pakistani American close to USMB)
• Hassan Hathout (deceased leader of the Islamic Center of Southern CA with likely background in the Egyptian MB)
• Ahmad Von Denffer (German Muslim Brotherhood)
• Taha Jabir (likely Taha Al-Alwani International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
• John Esposito (Georgetown academic and longtime USMB supporter)
The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report adds, “It should be noted that the ICM book list also features ‘Silent No More,’ the work of ex-Congressman Paul Findley, a long-time harsh critic of Israel and a supporter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an important part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Findley appeared at a 2006 press conference at the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) headquarters in Saudia [sic] Arabia to support a CAIR initiative. The ICM also has reported that is [sic] sponsored a January 2009 protest against the Israeli ‘war on Gaza.’”
Here is a case history of one battle: James Lafferty is an SIOA board member and chairman and founder of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST), a loose-knit coalition of people committed to stopping the spread of Sharia in Virginia and America. He was an early warrior to the fight, a pioneer in activism against Islamic supremacism. He organized a grass roots fight the expansion of the Saudi-owned and operated Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), an Islamic school in northern Virginia that taught hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity to replace the Constitution with Sharia. And while they lost the fight by one vote, it was very early in the information war. Most Americans were unaware of the colonization going on right under their noses.
Lafferty’s initiative to stop the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy succeeded because of the initiative and resourcefulness of VAST’s members. The expansion of the radical ISA required the approval of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.
Lafferty explained:
We were present at every hearing, no matter how small. At the first public information session, the Saudis turned out in force—their lawyers had lawyers. We set the tone for the debate however—how can you square the oath you took as public officials to “protect and defend” the Constitution of Virginia and the United States and then approve the operation and expansion of a madrassah which teaches and operates on Shariah principles? We broke all attendance records for the planning commission.
We lost all of the recorded votes, but we won the war when the Saudis relented and dropped their plans to expand.68
VAST credits three elements for outlasting the Saudis:
1. Publicity—Every time there was any hearing or public event, we called the media. In our testimony we used vivid soundbites, which highlighted the criminal legacy of the ISA and challenged public officials to “keep your oath.” The ISA hates publicity—even its school busses are marked “ISA” instead of spelling-out the school’s name.
2. Confrontation—Unlike their liberal counterparts, anti-Sharia activists are typically polite, rarely “coloring outside the lines.” VAST encouraged them to ask tough and accusatory questions during the hearings and take advantage of media coverage to make a point. When one official demanded during a public hearing to know the names of “cowardly politicians” referred to in a VAST flyer, audience members stood and shouted out the names of prominent politicians. The embarrassed official tried to stop the huge audience response with an “I’ve heard enough,” but his name was also included in the long litany.
3. Unrelenting Opposition—“The fight isn’t over until we stop fighting” was the principle that brought VAST members to every public discussion of the ISA expansion. Supportive county employees even tipped us when Saudi lawyers/officials performed routine tasks like applying for permits. A VAST member would soon appear.69
By the end of it, I am sure they were convinced that some of our members actually lived in the county building.
In the end, it has become a large-scale game of whack-a-mole. We stop them here in Fairfax County and they head south to Spotsylvania County or west to Loudon County. We are now a rapidly-expanding statewide group, helping other Virginians organize and develop effective grassroots tactics to stop the spread of Sharia.
It would be sadly ironic if Sharia triumphed in the land of Washington and Jefferson and the Constitution was discarded in favor of a cruel code that seeks to punish those who exercise freedom or liberty.70
The best advice is to assemble a team in your neighborhood to start researching. While this is being done—play the bureaucrats’ game. Check zoning, traffic codes, etc. If there is rezoning involved, fight it. If there are some changes to codes, fight them. Keep it tied up. Exhaust them. While the bureaucrat brigade is attacking that flank, research the people and the funding. Try to find pro bono lawyers in your town who understand the problem. If there are none who understand it, make a presentation to lawyers who will listen—giving them facts, not emotion.
At the end of the day, our government is only there to protect us. They steal the rest for their own political purpose, but the point, the goal, the reason for government is to protect our individual rights. Government = force, and if the Muslim Brotherhood intends to open a satellite HQ in your town or neck of the woods, it is up to the government, once presented with the facts, to protect its citizens from Islamic supremacists and jihadism. It could be up to you to present them with those facts. Be ready.
In June 2010, as the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief front and public face in the United States, prepared to buy a church and convent on Staten Island and convert them into a mosque, the local authorities scheduled a hearing to allow MAS representatives to answer questions from the community, which was growing increasingly concerned about the project. The impending sale of an empty, two-and-a-half story convent in Midland Beach owned by St. Margaret Mary’s Roman Catholic Church had neighbors angry.
That same month, lay leadership and tea party leadership in Staten Island approached me, enlisting my support and aid in fighting this mosque. A large Staten Island constituency had come to our first Ground Zero mosque protest on D-Day, and they shared their concerns with me.
The community had long supported the convent, and much of the land had been donated to the church by a parishioner.
Activists Pamela Hall and Robert Spencer and I made our way to the meeting, where it was clear from the beginning that the fix was in.
