Thanks to the lead from blogger Andrew Bostom and his article "Mosques as Barracks in America".
The title of my blog entry comes from a piece written in 1912 by Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gokalp called "The Soldier's Prayer". The words, "the mosques our barracks" rings true today because of the wide spread increase in domestic terrorism, both planned and executed, by radical Muslims in America, all seem to originate from within Islamic mosques on American soil. Just recently two Muslims in the southern part of Kentucky were arrested by the FBI for planning to obtain military weapons to kill American soldiers. Yet most communities in America that have seen new mosques being built have taken a position that religions are exempt from police investigation. Thankfully, the New York City Police Department wasn't one of them.
Yesterday the NYPD publicly released a 90-page investigative report in Adobe PDF format on their official web site NYPDShield entitled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat prepared by Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, Senior Intelligence Analysts, NYPD Intelligence Division. This report was compiled in 2007 and was, hopefully, distributed across America to every law enforcement agency. I say hopefully, because I wonder if any local authority ever saw it or read it and moreover did anything with it. Being politically correct is something like being under the influence of a narcotic, it dulls the senses and stops the brain from thinking.
NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly wrote this introduction on page 2 of the report:
The New York City Police Department Page 2
PREFACE
While terrorism has been with us for centuries, the destructive power and global reach of modern terrorism is unprecedented. The entire world witnessed the attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001, but most of the attacks and attempted attacks since then have shown 9/11 to be an anomaly rather than the standard pattern for terrorism in the homeland.
If the post-September 11th world has taught us anything, it is that the tools for conducting serious terrorist attacks are becoming easier to acquire. Therefore intention becomes an increasingly important factor in the formation of terrorist cells. This study is an
attempt to look at how that intention forms, hardens and leads to an attack or attempted attack using real world case studies.
While the threat from overseas remains, many of the terrorist attacks or thwarted plots against cities in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States have been conceptualized and planned by local residents/citizens who sought to attack their
country of residence. The majority of these individuals began as “unremarkable” - they had “unremarkable” jobs, had lived “unremarkable” lives and had little, if any criminal history. The recently thwarted plot by homegrown jihadists, in May 2007, against Fort
Dix in New Jersey, only underscores the seriousness of this emerging threat. Understanding this trend and the radicalization process in the West that drives “unremarkable” people to become terrorists is vital for developing effective counterstrategies.
This realization has special importance for the NYPD and the City of New York. As one of the country’s iconic symbols and the target of numerous terrorist plots
since the 1990’s, New York City continues to be the one of the top targets of terrorists worldwide. Consequently, the NYPD places a priority on understanding what drives and defines the radicalization process.
The aim of this report is to assist policymakers and law enforcement officials, both in Washington and throughout the country, by providing a thorough understanding of the kind of threat we face domestically. It also seeks to contribute to the debate among intelligence and law enforcement agencies on how best to counter this emerging threat by better understanding what constitutes the radicalization process.
Raymond W. Kelly
Police Commissioner of the City of New York
Most often, when a concerned citizen such as myself raises questions about a new mosque in their community to some elected official as I did to the city commissioners in Florence, Kentucky, they will get a reply saying why they cannot do anything to interfere with the religious freedoms of any group that wants to set up a place of worship. That response sums up the root cause of the entire problem when a hate group masquerades under the guise of a religion. If the contents of the printed works used by the followers of Islam were examined in an impartial light, the number of times Islam called for the death and or torture or enslavement of non-Muslims, it would be considered hate speech by any definition. This is exactly what the New York City Police Dept. did in its investigation. But this seems to be the problem local governments are faced with when they rely on "established sources of information" such as the ultra liberal group named the Southern Poverty Law Center.(SPLC) often cited by the ultra leftist (pro-Muslim) Obama administration as a reliable source for identifying "hate groups". SPLC says nothing about Islamic propaganda calling for the death of non-believers in Islam. Yet the SPLC defines a Hate Group as follows:
Active U.S. Hate Groups
The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 1,002 active hate groups in the United States in 2010. Only organizations and their chapters known to be active during 2010 are included.
All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.
This list was compiled using hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports.
Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing. Websites appearing to be merely the work of a single individual, rather than the publication of a group, are not included in this list. Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity.
And it describes a hate group focused on "Christian Identity" this way:
Christian Identity
Of all the movements that have appeared among white racists in America, Christian Identity is surely one of the strangest.
Although nominally Christian, it owes little to even the most conservative of American Protestants. Indeed, its relationship with evangelicals and fundamentalists has generally been hostile due to the latter’s belief that the return of Jews to Israel is essential to the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.
