Melvin Bledsoe on the Radicalization of His Son

The following is from an ACT! for America email. This is the testimony of Melvin Bledsoe. He explains how his son (who Muslimized his name to Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad) become a dedicated orthodox Muslim, waging jihad against his fellow Americans, and how this transformation started right here in the heart of America: A Nashville, Tennessee mosque.

Committee on Homeland Security: US House of Representatives, Washington DC, March 10, 2011. Testimony of Melvin Bledsoe:

Thank you very much for allowing me to come here and tell the country what happened to my son. This hearing today is extremely important to begin the discussion about the issue of Islamic radicalization in America and my hope is that this Committee can somehow address this issue in a meaningful, productive way.

First, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the family of Private William Long, and to the wounded soldier, Quinton Ezeagwula. I would like to talk about those complicit in Private Long’s murder – the Islamic radicals who programmed and trained my son Carlos to kill.

I want to tell the American people and the world what happened to my son. We sent him off to college at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee in the fall of 2003. Our dreams about his future ended up in a nightmare.

Carlos is my only son. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My wife and I operate a tour company in Memphis, Tennessee and Carlos started helping out with the family business at the age of eight. He loved talking to the traveling public; and he had a lot of fun interacting with the customers.

After graduating from high school, he wanted to get a degree in Business Administration. We thought perhaps he would come back to Memphis to run the business and give my wife and me early retirement.

After the fall of 2005 – his sophomore fall in Nashville –Carlos came home that Christmas for the holidays.

We were sitting around in the family room, Carlos’s only sister, Monica, her husband and I, having a normal conversation about life in general. But at a certain point, Carlos and his brother-in-law Terrell got into a heated conversation about the Muslim religion. Then and later, we felt like Carlos’s personality changed when we spoke about Islam. We thought maybe he had some Muslim friends in college and was offended by our comments.

The next time Carlos came home, we saw another side of him that we hadn't seen before. During the night, he took down all the pictures from the walls in the bedroom where he slept. He even took Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. picture off the wall. We asked Carlos: "What is going on with you?”

He replied that he is now a new convert to Islam and that everything he does from now on will be to honor Allah. We got very concerned: While he was growing up, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s picture had always hung on his bedroom wall; but now treated the picture as if Dr. King was nobody to him.

We asked Carlos not to take Dr. King's picture off the wall, but he took it off the wall anyway. This became a big concern to us. We went to visit him in Nashville because we wanted to learn more about what was really going on with Carlos.

We discovered that Carlos had dropped out of school, at the beginning of the 2005 fall semester. He was working a temporary job. He had gotten a dog while in college, and now we found out that he had turned the dog loose in the woods because he was told that Muslims consider dogs dirty creatures. I really couldn't understand how he could do that, because Carlos grew up with a dog in the house since he was five years old.

So my wife and I thought that there something or someone was getting in his head and changing the way he thinks. It had gotten to the point where he had no interest in coming home, even for the holidays.

All of this was part of brainwashing him, and changing his thinking a little bit at a time. He had a job in Nashville, together with some Muslims, who would tell him that according to Islamic law, his employer had to let him pray at certain times of the day, regardless of what was going on at the job. As a business owner, I told Carlos that it would be very difficult for an employer to do this for all of his employees.

As the next step on his process of radicalization, Carlos was convinced to change his name. He chose the name Abdulhakim Muhammad. At this point, his culture was no longer important to him, only the Islamic culture mattered.

Some Muslim leaders had taken advantage of my son. But he’s not the only one being taken advantage of: this is going on in Nashville and in many other cities in America.

In Nashville, Carlos was captured by people best described as hunters. He was manipulated and lied to. That’s how he made his way to Yemen. Carlos was hoping to go there for a chance to cross over to Saudi Arabia and visit Mecca, as he was taught all true Muslims must do at one time in their life. He was taught that he would get to walk on the ground where Prophet Muhammad walked be able to travel around the area. But these hunters had other plans for him. They set him up, telling him that he could teach English at a British School in Aden in South Yemen, This school turned out to be a front and Carlos ended up in a training camp run by terrorists.

Carlos’s joining in with Yemeni extremists was facilitated by their American counterparts in Nashville. We have since discovered that the former Imam of a Nashville mosque, the Al Farooq Mosque, wrote the recommendation letter Carlos needed for the school in Yemen. We also discovered that the school functions as an intake front for radicalizing and training Westerners for Jihad.

From what I understand, the FBI had been following Carlos since before he left Nashville and continued to do so after he came back from Yemen. When Carlos was arrested for overstaying his visa in October of 2008, he was interviewed by an FBI agent based in Nashville even before the U.S. Embassy was alerted about the arrest. According to the Embassy, the FBI was alarmed about what they learned from Carlos.

We wish they could have told us - his family – about what they learned. If we knew how serious his extremism had become, we could have put in every effort to prevent the tragedy in Arkansas from happening.

