The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy (32 page)
Read The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy Online
Authors: Erick Stakelbeck
Tags: #Political Science / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism
The neighbor told me one of the men was young, well dressed, spoke fluent English, and claimed to be a real estate agent. The other was clad in Islamic garb and spoke no English. Needless to say, the neighbor assumed the second man was from out of town. He told me the pair offered him up to $600,000 to buy his home, well above the market price. He declined their offer. In the process, he likely prevented the mosque on Voorhies Avenue from taking on even larger dimensions. If true—and after talking to others in Sheepshead Bay, I have no reason to believe it isn’t—the neighbor’s story represents an admirable show of defiance against a rising Islamist tide in Brooklyn and beyond.
Why Sheepshead Bay? Why would a Muslim Brotherhood–linked organization want to erect an expensive, three-story mosque in the middle of a quiet, tree-lined residential street where not one Muslim family lived? Notice that I use the past tense there. Because once the double parking and overflow traffic hit narrow Voorhies Avenue, and the call to prayer echoes through the neighborhood five times a day, and overflow Friday prayers perhaps spill outside, with worshippers prostrate in the middle of the street (this happens regularly at Madina Masjid, another three-story mosque located across the river in Manhattan’s East Village),
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it’s a safe bet that Sal, Angelo, Moshe, and other unfortunate local infidels will be posting “For Sale” signs on their modest front lawns, post-haste. It’s an even safer bet that Muslims will move in and replace them.
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it’s a safe bet that Sal, Angelo, Moshe, and other unfortunate local infidels will be posting “For Sale” signs on their modest front lawns, post-haste. It’s an even safer bet that Muslims will move in and replace them.
I’ve seen this pattern repeated time and time again over the course of my eleven years spent covering the Islamist movement in the West. An Islamist organization—usually linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and flush with cash from Saudi Arabia and/or the Gulf states—spends big bucks to buy up several acres of property in a town where hardly any Muslims reside. Plans are announced to build an “Islamic Cultural Center” where all faiths are welcome and diversity will be celebrated in a new, multiculti mini-utopia. But blindsided local residents, after doing some research, quickly learn of the nefarious connections of the mosque’s leadership and see a potential hub for terrorist plotting in their midst—one with financial backing from overseas radicals to boot.
Yet, when these same neighbors demand to know where the money is coming from to pay for the planned mega-mosque, smooth-talking Muslim spokesmen involved with the project just smile and calmly reassure all comers that the funds have been “locally raised.” The local city council, petrified of being called racist, ultimately approves the so-called Islamic center against the will of the people. On cue, the mainstream media and Islamic groups then team up to condemn critics of the mosque as “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Neighbors are left feeling demonized, abandoned, angry, and alone. And the mosque is built—even though its leadership has been exposed as having ties to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, a hatred for Israel, and a fondness for sharia law.
I highlighted several examples of this trend in my book,
The Terrorist Next Door
. In a chapter called “Mega-Mosque Nation,” I described the plight of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a rural town in the buckle of the Bible Belt where locals protested—fiercely but again, in vain—against a fifteen-acre, multi-million-dollar mega-mosque planned by radical Islamists.
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The Terrorist Next Door
. In a chapter called “Mega-Mosque Nation,” I described the plight of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a rural town in the buckle of the Bible Belt where locals protested—fiercely but again, in vain—against a fifteen-acre, multi-million-dollar mega-mosque planned by radical Islamists.
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I spent a few days in the town shortly after ground had been broken on the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro (ICM) and found all the classic elements that have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood’s disciples to gain footholds in communities across the United States. For starters, Murfreesboro’s tiny Muslim community consisted of no more than 250 families who had quietly worshipped at a much smaller facility for years. According to ICM’s 2009 annual report, the mosque had only forty-five active members overall. So why the sudden need for a gargantuan 52,000-square-foot facility—built right next door to a Christian church, no less? And who exactly was paying for this very expensive structure serving a mostly working-class congregation of (presumably) modest means?
The mosque’s imam, Ossama Bahloul (a graduate of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, an institution notorious for spewing anti-Semitic and anti-American bile) offered few answers to these questions but lots of reassuring smiles and pleas for tolerance and peaceful coexistence—even after an ICM board member was suspended for posting pro-jihad slogans and photos on MySpace. That same board member—whose MySpace page included a picture celebrating murderous Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—was quietly reinstated shortly thereafter.