Identity has created for itself a unique anti-Semitic and racist theology, but notwithstanding its curious beliefs, it rose in the 1980s to a position of commanding influence on the racist right. Only a prolonged period of aggressive efforts by law enforcement, together with the demise of influential leaders who were not replaced, brought about its present decline.
We need more accountability from our elected officials and they must begin to explain their reluctance to face the facts when they refuse to look at the causes of domestic terrorism and the dissemination of radical hate-filled material in masques. I plan on sending a copy of the NYPD investigative report to my county sheriff and to the Florence, Kentucky city commission to see if they have heard of it and read it and most importantly, to see what they are doing about it. I will write about their responses.
UPDATE June 7, 2011
Just discovered a very interesting fact about the NYPD report Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT VERSIONS.
The difference is the longer report includes 2 pages of apologies beginning on page 11 titled STATEMENT OF CLARIFICATION to the Muslim community in NYC. The page indexes in both reports are different after page 12 as the 90 page report lacks the additional two pages.
The longer report comes from liberal Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC.gov web site and the shorter version comes from the NYPD Shield.org web site that belongs to the Police Department.
Another interesting fact is that both reports use the phrase Salafi Islam and define it as simply a fundamental variety of Islam which is incomplete. Salafi Islam is a synonym for Wahhabism, the official state religion of Saudi Arabia which has financed many mosques constructed in the United States. The Saudi government requires Wahhabi texts to be distributed in every mosque it helps to build. Wikipedia confirms this by also saying Wahhabi texts were found in these mosques. Wahhabi texts are totally against all forms of western culture and rife with incitements to violence.
A study conducted by the NGO Freedom House found Wahhabi publications in mosques in the United States. These publications included statements that Muslims should not only "always oppose" infidels "in every way", but "hate them for their religion ... for Allah's sake", that democracy "is responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century", and that Shia and certain Sunni Muslims were infidels.
UPDATE June 8, 2011
The web site Mapping Sharia has an analysis of a collection of violence-advocating texts that have been found in a majority of Islamic mosques in America. The analysis comes from a book entitled Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques.
When reading Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques, a picture emerges that may give researchers, as well as law enforcement officials, a way to monitor or potentially to predict where violent jihad may take root. Potential recruits who are swept up in this movement may find their inspiration and encouragement in a place with ready access to classic and modern literature that is positive toward jihad and violence, where highly Shari’a-adherent behavior is practiced, and where a society exists that in some form promotes a culture of martyrdom or at least engages in activities that are supportive of violent jihad. The mosque can be such a place.
The survey, Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques, found a strong correlation between the presence of severe violence-promoting literature and mosques featuring written, audio, and video materials that actually promoted such acts.
51% of U.S. mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad; another 30% had texts that were moderately supportive of violence. 19% had no violent texts at all.
The mosques surveyed contained a variety of texts, ranging from contemporary printed pamphlets and handouts to classic texts of the Islamic canon. From the perspective of promoting violent jihad, the literature types were ranked in the survey from severe to moderate to nonexistent. The texts selected were all written to serve as normative and instructive tracts and are not scriptural. This is important because a believer is free to understand scripture literally, figuratively, or merely poetically when it does not have a normative or legal gloss provided by Islamic jurisprudence.
Alarmingly, many of these texts are currently endorsed by The American Muslim website in its “List of Recommended Books on Islam.” al-Misri’s Umdat al-Salik, the Tafsir Ibn Kathir, and the Qutb’s explicitly political tract, Milestones, are each singled-out for praise.
In addition, the list of recommended books contains other works by several writers included in the Mapping Shari’a Project‘s survey of texts which advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad. The American Muslim recommends books by Maududi (author of Jihad in Islam and Tafhim al-Qur’an) and al-Nawawi (author of Riyad-us-Saliheen). The American Muslim also recommends work by the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It is no surprise that the website and its author, Sheila Musaji, have been highly critical of US anti-terror policy and any negative criticism of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The literature assessed in mosques includes the following works. Click the book covers below to find out more.
Go to the web site Mapping Sharia and see the individual books found and read the text reviews.
Also, read the full article in The Middle East Quarterly containing the complete survey. This is a must read article if you want to understand the truth behind Islamic terrorism in the United States.
Shari'a and Violence in American Mosques
by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2011, pp. 59-72
Since its founding in 1994, the Middle East Quarterly has become America's most authoritative journal of Middle Eastern affairs. Policymakers, opinion-makers, academics, and journalists turn first to the Quarterly, for in-depth analysis of the rapidly-changing landscape of the world's most volatile region.
