The Al-Farooq mosque in downtown Brooklyn was identified as an Al Qaeda funding source in 2004.
Posted on 06/17/2007 4:57:27 PM PDT by Stoat
Sunday, June 17th 2007, 4:00 AM
The Al-Farooq mosque in downtown Brooklyn was identified as an Al Qaeda funding source in 2004.
Homegrown terrorists include the Brooklyn College grad Syed Hashmi...
...Bronx jazz musician Tarik Shah...
...and Shahwar Matin Siraj.
Neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx are spawning homegrown radicals, and some are plotting horrific acts to rival the 9/11 attacks, city and federal investigators say.
Like the recent plot to blow up fuel lines leading to Kennedy Airport, most have been thwarted before they get past the planning stage.
But cops and federal investigators say the motivation behind the plots reveals a troubling resentment against the U.S. heated by global events that have become rallying cries for jihad.
Statements from several of the suspects reveal plots inspired by the London train bombings or the abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
"It is kind of a simmering hatred that builds up, and it manifests itself in acting out," said Kelly, who has worked to expand the NYPD's worldwide intelligence-gathering abilities since 9/11. "You need a 360-degree perimeter. You have to work globally and look locally."
The head of the FBI's anti-terror efforts in New York says radical leaders exploit these events, with the help of the Internet, to increase their following.
"We find that even in this great city, events that happen abroad present a great recruiting tool for [terrorists] and they're very adept at playing it up," said Joe Demarest, special agent in charge of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a 500-member unit of federal, state and city investigators.
Arrests and prosecutions in the federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan over the past several years confirm the trend.
Shahwar Matin Siraj's failed plot to blow up the Herald Square subway station in 2003 was hatched after he saw photos of prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib. His lawyer said he felt a duty as a Muslim to respond.
Brooklyn College grad Syed Hashmi's anti-American fervor was stoked by exposure to al-Muhajiroun, a terror group whose leader voiced support for attacks in London and the U.S., those who know him say.
Hashmi, 27, was reared in Flushing but felt increasingly isolated by his devotion to an ancient culture that seemed at odds with the ideals of America, according to his friends.
Before his 2003 graduation, he invited an al-Muhajiroun speaker to the college's Flatbush campus.
"Hashmi lived here most of his life, and he didn't feel he was an American," said Azeem Khan, the assistant secretary general of the Islamic Circle of North Americans in Queens. "He wasn't afforded the opportunity to feel part of the community or have a greater relationship with the community or feel accepted."
Hashmi was extradited two weeks ago to face charges in Manhattan of conspiring to send money and military gear to Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. His lawyer says he may have been an outspoken political activist but he has never committed a crime.
Near the bustling intersection of Brooklyn's Atlantic and Flatbush Aves., a sign outside the Ahlul Bayt Islamic Library reads, "Islam is the Solution."
Across the way is Al-Farooq mosque, which the feds identified as an Al Qaeda funding source in 2004.
The mosque is not far from the former home of the House of Knowledge bookstore, where the feds say Moroccan-born owner Abdulrahman Farhane, 52, talked about raising money for jihadists with a man who was a government informer.
Farhane pleaded guilty to conspiring to send money overseas and recently was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Recordings of Farhane led the FBI to a Bronx jazz musician, Tarik Shah, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to train Al Qaeda operatives in martial arts.
Shah's radical leanings were evident in 2000, when he and others tried to use a mosque in upstate Poughkeepsie to rally members for a jihad. An armed confrontation with the leader of the mosque, Anwar Clifton Kearney, led Shah to look elsewhere.
Kearney said he was busy trying to help a struggling flock support themselves, but Shah had something else in mind.
"They were talking about jihad, and we can't even pay our rent," Kearney testified recently.
Aided by informers, law enforcement is trying to prevent plots from going beyond the planning stage.
"We try to squeeze as much intelligence out of each of these cases as we can," Demarest says. "We just can't miss anything."
Well gee, if organizations like "The Islamic Circle" didn't exist for the purpose of providing insulation for Muzzies from the rest of America, then idiots like these wannabee jihadists might have an opportunity to learn more about America, wouldn't they, Einstein?
When your organization and others like it feed your followers a constant stream of separatist ideology, then yes I suppose that he wouldn't "have an opportunity" to "feel like an American". You set up these systems and enclaves by which immigrants can spend their entire lives completely insulated from the rest of the country and interacting only with people exactly like him, and then you complain that "he didn't have an opportunity" to "feel like an American".
His arrogance is only eclipsed by his short-sightedness.
This same pattern is repeated all across America; it's not limited to New York City by any means.
Very informative post.
B U M P
Strange usage of the word “maniac” in the title.
Ping
None worse than this evil character...
