Now we know why Tamerlan called the mosque he attended "too moderate."
That's like saying that Mussolini was too moderate. Compared with what?
Tamerlan was not talking about an American or Christian comparison.
The comparison was to his frame of reference. When a Muslim Brotherhood
mosque is too moderate it means that it is willing to make strategic
compromises in order to further Brotherhood objectives,
not that it is abandoning those objectives.
Billy
------------------------------------------
Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical tie
Oren Dorell ("USA Today," April 24, 2013)
BOSTON — The mosque attended by the two brothers accused in the Boston
Marathon double bombing has been associated with other terrorism suspects, has
invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated
with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to
extremism.
Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in
Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a
conviction of the mosque's first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection
with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.
Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston
Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A
former
trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays
as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on
Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and
Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques.
The head of the group is among critics who say the two mosques teach a
brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust
of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and
social values.
"We don't know where these boys were radicalized, but this mosque has a
curriculum that radicalizes people. Other people have been radicalized there,"
said the head of the group, Charles Jacobs.
Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural
Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be
blamed for the acts of a few worshipers.
"If there were really any worry about us being extreme," Vali said, U.S.
law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and
Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the
Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four
years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach
programs in the Muslim community.
The Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned
by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge
mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the Boston
mosque.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, attended the
Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of setting two bombs that killed
three people and injured at least 264 others at the April 15 Boston Marathon.
The FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal
activity, but mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in
terrorist activity:
• Alamoudi, who signed the articles of incorporation as the Cambridge
mosque's president, was sentenced to 23 years in federal court in Alexandria,
Va., in 2004 for his role as a facilitator in what federal prosecutors called
a Libyan assassination plot against then-crown prince Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia. Abdullah is now the Saudi king.
• Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was
arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and
plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while
in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she
was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.
• Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in
2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had
traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic
weapons
to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston
alleged.
• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim
American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as
Mehanna's co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges
of
providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a
foreign country.
• Jamal Badawi of Canada, a former trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston
Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indicted co-conspirator
in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in Texas over the
funneling of money to Hamas, which is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
What both mosques have in common is an affiliation with the Muslim American
Society, an organization founded in 1993 that describes itself as an
American Islamic revival movement. It has also been described by federal
prosecutors in court as the "overt arm" of the Muslim Brotherhood, which calls
for
Islamic law and is the parent organization of Hamas, a U.S.-designated
terrorist group.
Critics say the Muslim American Society promotes a fraught relationship
with the United States, expressed in part by the pattern discussed by
Americans for Progress and Tolerance in which adherents are made to feel cut
off
from their home country and to identify with a global Islamist political
community rather than with America.
Zhudi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said
the radical teachings often follow a theme of recitation of grievances that
Islam has with the West, advocacy against U.S. foreign policy and terrorism
prosecutions, and efforts "to evangelize Islam in order to improve Western
society that is secularized," he says.
Jasser, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and author of the 2012 book A Battle for
the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot Fights to Save His Faith,
says the teachings make some followers feel "like their national identity is
completely absent and hollow, and that vacuum can be filled by (radical)
Islamic ideology, which is supremacist and looks upon the West as evil."
The Cambridge mosque was founded in 1982 by students at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Harvard and several other Boston-area schools,
according to a profile by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Its
members founded the sister mosque in Boston in 2009.
The leadership of the two mosques is intertwined, and the ideology they
teach is the same, Jacobs said. Ilya Feoktistov, director of research at
Americans for Peace and Tolerance, said much of the money to create the Boston
mosque came not from local Muslims but from foreign sources.
More than half of the $15.5 million used to found the Boston mosque came
from Saudi sources, Feoktistov said, who cites financial documents that
Jacobs' group obtained when the mosque sued it for defamation. The lawsuit was
later dropped.
Vali said that the vast majority of total donors were in the United States
and that "no donations were accepted if the donor wanted to have any
decision-making influence (even if benign)."