The Muslim American Society had purchased a convent in what was called a “mystery sale.” An underhanded deal had been made for the Church land to be sold to a developer, but then, in a mysterious and shady deal, the land was sold to the MAS. The Archdiocese of New York and the Rev. Keith Fennessy, St. Margaret Mary’s pastor at the time of the sale, refused to attend the hearing, or to have anyone there representing the church. The Archdiocese had sold out the parishioners, without so much as basic, cursory recognition of how Christians have fared in Islamic countries—and to the oppressive, violent Brotherhood, no less.
The meeting was cut short when the Midland Beach Civic Association abruptly ended it, after they stopped people from asking questions and brought on shills and propagandists for MAS. The community was having none of it. Not after sitting through a half hour of proselytizing.
Community members took issue with the fact that this took up the speaking time of the residents who had waited patiently in line for their turn to speak, and were now summarily cut off.
I have attended a good deal of these charades and I have to say that the members of this community were the most informed group of concerned citizens I have ever come across. The Q&A was fascinating—every question well researched and educated. The MAS taqiyya masters could not snooker this crowd.
Robert Spencer spoke first. He asked the MAS representatives to explain their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, to renounce its stated goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” and to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. They did none of these things; instead, they dodged and obfuscated. Spencer recounted:
…the Muslims began their presentation. They spoke in calm, measured tones. They spoke about their many years in the community, their children, their work (two were physical therapists, one a high school math teacher). They spoke, of course, of the need for “mutual respect.” They spoke about the need for both sides to communicate and get to know each other better. They spoke about reassuring someone with a sentimental attachment to the convent building (many of those present had been educated by the nuns who lived there) by saying, “God will be praised in that building.” They praised the Muslim American Society as an upstanding civic group with “50 chapters in 55 states across the nation” (yes, you read that right). They spoke of the MAS’s commitment to establishing a virtuous and just American society. They denigrated Steve Emerson and his Investigative Project as Islamophobic and claimed that he purveyed falsehoods. When challenged later by an IPT official to name even one specific falsehood in the IPT report on the Muslim American Society and Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Muslim spokesmen said only, “Later on.”
I asked them if they were prepared to denounce Hamas and Hizballah, both of which were publicly endorsed by MAS leader Mahdi Bray, as jihad terrorist organizations, and to renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S., in line with the Brotherhood’s stated goal of “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house” so that Allah’s religion is “made victorious over other religions.” In response, the main spokesman for the three hemmed and hawed and emitted billows upon billows of airy nonsense—to the increasing impatience of the crowd. This spokesman, made nervous by the crowd’s vocal disdain for his ever-lengthening non-answer, did ultimately call Hamas and Hizballah terrorist groups and renounce any intention to bring Sharia to the U.S. But since these positions are at odds with what are known to be the positions of the MAS, it seems likely that he was only saying this under pressure—otherwise he wouldn’t have needed to offer so much empty and condescending verbiage to the crowd before getting around to the point.
The other questions were pointed, informed, and full of righteous indignation. Challenged about the MAS’s leader, the unsavory Bray, the chief spokesman, a physical therapist named Ayman, called him a “civil rights activist.” Challenged on whether he thought the people in the room were the Infidels that the Koran directs Muslims to wage war against, he told the questioner, “No, you are not an Infidel,” and explained that the Koranic Infidels were only those who knew the truth and still rejected it. He did not mention, of course, that the Koran doesn’t envision any other kind of Infidel, and that it has no conception of people who reject Islam in good faith.
Ayman defined jihad as the right of a nation to defend itself whenever it is oppressed and occupied—a definition large enough to drive a bomb-laden truck through, and that fact didn’t elude the questioner, who further asked him whether that definition would indeed make Americans Infidels, because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He explained that no, he wouldn’t be raising his five children here if he thought America was an Infidel. Another one of the Muslims on the dais insisted that Sharia was democratic and protected democracy. Once again, the glaring contradiction of all this with the words and deeds of the MAS leadership and the Brotherhood was left unexplained.
And so it went. Ultimately, one of the Muslim spokesmen, the other physical therapist, whose name was Muhammad, became firm. Asked if the MAS would prove the sensitivity to the community that the spokesmen were insisting they had by leaving the community, he said: “We are exercising our freedom of religion. We will not apologize for being Muslim. We will not apologize for being American.”
Ringing words, but ultimately empty—ignoring, yet again, the aspect of Islam that is political, and that would subjugate women and non-Muslims and deny the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience. And when they were challenged on such issues, the Muslim spokesmen retreated behind their clouds of rhetorical smoke.
Finally, when the local officials tried to stop the questions from the floor while there was still a long line of people waiting to be heard, and to bring on instead a couple of local dhimmis (including a Christian Arab minister in a clerical collar) to explain how wonderful their experience had been living next to the Muslims of another Staten Island mosque, the crowd had had enough of being railroaded and lied to, and wouldn’t quiet down. The meeting was summarily ended, prematurely. But it mattered little. The fix was in from the start.
Nonetheless, this meeting exposed the MAS. It was no longer possible for the Archdiocese to justify the sale, and soon Church officials withdrew from their agreement to sell the church and convent to the MAS.
It was a victory that had been won by determined and informed Americans who were able to expose the lies and hypocrisy of the Islamic supremacists and their media shills.