Hometown Jihad: Blowback

UPDATE: Thanks to JihadWatch and LGF for the added coverage.

An article following up on my original Hometown Jihad article appears today again as the lead item at FrontPageMag.com, Hometown Jihad: Blowback.

Among the items covered:

1) The interview of Salah Sultan (the individual that was the focus of my original article) that appeared last week on Al-Risala TV (link to video here, thanks to MEMRI), where he stated that the 9/11 attacks were planned by the US "to enable the U.S. to control and terrorize the entire world, and to get American society to agree to the war declared on terrorism,” and defending Yemeni al-Qaeda cleric Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani, who has been listed by the US government as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”.

2) The recent whitewash of Sultan's record by the Columbus Dispatch (our local paper) just days before his interview of Saudi TV: Muslim Milestone: Islamic school marks 10 years of progress, but suspicions endure.

3) Defending my original article from counterattacks made by our local Muslim school, Sunrise Academy, and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio, who had challenged several of the claims made there.

As I say at the end of my article, FrontPageMag.com is one of the few places where individuals such as myself can get a hearing and respond to the outrageous mendacity of the mainstream media. FrontPage and its parent organization, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), are worthy of your support.

You heard it here first: Feds cracking down on Hezbollah

Being right is an old habit of mine, just like being humble, but it seems LTC Joe Myers and I hit the nail on the head with our article last month, Hezbollah, Illegal Immigration and the Next 9/11.

According to an article in yesterday's NY Post, the Feds are cracking down on Hezbollah operations in the U.S. in anticipation of a show-down with Iran: N.Y. Hezbollah Hunt.

N.Y. HEZBOLLAH HUNT
By NILES LATHEM Post Correspondent

May 22, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - The Hezbollah terror group - one of the most dangerous in the world - may be planning to activate sleeper cells in New York and other big cities to stage an attack as the nuclear showdown with Iran heats up, sources told The Post.

The FBI and Justice Department have launched urgent new probes in New York and other cities targeting members of the Lebanese terror group.

Law-enforcement and intelligence officials told The Post that about a dozen hard-core supporters of Hezbollah have been identified in recent weeks as operating in the New York area.

Sources said the activities of these New York-based operatives are being monitored by FBI counterterrorism agents as part of a nationwide effort to prevent a possible terror strike if the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program spins out of control.

Additional law-enforcement attention is being centered on the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, where there have already been three episodes in the last four years in which diplomats and security guards have been expelled for casing and photographing New York City subways and other potential targets.

The nationwide effort to neutralize Hezbollah sleepers in the United States, being spearheaded by the FBI and Justice Department's counterterrorism divisions, was triggered in January in response to alarming reports that Iran's fanatical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, met with leaders of Hezbollah and other terror groups during a visit to Syria.

Among those attending the meetings, according to reliable reports, was Hezbollah's chief operational planner, Imad Mugniyah - considered one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world - who is responsible for the bombings of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and who, more recently, provided Iraqi guerrillas with sophisticated explosive devices.

U.S. officials stressed there is no intelligence information pointing to an imminent attack by Hezbollah.

But officials said they have detected increased activity by Hezbollah operatives - including more heated rhetoric by its leaders and in Internet chat rooms as the U.S.-Iran diplomatic showdown heats up.

"Hezbollah is a group that the U.S. has to be concerned about in the current climate. Hezbollah is already coming under heavy pressure by the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and Ahmadinejad is under pressure on the nuclear issue," said Walid Phares, an outside terror expert who has briefed law-enforcement officials on Hezbollah in recent weeks.

"They are well funded, very well organized, and we assume that their penetration of the U.S. is deeper than al Qaeda's. It is only rational for the U.S. to think in pre-emptive ways. An attack here is clearly in the realm of the possible," Phares added.

A U.S. counterterrorism official called the latest effort a "major undertaking," with separate probes also under way in Los Angeles, Boston and Detroit.

Hezbollah has so far limited its activities in the United States to fund-raising and criminal enterprises. The FBI has already taken down two major rings, one in Charlotte, N.C., and one in Detroit, in which members were smuggling cigarettes, Viagra and baby formula, and kicking profits back to Hezbollah.

This is one I'm not glad to be right about.