When my son was arrested in Yemen, my family cried out for help in bringing our son back to America from our Government. We got in touch with the U.S. Embassy and the State Department. We also asked for help from our U.S. Representative, Steve Cohen’s office, and from FBI Special Agent Greg Thomason, who had been tracking my son since Nashville.

After our son was finally released and brought home to us. No one said anything to us about what might have happened to him in Yemen or what they may have learned that so alarmed the FBI agent who interrogated Carlos while he was in the custody of Yemen’s Political Security Organization.

Carlos’s experience in Yemeni political jail was the final stage of his radicalization. He was in there with true evil-doers – hard-core Al Qaeda members who convinced him to get revenge on America.

Something is wrong with the Muslim leadership in Nashville. What happened to Carlos at those Nashville mosques isn’t normal. I have other family members who are Muslims, and they are modern, peaceful, law abiding people, who have been Muslim for many years and are not radicalized.

I also have several uncles and brothers in the military. Our family has fought for the United States in every war since the Civil War. I have nephews who are currently in Afghanistan, as I speak, fighting for democracy and freedom for all Americans.

It seems to me that the American people are sitting around and doing nothing about Islamic extremism, as if Carlos’s story and the other stories told at these hearings aren’t true. There is a big elephant in the room, but our society continues not to see it.

This wrong is caused by political correctness. You can even call it political fear - yes, fear. Fear of stepping on a special minority population’s toes, even as a segment of that population wants to stamp out America and everything we stand for.

I must say that we are losing American babies – our children are in danger. This country must stand up and do something about this problem. Yes, it’s my son’s tragic story you’re hearing about today, but tomorrow it could be your son or your daughter. It might be an African-American child that they went after in Nashville, but tomorrow their victim might have blonde hair and blue eyes. One thing is for sure, it will happen again.

We must stop these extremist invaders from raping the minds of American citizens on American soil. Here in America today, there are people with radical Islamic political views who are organizing with one goal in mind: to convert our citizens and to turn them against the non-believers. This is a big problem now in Nashville, on college campuses and in the nearby area. Nashville has become a hot bed for radical Islamic recruiting.

Carlos grew up a happy-go-lucky kid. He always had a big smile on his face, and loved to crack a joke or two. Everyone liked him. He loved to play team sports like basketball and football. He loved swimming, dancing, and listening to music.

Today we have two families that have been destroyed. This could have been prevented. I would like to see something change so that no other family in this great country of ours has to go through what our family is facing now.

GOD HELP US! GOD HELP US!

No First Amendment Right to Build Mosques

IN AN ARTICLE on the Canada Free Press, Publius Huldah wrote:

We are told Muslims have a “First Amendment right” to build mosques, proselytize, and implement shariah here. But is that what the First Amendment says? No! Let’s read it:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment doesn’t grant any rights to anybody! All it does is prohibit CONGRESS from making laws about religion, speech, the press, or assembly!

So Muslims do not have a “First Amendment right” to build mosques, proselytize, and implement shariah here.

No New Mosques

The following was written by Kinana Nadir, originally from the UK:

All non-Muslim countries should prevent the building of any new Mosques until that time we are assured that what is being taught inside them are not a threat to the values and liberties of the country.

Everyone knows that mosques facilitate the teachings of Islam and therefore the promotion of Sharia law. This outcome and these efforts must be rejected by all lovers of freedom. Until we see an Islam that totally rejects the teaching of the domination of Muslims over Non-Muslims, and rejects Sharia law we must error on the side of caution and reject all new applications for new mosques.

However, opposition to new mosques should not be seen as an attack on Muslims. I make no judgment on them, but the public have an obligation to look at the larger picture and so too do local and central government when deciding applications for new mosques. The proper authorities, entrusted to look at the needs of the community, need to consider the role of Islam in light of history and a wider geography. If such a view is taken, a very disturbing role of the mosque in the life of communities emerges. Islam is a belief system with an international following and therefore a decision cannot be based solely on local conditions or only on recent local historical evidence. Such myopia would be negligence.

I would like to share two quotes by people who know a thing or two about Islam.

“Mehrab [or Mosque] means [a] place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the Mosques, wars should proceed. Just as all the wars of Islam proceeded out of the Mosques. The prophet had [a] sword to kill people. Our Holy Imams were quite militant. All of them were warriors. They used to wield swords. They used to kill people. We need a Caliph who would chop hands, cut throats, stone people. In the way that the messenger of Allah used to chop hands, cut throats, and stone people.”

This quote is from Ayatollah Khomeini, 1981, on the commemoration of the birth of Mohammed.

The second quote is from the Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan who publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and Muslims our soldiers…”

Those who look favorably on a new mosque in their community should remember these quotes and feel the chill its shadow will cast on present and future generations.

These ideas are also expressed in two recent (April and July 2010) speeches by the English Defence League here and here.

