Speaking at the State Department in 1999, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi sheik and leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, sounded an alarm about Muslim houses of worship in the United States.
"The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques . . . is the extremists' ideology," he said. "Because they are very active, they took over the mosques; . . . they took over more than 80 percent of the mosques that have been established in the US." He warned ominously that "a danger might suddenly come that you are not looking for . . . we don't know where it is going to hit."
When Kabbani was condemned by other Muslim organizations, he stood his ground. His assessment of the leadership of US mosques, he said, was based on having visited scores of them, and in a subsequent interview he explained the extremists' pattern of infiltration.
Muslim immigrants to the United States "came with a good heart . . . and they wanted a place to pray," Kabbani told the Middle East Quarterly. "They collected money and they built mosques in their community. Slowly, certain Middle Eastern groups seized these mosques, promoting political and ideological agendas rooted in their home countries' problems. . . . Slowly, such groups took over many mosques either directly or by unseen pressure on the moderate board members, and now an antagonistic mentality controls them. The extremists -- not ordinary believers -- changed the use of American mosques into centers of intolerant political dogma."
At the time, Kabbani's charges may have seemed little more than inside Muslim baseball. After Sept. 11, it became clear that mosques dominated by radical clerics were a potentially lethal threat. Many such mosques are funded by Saudi Arabia, which spends heavily to propagate Wahhabism, a fanatic and aggressive strain of Islam. The Saudi government, reported the 9/11 Commission, "uses zakat" -- Islamic charity -- "and government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world, including in mosques and schools. . . . Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims." Its findings were reinforced by Freedom House, which in 2005 documented the penetration of US mosques by Saudi-supplied Wahhabi hate literature.
It is against this background that the $24 million mosque and cultural center being built by the Islamic Society of Boston has generated such controversy.
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A Sarajevo court sentenced two Bosnians, a Dane and a Swede to jail terms from 2 1/2 to 15 years for terror-related crimes. The Bosnia-Herzegovina court in Sarajevo jailed Mirsad Bektasevic, 19-year-old Swede from Kungalv near Gothenburg, and the man with dual Danish and Turkish passports, to 15 years each, Sweden's TheLocal.online newspaper reported Wednesday.
The two Bosnians were sentenced to 8 years and 2 1/2 years imprisonment, respectively. The four men were charged with preparing terror attacks somewhere in Europe, the report said. Bosnian police arrested the two Scandinavians in October 2005 in a Sarajevo apartment, where they uncovered 44 pounds of explosives, hand grenades and guns.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20070110-014626-4790r.htm
Fundamentally Freund: Here Comes Muslim Europe
Jan 10, '07
The Muslim takeover of Europe is happening more quickly than people think. Just take a look at the demographic decline of traditional Europe and contrast it with the rapid growth of the continent's Muslim population. This trend has far-reaching consequences for the US and Israel, and it is time that our decision-makers start taking it into account as they plan for the future....
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=119190
Hicks 'took orders from bin Laden'
January 11, 2007
US prosecutors say Australian terror suspect David Hicks was a fully-fledged member of al-Qaeda who took orders from Osama bin Laden, rather than a naive adventurer out of his depth.
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of Hicks's imprisonment without charge at Guantanamo Bay Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the US Office of Military Commissions, rejected the portrait of Hicks as merely someone in over his head.
The 31-year-old former Adelaide man has been held at the notorious US jail in Cuba since January 2002 after being captured a month earlier in Afghanistan. Col Davis said today the US believed it had a strong case against Hicks and he was not convinced of his innocence.
Hicks returned to Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US with the expressed purpose of fighting with al-Qaeda, he said. "He (Hicks) had experience in Kosovo, he had experience in Kashmir, he's been to a number of combat and terrorism training courses put on by al-Qaeda and from my understanding when 9/11 happened he was out of the country.
"But once he saw the US had been attacked he made a conscious choice to try to get back to Afghanistan, report in to a senior al-Qaeda leader and, in essence, say: `I'm David Hicks and I'm reporting for duty'," Col Davis said on ABC radio.
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http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21042091-5007133,00.html?from=public_rss