The Terrorist Next Door (17 page)

To the average American, the arrival of tens of thousands of Somali Muslims on the taxpayers' dime represents a looming cultural and national security disaster—and an expensive one to boot. Yet average
Americans are no more shaping such policies in Washington than average Europeans are influencing them in their continent's capitals. Resettling Somali refugees, not only to major urban centers but to the very heart of America and of European nations, furthers the goal of a multicultural utopia that has long been the dream of academic and government elites on both sides of the pond. After all, these elites believe, no culture is superior to another, and spoiled, sheltered Westerners will be enriched by pre-dawn calls to prayer blaring through their windows from the local mosque, or by the sight of their Somali next-door-neighbors slaughtering a goat in their backyard according to Muslim tradition. Or perhaps they'll be enlightened by news of local Somali girls being subjected to female genital mutilation, a hellish ritual widely practiced in Somalia that sees part or all of the external genitalia hacked off.

You don't like it, you bitter, guns-and-religion clinger? Too bad. And hey, the elites reason, in the very least, the new arrivals will provide cheap labor and take on undesirable jobs like chicken plucking. In the case of Europe, home to rapidly aging indigenous populations with fertility rates well below replacement level, Somali and other Muslim immigrants can also help replenish a shrinking workforce and enable Europeans to retire in comfort. Or so the elites' thinking goes. But what happens when the new arrivals refuse to assimilate and instead demand religious and cultural accommodation, or worse, turn against their adopted countries and embrace jihad?

In Shelbyville, as of this writing, there have been no documented cases of local Somalis turning to terrorism. Demands for accommodation, on the other hand, are already a Somali-American tradition, and Shelbyville is no different. The Tyson Chicken processing plant that employs many of the town's Somalis stirred national controversy in 2008 when it dropped Labor Day as a paid holiday in favor of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. This shameless kowtow to Islam was later reversed amidst a huge outcry, but the writing is on the wall for Shelbyville: things will have to change now that the Religion of Peace is in town.

That suits the folks in the refugee industry, from the State Department on down, just fine. A representative from the Tennessee Office of Refugees summed up their line of thinking when I asked her thoughts on the Somali influx into the town. “I think that Shelbyville ... needs to look at it as a learning opportunity,” she replied. “And a chance to get to know someone that is really different from you and to learn from them. And I think that they would find some really interesting people.”

Perhaps even the next Shirwa Ahmed or Mohamed Osman Mohamud.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
s I slipped off my shoes and stepped into the mosque, all conversation ceased.

A black man in flowing Islamic garb had been teaching the Koran to a group of younger men sitting on the floor in one corner of the room. Now they just stared coldly at the tall, white infidel in a suit standing in their midst. So did the others, mostly Middle Easterners, who were milling around the place.

Their eyes said it all:
another bigoted FBI agent has come to harass the Muslims.

But as they saw my cameraman wheel his gear into the room behind me, a look of annoyed recognition came to their faces, and they began to file silently out of the room.
Another bigoted TV station has come to make Muslims look bad.

It was October 2005, and I had come to the Masjid An-Nur mosque, near the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, to try to solve a growing mystery. A few weeks before, an OU engineering student named Joel Hinrichs had committed suicide on campus. The method he
used was unique, to say the least: the 21-year-old blew himself up while sitting on a bench 200 yards from a stadium packed with 84,000 football fans watching OU play Kansas State on a Saturday night. Shattering windows on campus, the blast emanating from the bomb in his backpack was audible inside the noisy stadium.
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The explosives consisted of triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the same highly volatile substance favored by Islamic terrorists such as the July 7, 2005 London mass transit bombers, “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid.

To this day, it is unclear whether Hinrichs planned to enter Memorial Stadium. Since he obviously isn't available for questioning and the feds have been elusive about his case, we'll probably never know. Perhaps it was all just an unfortunate coincidence that the young man was prowling outside a jam-packed football stadium with a bomb in his backpack. But I doubt it. Although Hinrichs was not captured on any surveillance cameras, one government intelligence analyst told me that he believed Hinrichs intended to head into the game but was probably inhibited by the sight of stadium security guards conducting bag searches. Moreover, a top Norman police official revealed that Hinrichs had been spotted fiddling with his backpack while sitting on the bench. He believed Hinrichs accidentally detonated the bomb in that spot, saying, “I think he got a little bit cocky and it went off.”
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This begs an obvious question: if Hinrichs didn't mean to set the bomb off on the bench, just where did he plan to do it?

In the days and weeks following the blast, it was hard to believe the insistence of school officials and federal investigators that this was just a run-of-the-mill suicide. Led by OU president David Boren, a former Democratic senator and governor of Oklahoma, authorities calmly reassured OU students and the local and national media that Hinrichs was a classic, depressed loner with no plans to hurt anyone but himself. So what was their message for the 84,000 unsuspecting football fans and additional
passers-by situated a stone's throw from the scene of Hinrichs' suicide bombing?
Well, uh, these things happen.

Except that they don't. Needless to say, detonating a powerful backpack bomb in a public place is not a common way for a guy to off himself.