Freedom of Religion and the Ground Zero Mosque

MANY PEOPLE believe the question of whether the Ground Zero mosque ought to be allowed or not is a very simple question. This is America and we have a guaranteed freedom of religion. But as I was explaining to someone, this is not as simple as it seems. Here are the facts:

1. The First Ammendment guarantees freedom of religion.

2. Islam is legally considered a religion.

3. A fundamental part of Islam is the political goal of bringing every person on earth under the rule of Islamic law (Sharia).

4. That political goal, and the way this goal is pursued in most mosques in the United States, falls under the definition of sedition.

5. Sedition is illegal.

So which law should we follow? Should freedom of religion be protected? Or should sedition laws trump that right? Which is more important, freedom of religion or the survival of a government that guarantees freedom of religion?

If we had to choose, which would we choose? If we didn't have to choose, what alternatives could we pursue? Monitoring mosques? Does that violate the freedom of religion?

I believe in freedom of religion. But what do we do with a political ideology that promotes the sabotage of our government? Should a political ideology that encourages sedition be protected by the freedom of religion?

Mosques and CAIR Controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood

From an article entitled Islamist Infiltration:

In 1980, there were 481 officially recognized Mosques in the United States. Today, there are 1,209, with an estimated 80 percent of those funded and controlled by Saudi Arabia, where the official religion is virulently anti-Western Wahhabi Islam.

Sperry and Gaubatz’s "Muslim Mafia" exposes the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America using declassified FBI documents, FBI agent interviews, transcripts of telephone wire taps and thousands of internal documents smuggled out of CAIR headquarters by Gaubatz’s son, Chris Gaubatz, who posed as an American convert to Islam and was hired by CAIR. They demonstrate that the Brotherhood is now a worldwide central clearinghouse for virtually all Sunni terrorist groups, is operating inside U.S. mosques across the country and is in complete control of CAIR and its myriad subsidiaries.

What Does Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Believe In?

From an article by Robert Spencer entitled Closed for Business:

Amid all the controversy surrounding the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque set to be constructed at Ground Zero, virtually everyone has ignored the question of what will be taught there. Yet mega-mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an open advocate for Islamic law (Sharia) – and has never bothered to rule out the aspects of that law that deny the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience, and that mandate the subjugation of women and non-Muslims as inferiors. He even calls for restrictions on the freedom of speech in his book What’s Right with Islam. Rauf has, moreover, refused to denounce Hamas. He has lied about his commitment to religious dialogue. He has lied about whether the Islamic center planned for the Ground Zero site will contain a mosque or not. And he has lied about whether or not the project is getting foreign funding. He is involved with a group that helped fund the jihad flotilla against Israel.

All this duplicity makes the universal designation of Rauf as a “moderate,” whose mega-mosque at Ground Zero will preach a benign, peaceful form of Islam that directly contradicts the Islam of the 9/11 plotters, curious in the extreme. While he may appear to be worlds apart from Mamoun Darkazanli, given his dishonesty it is not unreasonable to ask whether the difference between the two imams is more one of degree than of kind, and whether they share an overall goal but differ only as to the means to attain that goal.

If this is not the case, Rauf could dispel suspicions easily by coming clean about his sources of funding for the mega-mosque, and definitively renouncing the elements of Sharia that are incompatible with American freedoms and values, as well as American law – and showing his sincerity in deeds as well as words. That he is not making any move to do anything like that, but instead encourages the vilification of opponents of the Ground Zero mega-mosque as racists and bigots, is not a mark in his favor, and only serves further to arouse the suspicion of free and clear-sighted Americans.

Ultimately, if the Ground Zero mega-mosque is built and becomes a center for the propagation of Sharia in the United States, it could end up being as influential and as malignant a place as the mosque that was shut down Monday in Hamburg – even if it pursues, as does Rauf, non-violent rather than violent means to weaken Western societies and spread Sharia in the West.

The Uses of Mosques

From an article by Robert Spencer entitled Closed for Business:

Authorities in Hamburg, Germany announced that they had finally shut down the Taiba mosque, which as the Al-Quds mosque in 2001 was a meeting place for several of the 9/11 jihad terrorists.

The Hamburg mosque was not singular. In recent years mosques have been used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the United States) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and much more.

The record of mosques in the United States is not much better. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: “The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques,” he said, “that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it.”

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005, saying that 80% of the mosques in this country “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence.” The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 a massive distribution of hateful jihadist and Islamic supremacist material in mosques in this country. And in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of “polytheists."

An Indian on the Ground Zero Mosque

Hindu human rights activist, native of India, Professor Babu Suseelan said:

“I was born in the largest democracy in the world, and we lost half of our land, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, that were once majority Hindu. Now we lost it and it became Muslim majority. What did the Muslims do with the Hindus living in their countries? They slaughtered them. They completely wiped them out.

I read the Koran. Read the Koran if you want to understand the terroristic doctrine and criminal treatise on the world. Of all the Koran, there are 164 specific verses instigating directly muslims to go against the kaffir and the infidel and conduct terrorism to wipe them out. It is surprising, they claim it is a religious book. But in their religious book, there is not a single word about love. I cannot understand in the Koran you read the entire words, you will not see the word ‘love’. Islamic religion is not a religion of love and compassion it is a criminal treatise for hostility, anger, violence and terrorism against infidels.