B U M P
Thank you for your kind words :-)
He lied. Anyway the protection payment is due.
LMAO :-) It's nice to know that we can trust Kerry just as much as Osama, isn't it?
Oh...I thought this was about Yankee Fan.
Never mind. Carry on.
I'm just glad that they didn't use "freedom fighter" as we might expect Reuters or AFP to do.
I thought it was refreshingly un-PC for them to use that word.
We are at war with Islam. WHY, pray tell, are they still here???
ping
Never mind. Carry on.
LMAO!
There are several hundred thousand muslims in NYC, many of them are native born. Should we outlaw a religion or deport Americans?
GRrrrrrrrr......you KNOW what I mean. Sheesh.
LOL!!!!
OK. I’ll be quiet and fleeeeee! :)
We are at war with Islam. WHY, pray tell, are they still here???
Because they are at war with the West, and when their shamefully-backward 6th-century "culture" is unable to invent a bicycle much less an ICBM, they find it far easier to come here to fight us from within by using our own technologies and advanced culture against us..
What about the guy who banned cigarette smoking and trans fats in New York? Name begins with a “B;” someboday help me here.
Oh, you mean that same guy who wants to inflict those same "successes" (and much more) upon the rest of the country?
Blimpbugger?
awwww....don't do that! :-(
Too too late,You know what you did you told the world we were not watching which means we are watching-Bad Gramma:)(((Hugs for you and POPs)))
“Strange usage of the word “maniac” in the title.”
Seemed unusual word choice to me too.
The great news is that the MSM is now openly talking about these things.
Celebrate the victory in that regard...then get back to work. ;O) This fight ain’t over with, yet.
It's no more a religion than nazism was.
L
On a more sober note, did anyone note that this demonstration was about 2 blocks from ground Zero?
Terrorists in NYC? Don’t worry. If bringing down the Trade Center didn’t make anti-terror warriors out of Manhattanites, nothing will.
Celebrate the victory in that regard...then get back to work. ;O) This fight ain’t over with, yet.
Agreed....the fight has just begun, despite Harry Reid's desire to raise the white flag and turn over our country to the Islamists.
If enough of us can maintain a long term view, we can win this thing. If the majority ends up deciding that this war needs to end in a short, predefined time like a sitcom, we're doomed.
Both would be good.
This can’t be true. We’re fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here. Or so somebody keeps telling us.
“There are several hundred thousand muslims in NYC, many of them are native born. Should we outlaw a religion or deport Americans?”
Well, ah, yes, and yes.
It is not a religion, it is a creed of conquest and subjugation. They aren’t called Islamonazis for no reason.
If they do not pledge allegiance to the United States because of their religion, they are not Americans in my mind.
Ping
I haven't noticed too many truck bombings or major successful operations against us here in the USA since we've been in Iraq, or since 9/11 for that matter. It's all a matter of scale and degree, which the Left doesn't like to acknowledge.
I suppose we're seeing one of the reasons why there is more than one book in the library....there are lots of ways to arrange words :-)
Terrorist would also have been fine with me but it's such a heavily-used term I'm guessing that the author wanted his article to stand out against the millions of other articles pertaining to terrorism.
If someone who plans on blowing up a fuel pipeline and kill thousands or more people while wreaking havoc upon the economy in the name of a hopelessly backward 'culture' and 'religion' isn't a 'maniac', then I'm not sure what is.
...and from along term pov, I am very encouraged at the moment. The tide is shifting.
The discussion re: global warming, - finally -is becoming more of a two-way form of discourse than when it was an Al Gore, ‘my way or the highway’ form. The threat of illegal immigration has become better known and understood in mainstream America - finally. (Rasmussen: “Why the Senate Immigration Bill Failed”)
...and the “religion of peace” meme is - finally - rapidly disappearing, if not becoming outright laughable.
We are winning.
However, our struggle continues.
203 million Americans are now on the WWW. 1.1 billion people around the world are now on the internet with another 1 billion people projected to join us before - or soon after - 2010. We will number three billion internet users by 2015, if not before.
They can find their own news and info w/o recourse to the MSM or to traditional institutions and to ideological and agenda-driven presentations. Those who have the facts on their side (and who share the best ideas) will win.
(Although they will remain players for sometime, Google and Yahoo and their ilk cannot control the narrative or even frame the issues.)
The paradigms are changing, folks.
Both!
Should we have let Nazism be practiced during WWII under the cloak of "religion"?
We interred multitudes of JapAmericans, we didn't bend over for their imperialist religion either!
Fascism is fascism! I dont care what the gawd of goat humpers says, it is IRRELIVANT!
Is-Slime declared WAR against mankind 1400 years ago.
upon such of those to whom the Scriptures have been given as believe not in God." Sura 9:29
Isn't it time to end it?
