The Terrorist Next Door (20 page)

Books by revered Muslim Brotherhood ideologues Sayyid Qutb and Yusuf al-Qaradawi and by convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri could be found on the shelves, while an entire section of CDs was devoted to the sermons of Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an American-born, pro-terror cleric who has described the beliefs of Christians and Jews as “filth.”
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Halalco was also stocked with a number of anti-Semitic tracts, including
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a notorious nineteenth-century forgery out of Tsarist Russia. Simply put, these are the types of books and recordings that provide a gateway into Islamic radicalism—and they're right at the fingertips of northern Virginia's large Muslim community, courtesy of Halalco. No wonder a number of young Muslims from that region—like the five described earlier in this chapter—have been arrested on terrorism charges since 9/11.

By May 2010, I had compiled enough radical materials at Halalco to produce an exposé for CBN News. As I entered the store, cameraman in tow, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a large display that I had not seen in my previous visits—shelves featuring dozens of CDs and DVDs by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki. Coincidentally or not, just one day before, Awlaki had released a video recording calling for the murder of American civilians.
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Yet there I stood, staring at a prominent display of the al-Qaeda cleric's collected works, just a few miles from the White House.
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I grabbed one of the DVDs and asked a nervous-looking young clerk if I could speak with the store's owner. He disappeared for a few moments and returned with a middle-aged man who identified himself as a store manager. He eyed my colleague's video camera warily as I showed him
the Awlaki DVD and asked for the owner. “I will check and see if he will talk to you,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”

When we returned to Halalco the next day, the Awlaki display had been taken down. After telling us the owner had agreed to talk to us, the manager from the previous day disappeared to go find him. Fifteen minutes passed as my cameraman and I—the only ones not wearing Muslim garb among the dozens of people milling around the packed store—took in the usual hostile glares. Just as I began to wonder if we were being set up, an older man with short white hair and a flowing white beard came walking toward us, followed by the manager.

“Hello,” said Abdul Mateen Chida with a nervous smile. “I am the owner of the store. Let's go into the other room and talk.” The manager departed, and Chida led my cameraman and me into a small meeting room near the store's entrance. As we sat down across from each other at a table, I asked permission from Chida to record the interview. He consented, and I went to work.

“What happened to the big Anwar al-Awlaki display?” I asked. “It was just here yesterday, now it's gone.”

Chida stammered that he had decided it was probably not a good idea to be hawking the wares of a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist who had just called for the murder of American civilians.

“So you just came to this realization yesterday?” I countered. “Awlaki has been in the news for months for his involvement in terrorism. Be honest: If I had never come in here and noticed that display, would it still be up?”

Chida hesitated for a moment then conceded, with a defeated look on his face, “It is possible.” But he denied that exposure to the materials sold at Halalco could inspire young Muslims to commit violence. This contradicted the testimony of Awlaki himself, who said of the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb's writings, which were also sold at Halalco, “Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day. I would be so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me ... speaking to me directly.”
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Halalco's displaying of Awlaki's CDs and DVDs was comparable to, say, a German-American restaurant peddling the speeches of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels during World War II. Yet according to Chida, selling Awlaki's sermons was just a way to make a few bucks—after all, “They were very good sellers.” To put it in perspective, that means that until CBN exposed Halalco, the recordings of a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist who has declared war on America were selling like hotcakes among northern Virginia's Muslim community—just minutes from Washington, D.C.

Mr. President, we have a problem.

In the course of my investigations, I've discovered that Islamist materials like those sold at Halalco are readily available in Islamic bookstores throughout the United States. Indeed, pop into your local Muslim shop in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Dearborn, Michigan, and you may be surprised at what you find. For our freaks and geeks, however, who are often a homebound, anti-social lot, nothing beats the convenience and anonymity of the Internet. How else can a homely white woman like Colleen LaRose, living in the rural suburbs of Philadelphia, communicate with jihadists around the world and become a terrorist recruiter?

The 46-year-old LaRose, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, is a far cry from the usual profile of an Islamic terrorist, at least on the surface. That fact, plus her U.S. citizenship and passport, was what made her so appealing to the jihadist movement. Going by the monikers “Jihad Jane” and “Fatima LaRose” in her online postings, LaRose is now in federal custody awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to providing material support to terrorists and other charges. Specifically, she recruited men and women in the United States, Europe, and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to her indictment. She also solicited funds for terrorists online—where she frequently contributed jihadist videos and messages
to YouTube and MySpace—and attempted to arrange the murder of Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had drawn a picture depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed's head on the body of a dog. With the encouragement of her online jihadi community, LaRose even traveled to Sweden herself to track Vilks in 2009.
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In perhaps the least surprising nugget to emerge in LaRose's case, authorities have investigated whether there was a link between her and Anwar al-Awlaki.
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It's unclear when Jihad Jane, who stands 4-feet-11-inches tall and weighs barely over 100 pounds, converted to Islam. But she had a troubled past. At the age of sixteen, LaRose, a junior high dropout, was briefly married to a 32-year-old man. She divorced and remarried, only to see her second marriage dissolve after ten years.
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During that time, she bounced around several Texas towns and was arrested for writing bad checks and driving while intoxicated.
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She eventually ended up living with a boyfriend in Pennsylvania where, depressed over her father's death, she tried to commit suicide in 2005.
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LaRose apparently buried herself in her computer not long after and became attracted to the jihadist cause online.