There were only 10 Mosques in New York City in 1970. There were over 100 in 2001, including 17 in Manhattan. There is no reason to allow construction of a 15 stories Mosque at Ground Zero. Muslims paid $4.85 million in cash for the property. Islamic leaders have not explained to the public where the cash came from. It is reported that the funding came from Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Iran, the leading promoters of Islamism around the world.

There are nearly 57 Islamic countries in the world. Is there any Islamic country where Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus can build their religious centers?"

Saudi Arabia's Funding of American Mosques

THE FOLLOWING are excerpts from an article entitled, Al Qaeda, Other Terror Groups Swim in Global Sea of Saudi-Funded Wahhabi Institutions:

Today, it has been estimated that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi influence, described by both scholars and U.S. officials as a radical, violent philosophical platform used by terrorists and their supporters to justify violence against Christians, Jews and other "non-believers."

American officials have described as a Wahhabism, known as an intolerant, ascetic movement, was developed by theologian Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab in the 18th century to purge what he saw as corrupting influences and return Islam to its original orthodoxy.

In 2006, Bernard Lewis, arguably the leading western scholar on Islam, called Wahhabism "the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam."

As to how much money Saudi officials have spent since the early 1970s to promote Wahhabism worldwide, David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, told a Senate committee in June 2004 that estimates went "north of $75 billion." The money financed the construction of thousands of mosques, schools and Islamic centers, the employment of at least 9,000 proselytizers and the printing of millions of books of religious instruction.

According to a major investigation by Washington Post reporter David B. Ottaway published on August 19, 2004, the Saudi government's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Call and Guidance pays the salaries of 3,884 Wahhabi missionaries and preachers, who are six times as numerous as the 650 diplomats in Saudi Arabia's 77 embassies.

Saleh Sheik, a direct descendant of Ibn Abdul Wahab, leads the ministry - the most important Saudi institution for exporting Wahhabism.

Sheik estimated the Islamic affairs ministry's budget at $530 million annually and said it goes almost entirely to pay the salaries of the more than 50,000 people on the ministry payroll, Ottaway reported. That figure does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars in personal contributions made by King Fahd and other senior Saudi princes to the cause of propagating Islam at home and abroad, according to a Saudi analyst who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The real total spent annually spreading Islam is between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, he said.

Eighty percent of major mosques in America are under Saudi-Wahhabi influence, according to Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, an organization that "challenges the dominance of American Muslim life by militant Islamist groups" including control of property, buildings, training and appointment of imams, content of preaching, literature distributed in mosques and charitable solicitation.

Most of the Wahhabi mosques work closely with Saudi state funded organizations such as the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Association for Muslim Youth (WAMY), institutions identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda. The Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a main Wahhabi ideological institution in America with a well-documented network of support for radical Islam, has received at least $750,000 from the Saudi government and its officials, including a donation by the Islamic Development Bank, a Saudi government-controlled financial institution, to purchase their headquarters in Washington D.C.

According to Schwartz's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003, the official Saudi government website stated in 2000, "In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia."

The Kingdom is also affiliated with the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School and the King Fahd mosque, both in California, according to Nina Shea in her 2005 Freedom House Report "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques". Shea, an international human-rights lawyer, is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. Additionally, the previously-mentioned official website of the Saudi Arabian government reported a donation of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure whose works influenced Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab. In his testimony, Schwartz estimated that the Saudis have spent a minimum of $324 million on Islamic institutions in America by 2003.

The Saudi influence in America is far from benign. "From Islamic centers to student associations, from relief organizations to bookstores, an ideology committed to the destruction of Western civilization is being offered as the only solution to the plight of the ummah [Islamic nation]," Epstein testified. The materials that the Kingdom has distributed to American schools and mosques in particular, have been proven to be pro-jihad, anti-Semitic, and anti-American. "In thousands of public school districts across the United States, without ever knowing it, taxpayers pay to disseminate pro-Islamic materials that are anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish… teaching programs funded by Saudi Arabia make their way into elementary and secondary school classrooms," a 2005 Jewish Telegraphic Agency staff report "What Your Kids are Learning about Israel, America and Islam," noted.

Saudi-Provided Texts Full of Hate

In the Freedom House report, materials found in mosques across America have been shown to be virulent and hate-filled. A book found in the King Fahd mosque, distributed by the Saudi embassy in Washington D.C., and published by the Saudi government, read: "Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law." A recurring theme is the idea that a peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims is impossible. A Saudi-government text for tenth-grade students entitled "Science of Tawheed", copies of which were obtained at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, teaches that if a Muslim "thinks it is permissible to be under their [infidels] control, and he is pleased with the way they are, then there is no doubt that he is no longer a Muslim."