And also wants to ban guns so we will have NO DEFENSE against the animals out to kill us all——NYC deserves what it gets for putting that asshole Bloomberg in office
Today, we're fighting the wanna-be's, groupies, and the immigrants with a grudge here in the United States.
Fold our tent in Iraq and pull out....then you'd see the al Qaeda and Iranian inspired "A Team" sneeking across the border and make some U.S. shopping centers look like Iraq.
For a Dad, your view seems pretty shortsighted.
The argument “fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them here” falls flat, given that “they” are ALREADY “here”. Thus we will have to fight “them” here AND there, and the only question that remains is “What is the optimal way to do that?”
The testimony of one who has been pre-occupied with this question for several decades:
Imperial Hubris: An Author Reviews the Reviews of His Book
by Michael Scheuer
The suggestion that I review the reviews of my book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism”, gives me a unique opportunity to evaluate the success of the book in prompting and influencing debate on the nature of America’s war on Islamist militancy, as well as to survey the range and content of the reviews the book has received.
What the book says
First, let me restate my intent in writing the book. My work was meant to inform Americans about the threat Islamist militancy posed to our country. The book is strongly nationalistic. I do not aspire to be a citizen of the world; being an American citizen is enough honor for one lifetime. The message I wanted to deliver can be summarized in three points.
1. Our Islamist enemies – led and personified by Osama bin Laden – attack America for what we do in the Muslim world, not for what we believe or the way we live. They attack us because they believe America, through its policies and actions, is tying to destroy Muslims and the Islamic faith. Our political leaders from both parties do not understand this, or, if they do, are willfully lying to the electorate. There is no other explanation for their abject wrong-headedness.
2. The war in which America is engaged is a war for survival, not a police action, a regime-changing or nation-building exercise, or, least of all, a law enforcement problem. We cannot talk our way out of this war, and we cannot – and must not try – to appease our way out of it. Indeed, we are faced not by a choice between war and peace, but a choice between war and endless war.
3. Today America is defending itself only through intelligence and military operations. These can hold the ring for a while, but to crush our Islamist enemy – as we must – the lethal power of these services must be complemented by a review of and debate about our policies toward the Muslim world. Not aimed at appeasement, this review, and the debate it engenders, would ensure that our long-in-place policies still serve U.S. national interests. If they do, fine, we will have make do with military and intelligence means. If they do not, we can alter them in a way that protects America’s interests while we simultaneously destroy our foes at every opportunity.
The book’s reception
I think any author would be pleased by the reception my book received. I was not only pleased, but shocked. The book has sold more than 150,000 copies, long excerpts have appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, and it was on those papers’ bestseller lists for several weeks. I have had numerous opportunities to talk about the book and my ideas on television, radio, and in print interviews, and have been asked to present talks in several public venues. With the exception of several sui generis Fox TV correspondents, I have been well treated on all occasions. The best part of this media experience has been participating in radio call-in shows. The eagerness of Americans to seek new information, question my ideas and judgments, and try to pin me down for specifics have reaffirmed my belief that Americans are not the simpletons their political leaders too often treat them as.
Notwithstanding these many positives – for which I am genuinely grateful – I have been disappointed by the failure of many reviewers to understand the book’s intent. This failure speaks either to the murkiness of my prose and the weakness of my arguments, or to the agendas of my reviewers. Likely it is a mix of both.
Reviews from the left
My book has been embraced on the left by those eager to attack President Bush and his neoconservative advisers, especially on the issue of Iraq. I oppose the Iraq war because it made crushing our bin Laden-led Islamist enemies vastly more difficult, and because self-initiated, offensive wars are incompatible with the principles on which the Founding Fathers grounded U.S. foreign policy. This said, the book devotes only a few of three-hundred pages to Iraq, and rarely mentions President Bush. Simply, Imperial Hubris is not about either Iraq or President Bush.
After disgorging their anti-Bush venom, reviewers on the left have consistently referred to the “schizophrenic” nature of the book. The argument they make on this point is that while I claim that our Muslim foes hate and fight us because of what we do in the Islamic world, I also assert that more and more-lethal military and intelligence activities must be undertaken in America’s defense. Well, I am guilty as charged. At a basic level, America is suffering from the postwar mangling of our educational system that allows the inculcation of such errant nonsense as the idea that all wars are evil, as well as from the willingness of our elites to preach the lie that wars can be fought and won with few combatant casualties on either side and even fewer civilian casualties.