Undaunted, the mainstream media—eager, as always, to avoid any discussion that might reflect poorly on Muslims—quickly swallowed the flimsy explanations and rejected local reports that Hinrichs was a white convert to Islam. Yet I and a handful of other journalists could not ignore the glaring truth that Hinrichs' method of self-murder was awfully similar to that used by Islamic terrorists—right down to the large quantities of bomb-making materials that investigators found in his apartment as well as his proximity to a major civilian target at the time of the blast.
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I also couldn't shake the fact that older photos of Hinrichs showed him clean-shaven, while before his death he sported an Islamic-style beard. And all that brings us back to Norman's Masjid An-Nur mosque.

I'd spent three days around Norman visiting the scene of the bombing, interviewing Hinrichs' acquaintances, and scoping out the apartment he had lived in just one block from the Masjid An-Nur mosque with, interestingly, a Pakistani Muslim roommate. On my last day in town, I received an intriguing tip. Local sources put me in touch with someone who claimed to have seen Hinrichs several times at the mosque. When I met with this witness, blurring her face on camera for her safety during our interview, she was adamant about what she had observed:

With no evident axe to grind, this woman spoke confidently as she described in detail when and where she saw Hinrichs. So I headed to the Masjid An-Nur mosque along with my cameraman to get some answers.

After the chilly reception, we were approached by mosque spokesman Mohamed Elyazgi. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries—and then things went quickly downhill. Before I could even ask a question, Elyazgi began complaining about CBN's “anti-Muslim” coverage. We went back and forth a bit as Elyazgi, with barely disguised disdain for me, tried to explain away Islam's obvious terrorism problem and disputed my well-proven assertion that the vast majority of today's terrorist acts are committed by Muslims.

A Libyan native, Elyazgi has been known to keep some interesting company. His former business partner, Mufid Abdulqader, was one of several U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood operatives convicted in the landmark Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Abdulqader received twenty years in prison for raising funds for Hamas
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and just so happens to be the half-brother of Khaled Meshaal, the terror group's so-called “political leader.” Incidentally, both Abdulqader and Elyazgi have worked for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation—helping, no doubt, to keep the Sooner State's roads safe and sound.
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The Masjid An-Nur mosque, like Elyazgi, has some dubious connections. Al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of helping to plot the 9/11 attacks, worshipped there while living in Norman in 2001.
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His presence doesn't seem to have left a lasting taint locally—as of this writing, the Islamic Society of Norman is planning to build a new, expanded mosque on the site of the existing one, at an estimated cost of $75 0,000.
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Strike another one for Islam in America's heartland.

While Mohamed Elyazgi never raised his voice during our encounter, he did become slightly agitated when I asked about Moussaoui, who he claimed had little contact with fellow mosque-goers. Elyazgi became more upset when I began to press about Joel Hinrichs. “The first time we've seen his picture is when the news and the media put his pictures in the
papers and on TV,” he told me. “Other than that, we've never seen him here.” When I countered that an eyewitness told me she had repeatedly seen Hinrichs at the mosque, Elyazgi gave the same response—he'd never seen Hinrichs there, and neither had any of the other congregants. Our interview ended soon after.

Before leaving Norman, I headed over to a local feed store and confirmed reports that Joel Hinrichs had stopped there in the days before his death to inquire about purchasing ammonium nitrate fertilizer—the same substance used in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in nearby Oklahoma City. If Hinrichs wasn't looking to harm anyone but himself, as Boren and the FBI had suggested, why would he look into buying a substance that can potentially take down an entire building? And if authorities knew from the beginning that Islam played no role in Hinrichs' actions, then why were at least seven members of OU's Muslim community either detained or questioned following Hinrichs' suicide?
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Regardless, the FBI's official verdict was that Hinrichs was not a terrorist, and that he had no outside help, nor any involvement with terrorist organizations.
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Yet I got a different take from two government intelligence analysts who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. Both classified Hinrichs' suicide as an attempted act of terrorism and believed he was indeed a Muslim convert. One opined that Hinrichs was a seriously disturbed individual who was attracted to Islamic jihadism simply because it was the darkest thing available, and that he may have selfradicalized over the Internet.

The fact that Hinrichs was a deeply troubled loner is undeniable. He'd been picked on as a boy and had struggled with depression throughout his life, and his father said Joel had a lifelong difficulty relating to and interacting with other people. Nevertheless, he was an excellent student, even a National Merit Scholar.
¹⁰
But the questions remain: was Hinrichs a homegrown Islamic terrorist, and did Oklahoma University football fans narrowly avoid falling victim to the first successful suicide bombing on U.S. soil since 9/11?

Hinrichs' profile—emotionally disturbed, brainy white kid from middle-class Colorado Springs—certainly doesn't fit most people's image of a jihadist. And that's part of the problem. If academically gifted, mentally unbalanced Joel Hinrichs was indeed acting in the name of Allah on that fateful October night in 2005, he would have had plenty of company. Increasingly, terror recruiters are connecting with psychologically unstable people, usually through the Internet, and helping to transform them into the unlikeliest of jihadis. As a result, the terrorists next door are now taking up more real estate than ever before.