Democracy in particular is demonized in Wahhabi ideology. In one book published in Riyadh by the Al-Nahawi Printing House, collected by Freedom House from the Abu Bakr Mosque in San Diego, it is written, "Satan and his soldiers have found a home for themselves there… Democracy is in need of someone to save it from itself." In order to rectify the evils of democracy, the Wahhabi American mosques advocate for jihad and terror, teaching that, "[we] will pursue this evil force [modernist civilization] to its own lands, invade its Western heartland, and struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more 'persecution' and all religion will be exclusively for Allah…" That quote comes from "To Be a Muslim", published by Saudi Arabia's International Islamic Publishing House and collected from the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston.

The hate-filled materials distributed by "American mosques and…spread, sponsored or otherwise generated by Saudi Arabia…demonstrates the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia's hard-line Wahhabi sect of Islam" Shea noted.

"The vision of Islam defeating and subjugating the west is a major element in the appeal of the jihadists, supported by the Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, to their mostly-young followers around the world," Schwartz said in an interview.

The cases of American Islamist terrorists are "incidents that reflect the general tone in the Muslim community, and they have been here, and dominant, through the 1980s and 1990s," stated Schwartz. John Walker Lindh (a California native convicted of aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan), the Lackawanna Six (a group of six American citizens convicted of materially supporting al Qaeda), Iyman Faris (an American citizen born in Kashmir, discovered to be plotting an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge), Jose Padilla (a Brooklyn native known as the "dirty bomber" designated an "enemy combatant" by the Justice Department), Hassan Akbar (a Los Angeles native convicted of killing two fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2003), and Adam Yahiye Gadahn (the American-born English-language spokesman for al-Qaeda), have revealed an unpleasant truth. As Schwartz said, "Jihadist ideology in American Islam was financed by Saudi Arabia…Wahhabi and related Pakistani and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda is the basis of it… The money comes from Saudi, the preachers from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and various Arab states, and the donations go to Hamas. That is life in institutional American Islam today," declared Schwartz.

In a speech by Mark Steyn, he said (when answering a question) Canadian Mounties did a survey of Canadian imams. It found 85 percent of the imams in Canadian mosques were "hardcore radical jihadists."

Eighty Percent of Mosques Preach Extremist Ideology

In testimony before the U.S. State Department in 1999, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, affirmed most of the mosques in the U.S. are run by extremists.

"We would like to advise our government, our congressmen, that there is something big going on and people do not understand it," he said. "You have many mosques around the United States...So the most dangerous things are going on in these mosques that have self appointed leaders throughout the United States. The extremist ideology makes them very active. We can say that they took over 80 per cent of the mosques in the United States...This means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to the youth and the new generation." Source

The Mapping Sharia Project sent trained people into mosques in the U.S. to find out how many of them are calling for jihad against America. They discovered that the majority of the mosques they've investigated so far do, in fact, promote jihad against America, in the Friday "sermons" (known as "khutbah") and in the literature available at the mosques.

In a speech by Mark Steyn, he said (when answering a question) Canadian Mounties did a survey of Canadian imams. It found 85 percent of the imams in Canadian mosques were "hardcore radical jihadists."

Saudi Arabia's oil wealth enables it to control around 90% of the world's Islamic institutions (source), and the Saudis promote hardcore, fundamentalist Islam. They pay for these mosques because it gives them control over what is taught and promoted at the mosques. Read more about this.

Authorities in Hamburg, Germany announced that they had finally shut down the Taiba mosque, which as the Al-Quds mosque in 2001 was a meeting place for several of the 9/11 jihad terrorists.

The Hamburg mosque was not singular. In recent years mosques have been used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the United States) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and much more.

The record of mosques in the United States is not much better. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: “The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques,” he said, “that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it.”

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005, saying that 80% of the mosques in this country “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence.” The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 a massive distribution of hateful jihadist and Islamic supremacist material in mosques in this country. And in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of “polytheists."

The Symbology of Mosques

IN AN article entitled, The Mosques of War, Victor Sharpe wrote:

And it is in one abiding respect that this endless spiritual and temporal conflict is seen in its most practical and historical context — the conversion of places of worship into mosques.

The result has been that since the time of Muhammad, synagogues, churches, Hindu temples, Zoroastrian temples, and pagan shrines have been all too often violently converted into mosques.

After the conquest of Mecca in the year 630, Muhammad transformed the Black Stone in the Ka'aba, which ancient pagan Arabs had worshiped, into the paramount Islamic holy place. It became known as the Masjid al-Haram, or Sacred Mosque.

During the Arab invasions of neighboring lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, under the new banner of Islam, numerous synagogues and churches were converted into mosques. In Damascus, Syria, the church of St. John is now known as the Umayyad Mosque. Also in Syria, the mosque of Job was originally a church.

The Islamic tide swept into Egypt, and many Christian Coptic churches were converted into mosques. From North Africa, the conquests continued into Spain and Portugal, where again churches were converted into mosques. Interestingly, many churches had been built upon the sites of earlier Roman temples. But during the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies — the Reconquista — these same mosques were reconverted into churches.