There was also the not-so-small matter of the literature found at the ICM, which included pamphlets from Muslim Brotherhood–tied groups, and the mosque’s official reading list, which contained a roll call of MB ideologues before curiously disappearing from the ICM website. Likewise, YouTube footage of a January 2009 anti-Israel rally sponsored by the ICM in downtown Murfreesboro and featuring shouts of “Allahu Akbar” was also scrubbed from the Web shortly after the ICM gained approval to build the new mega-mosque. This was no coincidence: local residents were in the process of filing a series of appeals against the mosque and the ICM’s hierarchy was trying desperately to conceal all traces of its Ikhwan-inspired Islamism until the mammoth structure was safely built.
When my cameraman and I found Imam Bahloul in the parking lot of the original ICM, he declined to speak on the record. Asked about the ICM’s Brotherhood-heavy reading list and allegations that the mosque was tied to the Ikhwan, he responded, with a straight face, “They’re in this country? I didn’t know that.” Back in Sheepshead Bay, that’s called
chutzpah
.
chutzpah
.
But Bahloul needn’t have worried. The Rutherford County (TN) Commission, petrified of earning the dreaded “Islamophobe” label, green-lighted the mosque after only seventeen days and with no input from local residents—even though it often takes churches and other religious facilities in the area up to a year to gain such approval. When Murfreesboro residents (who, like the homeowners in Sheepshead Bay, only learned of the mosque plans after approval had already been granted) loudly protested, state and national media dutifully castigated them as anti-Muslim rednecks and zealots.
The Civil Rights Division of the Obama Justice Department essentially sealed the deal for the ICM’s construction when it filed an amicus brief in October 2010 declaring DOJ’s “vigorous” support for the new mega-mosque in the heart of American Christendom. This was followed by a DOJ lawsuit against Rutherford County demanding that the mosque be permitted to open.
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The Obama administration ultimately got its way, and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez (who, at the time of this writing, was in line to be the next Secretary of Labor) spoke at the mosque’s grand opening in November 2012 where he warned of—you guessed it—Islamophobia.
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The Obama administration ultimately got its way, and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez (who, at the time of this writing, was in line to be the next Secretary of Labor) spoke at the mosque’s grand opening in November 2012 where he warned of—you guessed it—Islamophobia.
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Surprised that the federal government would get involved in a community quarrel? Don’t be. The Obama Justice Department has shown a troubling and persistent habit of meddling in local mosque controversies like in Murfreesboro, repeatedly strong-arming townspeople and weighing in on the side of Islamists. The administration’s efforts in this regard are led by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which, as of this writing, has opened investigations into a whopping twenty-eight cases nationwide involving local denials of mosque construction applications.
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A few notable examples:
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A few notable examples:
■ In December 2012, shortly after the Department of Justice opened an investigation, the zoning commission for the town of Norwalk, Connecticut (population: 86,000), dropped its previous opposition to the construction of a 27,000-square-foot mega-mosque. The commission had opposed the Al-Madany Islamic Center—which will reportedly feature a towering, eighty-foot minaret—over zoning and parking issues before caving to DOJ pressure.
The current Islamic center in Norwalk serves a hundred families. The new facility, which will cost an estimated $3.5 million, will have the capacity to hold a thousand worshippers.
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Where are the funds coming from and why the need for Norwalk’s small Muslim population to have such a large complex? Frankly, the Obama administration doesn’t care, as long as more mosques are constructed and the traditional Judeo-Christian fabric of America is further eroded in the process.
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Where are the funds coming from and why the need for Norwalk’s small Muslim population to have such a large complex? Frankly, the Obama administration doesn’t care, as long as more mosques are constructed and the traditional Judeo-Christian fabric of America is further eroded in the process.
■ In the small town of St. Anthony, Minnesota (population: just over 8,000), the Department of Justice opened a formal investigation in October 2012 after the local city council rejected a proposal to open a 13,000-square-foot Islamic center in a building located in an area dedicated to light industrial use only. A Christian group’s proposal was rejected on the same grounds in 2011.
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The DOJ was curiously absent in that case but not this time around.
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The DOJ was curiously absent in that case but not this time around.
The space for the proposed Abu Huraira Islamic Center was purchased for $1.9 million—again, a very tidy sum for a small congregation of only two hundred people.
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,
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DOJ reportedly got involved after the Minnesota chapter of the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) requested an investigation. The lesson: when a Hamas-linked group that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history talks, the Obama administration listens—and acts.
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,
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DOJ reportedly got involved after the Minnesota chapter of the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) requested an investigation. The lesson: when a Hamas-linked group that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history talks, the Obama administration listens—and acts.