There, she made contact with another baggage-laden white woman who had drifted into the dark world of jihad. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez hailed from Leadville, Colorado, a tiny town in the Rocky Mountains where she worked as a medical assistant. By the time she was thirty-one years old, the tall, blue-eyed blonde had already been married four times and had a 6-year-old son who had no contact with his father. In spring 2009, Paulin-Ramirez, described by her mother as a “very insecure, unhappy person that was just looking for something to hang on to,” announced to her family that she had converted to Islam.
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She began spending more time on the computer and dressing in full Muslim garb that covered everything but her eyes. Then suddenly she disappeared, along with her young son, whom she now called “Wahid.” It seems that Colleen LaRose had invited Paulin-Ramirez online to join a terrorist training camp in Europe. Paulin-Ramirez agreed and traveled to Ireland, where she married an Algerian jihadi she'd met on the
Internet and became pregnant with his child. All this was no surprise to Paulin-Ramirez's brother, who later told a local television station, “Any man that came along in my sister's life, she kind of followed like a lost puppy.”
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Unfortunately, her newest squeeze was also a terrorist. On March 10, 2010, he and Paulin-Ramirez, along with five others, were arrested by Irish police in connection with a plot to kill Lars Vilks, whom Colleen LaRose had also targeted. As of this writing, Paulin-Ramirez is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

The lesson driven home by the Jihad Jane and Jihad Jamie cases, along with many others, is that Islamic terrorists are doubling their efforts to recruit disaffected, vulnerable, and quite possibly, mentally unstable U.S. citizens via the Internet. If these troubled outcasts are, say, two white, blonde-haired women like LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez who are capable of slipping detection in Western countries, even better. Had they not been lured in by Islamic extremism, the “Jihadi Chicks” likely would have found some other form of excitement among the endless array of choices presented in cyberspace. But they and a growing number of others like them have been seduced by the message of jihad—suckered in by online sweet talk and a sense of belonging, then quickly radicalized.

With each new arrest of an American Muslim terrorist, the Obama administration warns the American people that there is a growing threat posed by homegrown “violent extremists.” Yet the administration's main solution to this problem is reaching out to groups intimately connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's preeminent Islamic supremacist group, in hopes they will be a moderating force in America's Muslim communities. This suicidal strategy involves allowing Brotherhood-linked elements to build more mosques, which will only serve to radicalize more American Muslims, especially impressionable recent converts. Indeed,
other than pandering to the Brotherhood at home and other Islamist elements abroad and praising Islam at every available public opportunity, members of the Obama national security team are at a loss as to how to tackle the growing jihadist phenomenon.

Realistically, at the end of the day, there is probably little that can be done to prevent a downtrodden freak or geek from logging on to the Internet, stumbling upon a jihadist website, and being drawn in by an Anwar al-Awlaki sermon. The easy answer would be to continue to shut down jihadi websites wherever they are found, and to continue to monitor social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, as well as online chat rooms, that are utilized by terrorist recruiters. The more difficult answer is that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers will have to take a long, hard look at why a religion they've branded as peaceful, tolerant, and loving seems to attract so many violent, intolerant, and hateful individuals.

CHAPTER SIX

I
instantly decided not to sit by the window.

Saad al-Faqih—a man with suspected ties to Osama bin Laden and the global al-Qaeda network—had just informed me that he was being targeted in an assassination plot. And I was standing in his home.
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“You just missed the British authorities,” al-Faqih casually mentioned to my cameraman Ian and me as he led us into his living room. “They had stopped here to warn me about a plan to kidnap and kill me. The Saudis are behind it. It's not the first time.”

That would explain the “CCTV” signs dotting the exterior of al-Faqih's well-kept home, located in a quiet corner of northwest London. The signs were a warning to potential intruders that security cameras were monitoring their every move.

Al-Faqih had already informed us that, since we were with a Christian TV network, he would not appear on camera. Eying us suspiciously as we entered his home, he made clear from the outset that he was only speaking to us because a mutual contact had recommended us highly. The initial tension eventually eased, but not before al-Faqih left the room
twice to make phone calls. As my colleague and I overheard him speaking animatedly in Arabic, I envisioned us in a starring role in an al-Qaeda snuff video. But during the course of our nearly two-hour conversation with al-Faqih, jihadi gunmen never did burst through the door—although, judging by what I'd seen in London up until that point, I can't say I would have been surprised if they had.