In Gaza, the Great Mosque of Gaza was originally a Christian church. In Turkey, the Hagia Sophia Church was converted in 1453 into a mosque and remained so until 1935, when it became a museum. Indeed, the Ottoman Turks converted into mosques practically all churches and monasteries in the territories they conquered.

The most well-known mosques, built upon previous non-Muslim holy sites, are the Al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, also built upon the site of the two biblical Jewish Temples.

There are four holy cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Hebron is the second-holiest city, and in it is the burial place of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, known as the Cave of Machpela, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah are buried.

Herod the Great constructed an enclosure for the burial site. During the later Christian Byzantine period, a church was built upon the site, but this was destroyed in 614 by the Persians. Later, the Arab-Muslim invaders built a mosque in its place.

Jews were not permitted to worship at their nearly-four-thousand-year-old holy place by the Muslim Arabs. They could only ascend to the seventh step leading to the tombs. Indeed, they were refused this right as a place of worship from the 7th century until 1967, when Israel liberated the territory from the Jordanian occupiers. Even before the Israeli liberation, a horrifying massacre of Jewish residents in Hebron by their Arab Moslem neighbors took place in 1929 while under the British Mandate of the geographical territory known as Palestine.

Prior to the present-day Palestinian Authority assuming control of the city of Nablus, which was the ancient biblical Jewish city of Shechem, the Tomb of Joseph, the biblical figure, was a place of Jewish pilgrimage. When it was handed over to the PA, as one of seemingly endless Israeli concessions, the tomb was desecrated by a Moslem mob, which proceeded to convert it into a mosque.

On the Indian subcontinent, Hindu temples were similarly converted into mosques. Lately, Hindu nationalists have reconverted some mosques into temples, and, as in so many other parts of the world, considerable bitterness exists between Moslems and members of other faiths or those of no faith.

Mosques now occupy vast numbers of places of worship for other faiths. In Algeria, the Great Synagogue of Oran is now a mosque after the Jewish population was driven from Algeria. Many other synagogues throughout the Arab world are now mosques from after the Jewish inhabitants were expelled.

In the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, many Greek Orthodox churches in northern Cyprus were converted into mosques. And the process continues.

Saudi Arabia invests endless billions of dollars to build mosques throughout the world. The international blanketing of cities with mosques is just another expression of jihad.

Read the whole article: The Mosques of War.

Fairness Toward Saudi Arabia

THE FOLLOWING IS a comment made by Bhigr on this article:

Well, at least we could stop any Saudi money financing mosques or schools in our countries until the Saudis reciprocate, i.e. allow the building of houses of worship in their country. Unless they grant equal rights to all citizens regardless of religion, they shall not promote their religion in our countries.

This is what they preach in Saudi schools:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,994052,00.html

http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-02/20/article06.shtml

This is tit for tat, one of the most basic principles of sound human relations of every kind.

The Problem With Mosques

IN AN ARTICLE in FrontPage Magazine entitled, Closed For Business, about a mosque in Germany that has recently been closed by the government, Robert Spencer describes some of the ways mosques are being used. The mosque in Germany was shut down because,

"young men were being turned into religious fanatics there. Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war. Hamburg cannot become a cradle for Islamists capable of violence," said Christoph Ahlhaus, Hamburg's secretary of the interior.

The article continues...

In recent years mosques have been used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the United States) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists ; and much more.

The record of mosques in the United States is not much better. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: "The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques," he said, "that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States - like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok - but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it."

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005, saying that 80% of the mosques in this country "have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence." The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 a massive distribution of hateful jihadist and Islamic supremacist material in mosques in this country. And in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of "polytheists."

Amid all the controversy surrounding the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque set to be constructed at Ground Zero, virtually everyone has ignored the question of what will be taught there. Yet mega-mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an open advocate for Islamic law (Sharia) - and has never bothered to rule out the aspects of that law that deny the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience, and that mandate the subjugation of women and non-Muslims as inferiors...

These ways of using mosques are "pure Sunna" as Bill Warner would say. That is, they are in keeping with the way Mohammad himself used mosques. And as it says 91 times in the Quran, Islam's most holy book, a Muslim should and MUST pattern his life after Mohammad's.

What to do if the Mosque at Ground Zero is Built

A COMMENT on the article, A mosque by any other name: Ground Zero mega-mosque group ditches name redolent of Islamic supremacism, said this:

In the unfortunate event this mosque project goes through, since Imam Rauf claims to want interfaith dialogue, perhaps non-Muslims should pour into this place daily to the point of outnumbering the adherents to Sharia.

If he wants interfaith dialogue, then Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. should all expect the same benefits and privileges as anyone else who enters the dwelling, and should practice their respective religion while inside it.

If Rauf is what he says he is, he should have no problem with that, right? Play for keeps.

Mosques as Symbols of Conquest and Dominance

THE FOLLOWING is from an article by Victor Sharpe entitled, Mosques of War:

Since the time of Muhammad, synagogues, churches, Hindu temples, Zoroastrian temples, and pagan shrines have been all too often violently converted into mosques.