Hometown Jihad, Part 3

Well, my old friend and neighbor Salah Sultan is back in the news. You might remember that he was the subject of my Hometown Jihad article back in April. And just a few weeks ago he was defended by the Columbus Dispatch, who tried to airbrush Sultan's extensive record of terrorist collaboration and anti-Semitic tirades and who likened me and FrontPageMag.com (where my article was published) to neo-Nazis for daring to make Sultan's record public. That was the subject of Hometown Jihad, Part 2 blog post.

Last week Salah Sultan appeared on Al-Risala TV in Saudi Arabia, where he enlightened the world by claiming that the 9/11 attacks were organized "to enable the U.S. to control and terrorize the entire world, and to get American society to agree to the war declared on terrorism" and defending al-Qaeda cleric and fellow 9/11 conspiracy-monger, Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani, who has been listed by the US as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" and was the subject of a 2003 National Review report, Yemeni Sheikh of Hate.

Yes, the US is terrorizing the world, not Islamic jihadis.

MEMRI has provided a translation of Sultan's Al-Risala interview, and also offers a full video clip of the interview on their MEMRI TV site. Here's what Sultan had to say:

"The film 'The Siege,' starring Denzel Washington, portrayed the Muslims in a very bad light. They are shown calling for prayer, performing the ablution, praying, and then planning multiple bombings - a government building, a security agency, the FBI, a bus carrying young men and women, adults and children. They bombed shops.

"The film came out in April 1999. It paved the way for 9/11, since it was filmed in Brooklyn, New York. The truth is that immediately after 9/11, I said people should view these events in the context of 'The Siege,' because these events were identical.

"This scenario... I still believe to this day... This scenario still baffles me. I share the view of many Americans, French, and Europeans, who say that 9/11 could not have been carried out entirely from outside [the U.S.] - by Muslims or others. The confessions by some people could have been edited. But even if they were not edited, I believe that these people were used in a marginal role. The entire thing was of a large scale and was planned within the U.S., in order to enable the U.S. to control and terrorize the entire world, and to get American society to agree to the war declared on terrorism - the definition of which has not yet been determined.

"The U.S. remains the only country to determine who is a terrorist, and what is the definition for terrorism, and it can pin it on anyone. The most recent instance is the case of Dr. Al-Zindani, who has been accused of terrorism, even though he is known worldwide for his refinement, virtue, and broad horizons."

Yep, that Salah Sultan is a real moderate if I've ever seen one. I'm sure the Columbus Dispatch is going to be thrilled that the man they took to defend has been caught going off the deep end not even two weeks after their whitewash appeared.

Couldn't happen to nicer people.

Thanks to Jihadwatch.org for making me aware of the MEMRI report.

"The Project" of the Muslim Brotherhood

Update (5/14/06): Thanks to LGF for plugging my article.

Back in December I posted on a document, called "The Project", recovered by Western intelligence authorities in 2001 in a raid in Switzerland. This "master plan" of the Muslim Brotherhood - the oldest Islamist organization and with one of the largest terror networks in the world - drafted by Muslim Brotherhood scholars details how Islam would culturally invade the West through immigration, escalating confrontation, terrorism, and eventual domination. What should concern every freedom-loving Westerner is that this "master plan" has been executed, and is being executed, flawlessly. More than two decades have proved the success of this plan.

Today I have another article on the topic headlining today's edition of FrontPageMag.com, The Muslim Brotherhood "Project", that also includes the entire text of "The Project", which has only appeared in English serially at The Daily Ablution. The translation accompanying my article was prepared by Scott Burgess, an American researcher and journalist who lives in London. I cited Scott's groundbreaking work in my first post and he greatly assisted me in my research for today's article.

If you want to understand the future and the escalating threat posed by the rising tide of Islam in the West, take the time to read my article, Scott's translation of "The Project", and follow the links to The Daily Ablution to read his additional insights and research on the topic (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, Conclusion). This is an issue that you ignore to the peril of your children, grand-children and great grand-children.

Hometown Jihad, Part 2: Blowback

(Update: Thanks to Lawrence Auster and truepeers for their added coverage of this issue.)

In a review of my Hometown Jihad article published last month by FrontPage Magazine, the Columbus Dispatch, our hometown liberal fish-wrapper, this past Friday (Muslim Milestone: Islamic school marks 10 years of progress, but suspicions endure) likened me to a Neo-Nazi and devoted significant space on the front page of its weekly "Faith and Values" section to promote an open house sponsored by the local Muslim school I identified in that article, Sunrise Academy, which has direct ties to Islamic terrorism, and defending them from the points I raised in that article.

