Terror mosques in the US

Michael Ledeen:

Whatever we may think about Imam Rauf and his Manhattan project, sooner or later we are going to have to face a serious problem: what to do about the hundreds of radical mosques in this country. It’s a serious problem because, as Bernard Henri Levi wrote some years ago, every terrorist has a mosque. Indeed, some became terrorists because of what they were told in mosques. Many young, alienated Muslims found the meaning of life by joining jihad, and they were encouraged to become terrorists by radical imams and ayatollahs.

We in Greater Washington know a thing or two about this process, through the story of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church. The Center employed Imam Anwar Awlaki as its prayer leader from 2000 to 2002. Awlaki met privately with two of the 9/11 hijackers in closed-door meetings, and radicalized three American terrorists: the Fort Hood killer, Major Nidal Malik Hasan; the “Christmas Day bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; and the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. Now designated as a key member of al-Qaeda, Imam Awlaki is hiding in Yemen.

Take another local case: An Iranian-American imam named Muhammad al-Asi was for several years the head of the Muslim Community School and the Islamic Education Center in Potomac, Maryland. He was also briefly the imam at the Islamic Center of Washington. The Islamic Education Center distributes literature direct from Tehran, including the Ayatollah Khomeini’s celebrated death sentence on the novelist Salman Rushdie, and sells anti-Semitic tapes from Switzerland that praise Khomeini as a latter-day Hitler. Al-Asi has been honored at an official dinner in Tehran, with Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamene’i, presiding.

We’re not talking about a handful of mosques, and the schools associated with them. As of 9/11, there were at least 1,200. Most are radical. The American Sufi leader Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America to combat the influence of radical (Saudi) Wahhabis in the United States, testified at a State Department hearing that 80 percent of the nation’s mosques were under radical influence or outright control.

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When these guys cross the line from religion to preaching of hate and terror then they should expect to be criticized. Some political leaders think there should be some immunity from criticism for Muslims and their clerics, but when they engage in activity that is unacceptable, we should not be afraid to call them on it. Insulting those who do raise questions is not a way to create dialog on the issues.