As a consequence, since 2001 most of the Taleban, al Qaeda, and the Iraqi armed forces escaped America’s daintily applied wrath, went home with their guns, and have lived to merrily fight another day. My point was not schizophrenic, but just this: It does not matter whether Muslims are angered by the simple fact that we intend to kill all those who intend to kill us. What matters, and this point was seldom caught by reviewers on the left, is that we cannot kill 1.3 billion Muslims, that while we must in the short term kill far greater numbers of our enemies, this lethality must be coupled to a policy review aimed at trying to cut into the now steadily growing numbers of Muslims willing to take up arms against America. We cannot stop this growth in its tracks, but we can decide to use all the tools at our command – economic, diplomatic, propaganda, as well as military and intelligence – to slow it over time. It does not seem to me schizophrenic to try to broaden the range of tools available to America by adding non-lethal ones to a more aggressive use of the lethal.
Reviews from the right
For the most part, reviews of Imperial Hubris from the right have been more straightforward and less nuanced. I am simply and variously described as a “liberal appeaser”, an “Islamist fellow traveler”, and – my personal favorite – a “rightwing weasel” who always “blames the Jews.” The consensus on the right seems to be that my intention was to “blame America” for the problems we are having at the hands of Islamist militants. The use of these epithets necessarily sets the tone and shapes the content of the reviews. Oddly, the reviews from the right have not noted the sharp nationalistic tone of my book, suggesting, perhaps, that the neoconservatives now in the saddle in Washington are truly more interested in the glories of empire than in the security of America.
There is, in the American context at any rate, nothing “conservative” about a policy of empire-building. Traditionally, as Colonel Ralph Peters brilliantly argues, America has been the killer of empires not their creator. American conservatism has meant regarding war as a last, not a first resort, and going to war only to destroy foes who present a genuine threat to America’s survival. Never has it meant or sanctioned offensive wars of our choosing, and the explicit rejection of John Quincy Adams’s timeless principle that “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Many of the reviews of my book from the right seem to me – as a Republican diehard, a nationalist, and a moderate isolationist – to be grounded in nothing more than repackaged Wilsonianism, a set of ideological fantasies that have helped to soak the world in blood since Versailles. The traditional principles of U.S. foreign policy – non-intervention, freedom of the seas, avoiding detrimental alliances, being the exemplar not the installer of democracy in the world, not picking fights abroad, etc. – appear as foreign to some of my reviewers on the right as they so manifestly are to the neoconservatives. Many in both categories would not know the difference between an American founder and an Atlantic flounder, although our current foreign policy suggests that the advice guiding it comes from minds similar in quality to the latter not the former.
Summing up
So far, I have failed in terms of what I intended my book to do. I have failed to stir any sort of substantive debate, and the nationalist, America first – not America alone – content of my argument has gone virtually unnoticed. I am responsible for that failure, and will work to clarify my prose and sharpen my argumentation on the chance I am tempted to write a third book on America’s war with Islamist militancy. There is also the chance, of course, that the problem is not my writing, but that I have not changed with the times. I suppose that there must be a chance that our elites are right when they preach casualty-free wars and the efficacy of democracy crusading; that everyday, working Americans really believe that their liberty is safe only if we impose our brand of freedom elsewhere at bayonet point; and that, to do so, American parents are gladly willing to spend the lives of their sons and daughters to ensure foreigners are just like us. Call me stubborn, but if there is anyone in non-elite America who believes this I would like to meet them because, as George Strait sings, I have some ocean-front property in Arizona to sell.
February 7, 2005
Michael Scheuer is the author of Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA.
We’re talking about a quarter of humanity. Over a billion people.
I worked at 2 World Trade(several years before 9/11). That’s a LOT closer than 2 blocks.
“And also wants to ban guns so we will have NO DEFENSE against the animals out to kill us all——NYC deserves what it gets for putting that asshole Bloomberg in office”
Put that way, it sounds a bit harsh. But Bloomberg is just the latest in a long line of bad people who have been Mayor of New York, Koch being a slight exception. Whether they deserve it or not, they have created the conditions that mean they are likely to pay another terrible price. Trading liberty for security ensures you get neither.
On the other hand, how much better are we doing in the rest of the country?
“We are at war with Islam. WHY, pray tell, are they still here???”
simple. Because WE are at war with THEM....and they’re right here with us ,living as a protected species.
Im not directing this at you personally Bill1952, but that picture really burns my a$$ big time
The sad joke is that the liberal a holes of NY City will be the LAST to believe this story ..I know , I’m in NY City every day and it’s a hell hole of moronic , super liberal , anti American , socialist , brainwashed jerks.
Two are infiltrated already, the musician is being worked on.
CO
Adolph had a pretty good following too. Quite a few mooselimbs were all too happy to jump on the jewish genocide bandwagon!
I'm talking about 3/4 of humanity here! Over 5 Billion, under the threat of enslavement/subjugation/conversion to satanallah/death !
Which of the 4 choices did YOU pick?
I choose #5 Feed em Fish Heads!
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