The Dispatch goes out of its way to infer that I'm a Neo-Nazi. Rather than go to the trouble of actually finding something I said that could be construed as racist hate speech, the reporter, Felix Hoover, cherry-picked a quote from an unrelated article published elsewhere on the FrontPage site and authored by someone I've never met or communicated to level the charge.

Here's what the Dispatch article said:

FrontPageMag.com is edited by conservative activist David Horowitz, known for his campaign against perceived liberal bias on college campuses. Another article in the April 3 edition said U.S. immigration policy should be shaped by the nation's "overwhelmingly Christian" and "overwhelmingly white"' heritage.

Did you read that? "Christian" "white" "heritage"? What else could he mean but that FrontPage Magazine is a White-Power front, and that I am, by implication, a Neo-Nazi?

But is that what the article he cites actually says? In fact, it doesn't. Here's what Lawrence Auster wrote in his April 3rd article, "Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants ":

It is also blatantly unfair to make the factoid that "we are all descended from immigrants" our sole guide to national policy, when there are so many other important and true facts about America that could also serve as guides. For example, throughout its history the United States has been a member of Western civilization—in religion overwhelmingly Christian (and mainly Protestant Christian), in race (until the post-1965 immigration) overwhelmingly white, in language English. Why shouldn't those little historical facts be at least as important in determining our immigration policy as the pseudo-fact that we're all "descended from immigrants?"

Auster never claims that "U.S. immigration policy should be shaped by the nation's 'overwhelmingly Christian' and 'overwhelmingly white' heritage," as Hoover alleges, but I guess that doesn't matter when you're manufacturing bias or making me the object of a game of "Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler". It was close enough to make it seem like he was saying something suspicious enough to tie it to me and to discredit my article. Admittedly, that was a lot easier than dealing with the substance of my article.

But who said that the mainstream media was biased?

After the Dispatch article was published I emailed Mr. Hoover and asked him how he arrived at his interpretation of Auster's comments, and what if anything they actually had to do with my article, but as of yet, no word. Should I be surprised?

I should note that when Hometown Jihad was first published, I contacted the Local News desk at the Dispatch to see if they had any interest in a follow-up. I was told categorically that they were not. And yet, when Sunrise Academy contacted the paper two weeks later, the matter was put on the front-burner, though Mr. Hoover did withhold his article for several weeks until the day before Sunrise Academy's open house, which his article vigorously promoted as if his article was intended as a public service announcement. Might this all just be just coincidence?

As I mentioned in Hometown Jihad, each month at Sunrise Academy a local resident, international terror apologist and raging anti-Semite, Salah Sultan, delivers lectures at the school. Even according to the Dispatch, he previously served as the religious director there. Sultan is a close associate of Muslim Brotherhood cleric and notorious terror apologist Youssef Qaradawi, who the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith recently identified as a "Theologian of Terror" (note: Salah Sultan is one of the few individuals apart from Qaradawi named in the ADL report). His terror connections notwithstanding, Sultan hired him as faculty for the Islamic-American University, which Sultan founded, despite the fact that Qaradawi has been banned from entering the US because of his outspoken advocacy of Islamist terrorism.

Sultan sits on Qaradawi's European Council for Fatwa and Research, which has issued rulings justifying suicide bombings against Israel, and he issues "live fatwas" for Qaradawi's Islamonline.net website. As I note in Hometown Jihad, in 2003 Qaradawi issued a fatwa authorizing suicide bombings, declaring such acts as "martyrdom", and that they did not fall under the Qur'anic prohibition against suicide. In 2004, Qaradawi and 92 other extremist leaders authorized the killing and abduction of American civilians working in Iraq, identifying them as "invaders".

According to Sunrise Academy, they have no active connection with Salah Sultan. This despite the fact that:

1) Sultan delivers lectures at the Sunrise Academy facility once a month;

2) Sultan directs the Islamic Education & Fatwa Center, which is sponsored by the same parent organization as Sunrise Academy, the Islamic Society of Greater Columbus;

3) Sultan spoke in conjunction Sunrise Academy's annual Iftar fundraiser last October;

4) Sultan's website is promoted and linked to on Sunrise Academy's own website.