Vali characterized Americans for Peace and Tolerance and its founder,
Jacobs, as anti-Muslim activists who spread "lies and half-truths in order to
attack and marginalize much of the local Muslim community and many of its
institutions."
"It's the new McCarthyism in full swing," he said.
Sheik Basyouny Nehela, the imam of the Cambridge mosque, which is located
across the Charles River from Boston, is on the board of directors for the
Muslim American Society of Boston, which runs the Boston mosque. The
Tsarnaevs attended the Cambridge mosque.
A statement issued by the Cambridge mosque said the Tsarnaev brothers were
"occasional visitors." The mosque's office manager, Nichole Mossalam, said
neither brother expressed radical views. "They never exhibited any violent
sentiments or behaviors. Otherwise, they would have been reported,"
Mossalam said.
The Cambridge mosque said Tsarnaev, 26, who died Thursday night in a
shootout with police, "disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology"
of
the mosque. Tsarnaev challenged an imam who said in his sermon that it was
appropriate to celebrate U.S. national holidays and was told to stop such
outbursts, the mosque said in a statement.
Talal Eid, a Muslim chaplain at Brandeis University, said focusing on
individual radicals that prayed in a building is unfair.
"In 2011, the two brothers were right under the nose of the FBI and they
didn't find anything," Eid said, who never met the Tsarnaevs. "How do you
want me as an imam to know enough to tell them they are not welcome here? How
can I figure out those people have that kind of criminal intent?"
The Muslim American Society says on its website that it is independent of
the Muslim Brotherhood. However, early Brotherhood literature is considered
"the foundational texts for the intellectual component for Islamic work in
America," the website states.
Jacobs says claims of moderate Islam do not square with the mosque's
classic jihadi texts in its library and its hosting of radical speakers.
Jacobs said Ahmed Mansour, his co-director at Americans for Peace and
Tolerance, found writings by Syed Qutb, the former leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, and other jihadi texts at the Cambridge mosque's library
when Mansour went there in 2003. Qutb pioneered the radical violent ideology
espoused by al-Qaeda.
Yusuf al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who espouses
radical views in videos collected by Jacobs' group, was listed as a trustee on
the Cambridge mosque's IRS filings until 2000, and on the mosque's website
until 2003, when he addressed congregants via recorded video message to
raise money for the Boston mosque, according to a screenshot of the
announcement that Feoktistov provided.
Vali said Qaradawi was listed as an honorary trustee years ago only because
his scholarship and high esteem in Muslim circles would help with
fundraising.
Yasir Qadhi, who lectured at the Boston mosque in April 2009, has advocated
replacing U.S. democracy with Islamic rule and called Christians "filthy"
polytheists whose "life and prosperity … holds no value in the state of
Jihad," according to a video obtained by Jacobs' group.
Vali said Qadhi was a guest of a non-profit organization that was renting
space at the Boston mosque and has changed his views since that video was
made.
Jacobs and others say it is not only renters who express sympathetic views
for terrorists. Leaders of the Boston and Cambridge mosques, and invited
guests, have advocated on behalf of convicted terrorists, urging followers to
seek their release or lenient sentences.
Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, sometimes a spokesman for the Boston mosque, used
Siddiqui's case to speak against the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law
passed under the George W. Bush administration. "After they're done with
(Siddiqui), they are going to come to your door if they feel like it," he
said, according to a video obtained by Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
Anwar Kazmi, a member of the Cambridge mosque's board of trustees, called
for leniency for Mehanna and Siddiqui at a Boston rally in February 2012, in
a video posted to YouTube. He characterized Siddiqui's 86-year sentence as
excessive.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Kazmi insisted that the Cambridge mosque is
moderate and condemns the marathon bombings. On Monday, the mosque
e-mailed members to caution them that the FBI may question them and that they
may
want to seek representation.
"This kind of violence, terrorism, it's just completely contrary to the
spirit of Islam," Kasmi said. "The words in the Quran say if anybody kills
even a single human being without just cause, it's as if you've killed all of
humanity."
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