After the conquest of Mecca in the year 630, Muhammad transformed the Black Stone in the Ka'aba, which ancient pagan Arabs had worshiped, into the paramount Islamic holy place. It became known as the Masjid al-Haram, or Sacred Mosque.

During the Arab invasions of neighboring lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, under the new banner of Islam, numerous synagogues and churches were converted into mosques. In Damascus, Syria, the church of St. John is now known as the Umayyad Mosque. Also in Syria, the mosque of Job was originally a church.

The Islamic tide swept into Egypt, and many Christian Coptic churches were converted into mosques. From North Africa, the conquests continued into Spain and Portugal, where again churches were converted into mosques. Interestingly, many churches had been built upon the sites of earlier Roman temples. But during the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies — the Reconquista — these same mosques were reconverted into churches.

In Gaza, the Great Mosque of Gaza was originally a Christian church. In Turkey, the Hagia Sophia Church was converted in1453 into a mosque and remained so until 1935, when it became a museum. Indeed, the Ottoman Turks converted into mosques practically all churches and monasteries in the territories they conquered.

The most well-known mosques, built upon previous non-Muslim holy sites, are the Al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, also built upon the site of the two biblical Jewish Temples.

There are four holy cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Hebron is the second-holiest city, and in it is the burial place of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, known as the Cave of Machpela, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah are buried.

Herod the Great constructed an enclosure for the burial site. During the later Christian Byzantine period, a church was built upon the site, but this was destroyed in 614 by the Persians. Later, the Arab-Muslim invaders built a mosque in its place.

Jews were not permitted to worship at their nearly-four-thousand-year-old holy place by the Muslim Arabs. They could only ascend to the seventh step leading to the tombs. Indeed, they were refused this right as a place of worship from the 7th century until 1967, when Israel liberated the territory from the Jordanian occupiers. Even before the Israeli liberation, a horrifying massacre of Jewish residents in Hebron by their Arab Moslem neighbors took place in 1929 while under the British Mandate of the geographical territory known as Palestine.

Prior to the present-day Palestinian Authority assuming control of the city of Nablus, which was the ancient biblical Jewish city of Shechem, the Tomb of Joseph, the biblical figure, was a place of Jewish pilgrimage. When it was handed over to the PA, as one of seemingly endless Israeli concessions, the tomb was desecrated by a Moslem mob, which proceeded to convert it into a mosque.

On the Indian subcontinent, Hindu temples were similarly converted into mosques. Lately, Hindu nationalists have reconverted some mosques into temples, and, as in so many other parts of the world, considerable bitterness exists between Moslems and members of other faiths or those of no faith.

Mosques now occupy vast numbers of places of worship for other faiths. In Algeria, the Great Synagogue of Oran is now a mosque after the Jewish population was driven from Algeria. Many other synagogues throughout the Arab world are now mosques from after the Jewish inhabitants were expelled.

In the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, many Greek Orthodox churches in northern Cyprus were converted into mosques. And the process continues.

Saudi Arabia invests endless billions of dollars to build mosques throughout the world. The international blanketing of cities with mosques is just another expression of jihad. In western Europe, most famously renamed Eurabia by the writer, Bat Yeor, there may soon come a time when there will be more minarets than steeples.

Perhaps the most egregious and blatant example of Islamic triumphalism is the planned construction of a giant mosque in New York, almost upon the site of the horrific destruction of the Twin Towers by Moslem terrorists acting in the name of Allah.

The proposed mosque is to be opened in 2011 on the very anniversary of the September 11, 2001 atrocity — a flagrant insult to the memory of the thousands of innocents who died at the hands of Moslem fanatics and believers, most of them Saudis.

But this, after all, is what jihad is all about. Subdue the "infidel" at all costs. The Islamic obligation to conquer and convert the unbeliever must never lapse. Its tangible manifestation can also be characterized as the mosques of war.

Read the whole article: Mosques of War.

Who is Behind the Cordoba Initiative?

"THE PROSPECTIVE developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate. Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts of his issue from an 'Egyptian family steeped in religious scholarship.' Indeed, Feisal Rauf’s Muslim Brotherhood provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets." says Alyssa Lappen.

"Ground Zero mosque wanna-be developers show their true radical colors," she says. "On October 20, 2009, American Society of Muslim Advancement leader Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, both received a letter from Former Muslims United requesting that they each sign the latter's Freedom Pledge. Neither has yet signed." Read the whole article.

The 878-word Freedom Pledge outlines the principles of Islamic law under which apostates from Islam are subject to the death penalty. It notes that the four schools of Sunni Islam — Hanafi, Miliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali — “unanimously agree that a former Muslim male, also known as an apostate, must be executed” and that a woman, at best must be “imprisoned or beaten five times a day until she repents or dies” and at worst, like men executed outright. It then goes on to cite 1978 and 1989 religious rulings — from the Fatwa Council at Al Azhar University, the closest Muslim equivalent to the Vatican, and the Mufti of Lebanon, each, respectively consigning a renegade Muslim to death if they “do not repent.” Perhaps “a misunderstanding on his part may have taken place, and there would thus be an opportunity to rectify it,” intones the Mufti. But he must do so within three days, or die.