I think I can be forgiven for confusing these as "active connections" between Sunrise Academy and Sultan.

In a follow-up email to Mr. Hoover after our face-to-face interview, I provided him with information and source documentation that Salah Sultan shared the podium at a 2003 Muslim American Society (the US front group for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) event in Philadelphia with notorious Neo-Nazi William Baker, the once-chairman of the Populist Party, which under his tenure pushed for the revival of segregation-era laws and later would nominate David Duke for President. None of this was addressed in the Dispatch article. Of course, if I had any of these open connections to Neo-Nazis it would have been mentioned in the first line of this story (Wait! Didn't they make the inference anyways?), but the Columbus Dispatch gave Salah Sultan a pass.

The real kicker never mentioned in the Dispatch article is that a local group of liberal usual suspects, the Interfaith Alliance of Central Ohio, began circulating emails (one of which was sent to FrontPage managing editor, Jamie Glazov) alleging that my Hometown Jihad article was "inciting violence against the children of the school" and that I was engaging in "hate speech". In the email, which included an open letter from one of the teachers at Sunrise Academy, the school denied any association with the Muslim American Society, as I alleged in my article. And yet just last month MAS held a youth conference here in Central Ohio. And who was listed among the sponsors of the event? That's right: Sunrise Academy. They were even listed as sponsors on the official flier for the event. Would you think that the Dispatch pointed out this flagrant misrepresentation in their article? I didn't think so.

In their vigorous defense of Salah Sultan and Sunrise Academy, no mention was made by the Interfaith Alliance of what these "interfaith" leaders thought of Sultan's recorded anti-Semitic tirades, quotes of which I provided in Hometown Jihad. Or how about his "interfaith" fatwa published on his own website, which prohibits Palestinians from selling land to Jews in Israel:

...There is no doubt about the fact that the Jews usurped the Holy Lands of Palestine and it is not permitted to bargain with them over anything except the means of their departure from the lands that they usurped by means of violent force and through the killing of hundreds of thousands of people.

How much "interfaith" can you get than that? Salah Sultan - bridge-builder between Muslims and the Jewish community in Israel. I mentioned this to Mr. Hoover of the Dispatch, but it was apparently not worth following up on.

I also wonder how the members of the Interfaith Alliance, a number of members of whom are women clergy in mainstream Protestant denominations, would respond to Sultan's statements on marriage, family and women's rights, like his recent fatwa ruling that women are not allowed to go to the store without the husband's permission (4th fatwa), or his ruling telling an American woman who married a Muslim man who later got married to a second wife that if she objects to the second marriage and wants to keep her marriage she better get pregnant soon (3rd fatwa)?

Yes, that Salah Sultan is a real feminist on top of being an "interfaith" activist.

As I said in my previous article, what concerns me most about Salah Sultan is that he is my neighbor; and as a result of his well-known terror ties, he poses a standing threat to the community I was raised in and recently moved back to. He not only resides here, but freely spreads his message of hate and violence in our community. Just is troubling is that a local Islamic school, Sunrise Academy, while claiming to be run by peace-loving, moderate Muslims, unapologetically hosts an individual like Salah Sultan. I must admit that I wasn't surprised that the mainstream media in Columbus and the liberal interfaith "usual suspects" were so eager to serve as useful idiots and rose to the occasion to help defend Sultan and Sunrise Academy from the negative publicity that resulted from my article.

If anything, my experience should serve as a warning to America, because there are probably hundreds or possibly thousands of communities across the country just like Hilliard, Ohio, which unbeknownst to most residents harbor would-be jihadists. At present, these individuals and groups plead moderation and sign statements opposing terrorism, but they nurture hatred for America and defend hatred and violence when they think no one is looking. This faux moderation is a deliberate part of their strategy, as Salah Sultan made clear in a speech he gave in April 2004 for the New York chapter of MAS, where he said:

"Da'wah [conversion] work can never succeed unless Muslims embed themselves within the very marrow of American society"

Salah Sultan has embedded himself into American society here in Hilliard, Ohio, making good on his threat and serving as an example for those like him. If the blackening of my name by the Columbus Dispatch by likening me to a Neo-Nazi is the price I have to pay to warn my community about who is living amongst us and the potential threat they pose, I will gladly pay it.