■ In March 2010, in Lomita, California—a town of just over 20,000 people located in Los Angeles County—the city council unanimously rejected a proposed expansion of the Islamic Center of the South Bay into a much larger, two-story facility. The council cited neighbors’ concerns and a likely increase in traffic as the main reasons behind its decision. Sounds reasonable enough—but not to the Obama administration.
In November 2011, the Department of Justice launched an investigation of Lomita city officials over alleged discrimination .
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Once again, the local CAIR chapter led the charge. In the end, the DOJ found no evidence that the officials engaged in religious discrimination. But Lomita eventually came to a settlement with the Islamic center and the federal government that required the city to reconsider the mosque’s redevelopment plans. That means the mosque expansion may yet happen.
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“It surprises me that the federal government would spend so many resources second-guessing this pretty basic land-use decision,” said Lomita City Attorney Christi Hogin.
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In truth, she and the people of Lomita learned the hard way that when it comes to promoting Islamism at the expense of American interests, this particular federal government is full of surprises—of the worst kind.
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Once again, the local CAIR chapter led the charge. In the end, the DOJ found no evidence that the officials engaged in religious discrimination. But Lomita eventually came to a settlement with the Islamic center and the federal government that required the city to reconsider the mosque’s redevelopment plans. That means the mosque expansion may yet happen.
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“It surprises me that the federal government would spend so many resources second-guessing this pretty basic land-use decision,” said Lomita City Attorney Christi Hogin.
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In truth, she and the people of Lomita learned the hard way that when it comes to promoting Islamism at the expense of American interests, this particular federal government is full of surprises—of the worst kind.
■ Let’s get ready for what’s been dubbed the “Largest Islamic Project in America.” It’s a massive Islamic center planned, yet again, for a rural area—this time in Howard County, Maryland. The Dar us-Salaam mosque would reportedly hold up to five thousand people and cover some sixty-six acres of land. The price tag? An astronomical $8 million. As of this writing, the sale has not been completed; locals are up in arms about the plan and have vowed to fight.
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Rest assured the Department of Justice is up for a battle as well—and not on the side of the locals.
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Rest assured the Department of Justice is up for a battle as well—and not on the side of the locals.
The cases described above are far from isolated. According to a 2012 Pew Research Forum study, no less than fifty-three proposed Islamic centers and mosques have met community resistance in recent years from coast to coast.
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Contrary to elite opinion, the American people are not stupid. When they see a multi-million-dollar mega-mosque proposed for a rural area with only a smattering of Muslims, they begin to ask serious questions. Years of watching Islamist fanatics burn American flags and kill U.S. soldiers and civilians will have that kind of effect on folks.
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Contrary to elite opinion, the American people are not stupid. When they see a multi-million-dollar mega-mosque proposed for a rural area with only a smattering of Muslims, they begin to ask serious questions. Years of watching Islamist fanatics burn American flags and kill U.S. soldiers and civilians will have that kind of effect on folks.
At the end of the day, however, the widespread resistance to creeping Islamization has had little noticeable effect. A 2011 study found that the number of mosques in America had nearly
doubled
over the span of a decade, from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2011—or an increase of 74 percent in just eleven years.
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That means that roughly four in ten mosques in the United States have opened since the year 2000. These are simply astounding numbers, made all the more jarring when one considers that the mosque-building craze has occurred mostly
after
9/11. During that same span, the Muslim population in the United States has grown by 67 percent, more than doubling since 9/11 and making Islam the fastest growing religion in America.
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The Muslim presence is growing in particular in the South and Midwest, areas where the traditional, Judeo-Christian, God-and-country ethos of the United States has always been strongest. Yes, folks, America is so viciously Islamophobic that Muslims are beating down the doors to settle here and build mosques in droves—and our government is rolling out the prayer mat.
doubled
over the span of a decade, from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2011—or an increase of 74 percent in just eleven years.
25
That means that roughly four in ten mosques in the United States have opened since the year 2000. These are simply astounding numbers, made all the more jarring when one considers that the mosque-building craze has occurred mostly
after
9/11. During that same span, the Muslim population in the United States has grown by 67 percent, more than doubling since 9/11 and making Islam the fastest growing religion in America.
26
The Muslim presence is growing in particular in the South and Midwest, areas where the traditional, Judeo-Christian, God-and-country ethos of the United States has always been strongest. Yes, folks, America is so viciously Islamophobic that Muslims are beating down the doors to settle here and build mosques in droves—and our government is rolling out the prayer mat.
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