“Overwhelmingly, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan ... do not honor freedom to choose one’s beliefs as guaranteed under our [U.S.] First Amendment,” said Nonie Darwish in response to their dead silence since October 20, 2009. “That is the only conclusion we can draw” by their failure to acknowledge or sign the Freedom Pledge.

Islam Tends to Replace Other Cultures

The following is an excerpt from Vijay Kumar's THE MUSLIM MOSQUE: A STATE WITHIN A STATE:

[The same Islamic] patterns and political mandates have been used over and over by Muslims since 610 A.D. to invade and conquer many civilizations and nations throughout the world, and to eradicate human rights and freedoms in those lands. Iran once was called Persia and was Zorastrian. Egypt was Christian. What was once a Hindu civilization was conquered and made into Pakistan, which is now part of the Axis of Jihad, along with Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was Buddhist for thousands of years. Now its chief exports are heroin and Islamic terrorism.

“When We decide to destroy a population, We (first) send a definite order to those among them who are given the good things of this life and yet transgress; so that the word is proved true against them: then (it is) We destroy them utterly.” —Quran 17:16

In every instance where Islam has conquered and “destroyed utterly” a nation or civilization, the key to the conquest was the establishment of mosques, which are political and military command and control centers for Islam, and which all point toward the seat of Islamic power: the Kaaba.

Radical Muslims’ goal is total domination

Posted on Wed, Dec. 03, 2008 by Cal Thomas

THOMAS: Radical Muslims’ goal is total domination

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear

You’ve got to be taught from year to year

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

— South Pacific, music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

DUBLIN, Ireland — Looking at the faces of two young men who were among the purveyors of death at the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus station and Leopold’s restaurant in Bombay, India, makes Westerners recoil, and not just in horror. We also question how anyone could be so insensitive to the value of human life. See lyric above.

The killers — these and others over many years — use Islam as the foundation for their indoctrination, coupling it with the belief that Western society is unwilling to do what is necessary to defend itself. They have literally bet their lives that the West will meet their force with something less commanding. And that is why they have infiltrated — and are infiltrating — Britain, much of the rest of Western Europe, America (and India) through immigration and high birth rates.

President-elect Barack Obama, who once pledged to "sit down" with America’s enemies, may have second thoughts after watching the carnage.

A caller to one media outlet, a man representing himself as one of the terrorists, said Indian occupation of "Muslim land" was the reason for the attack. How do you negotiate with that? Do we give them all of Earth, move to the moon and start over, controlling who gets to follow? Radical Muslim doctrine considers all land potential, or actual, "Muslim land."

The British media are full of stories claiming that some of the Bombay killers were taught in Islamic schools in Britain and radicalized by fanatical imams before heading to Pakistan for weapons training.

This is nothing new. The terrorists who bombed three London subway trains and a bus in 2005 were found to be part of this web of hate involving Islamic schools, radical mosques, fanatical imams and operational trainers in Pakistan.

Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair attempted to shut down the most offensive mosques and deport the imams of hate. His efforts produced mixed results, thanks to opposition from British civil liberties groups that are more concerned with protecting terrorists than their targets. Some imams were deported, but many others remain, and new terrorists are being incubated in Britain and other European nations.

The Daily Mail online reported Sunday that a banned Islamic terrorist group helped underwrite the Bombay attacks with cash raised in British mosques.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s security service, MI5, "has identified approximately 2,000 individuals who pose a direct threat to national security and public safety and believes the number of potential terrorists living in this country [Britain] could run to 4,000."

In the Telegraph, columnist Philip Johnston wrote, "It is difficult to prevent someone traveling to Pakistan ostensibly to visit their grandmother or uncle. An estimated 400,000 trips a year are made by Britons of Pakistani origin to their ancestral homeland."

What is needed in Britain — and the United States — is a change in the thinking that naively believes that simply exposing foreign nationals to our way of life means they will "catch" it as they might the flu. Allowing immigrants from nations in which the dominant religion mandates the forced subordination of every other faith (or no faith) and their subjugation through state power under Sharia law, increases the likelihood of more attacks.

At the very least, all non-Western immigrants to Britain and the U.S. should be told before their arrival that our intention is to westernize them.

They must learn English and study and embrace the history of their host nation. If they are Muslim, they will be allowed to worship only in existing mosques. No new ones should be built. Existing mosques must be monitored to make sure that hate is not taught and aggressive behavior toward their host countries is not promoted. If such behavior or speech is detected, the mosques should be closed and the imams arrested or deported.

Diplomacy should precede or follow war.

Once war begins, victory is the only acceptable outcome. The goal of the terrorists is victory. If Britain and America settle for less, they will get less, which is defeat.

Cal Thomas writes for Tribune Media Services. tmseditors@tribune.com