Author: Robert Spencer
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: December 28, 2005
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20699
New revelations that federal officials are
checking mosques for radiation levels has the Council on American Islamic
Relations in an uproar. CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper fumed: "This creates the
appearance that Muslims are targeted simply for being Muslims. I don't think
this is the message the government wants to send at this time." A CAIR
statement claimed that the monitoring "could lead to the perception that
we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps
constitutional rights. All Americans should be concerned about the apparent
trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens,
and another diminished set of rights for Muslims."
Indeed, the mainstream media has made much
of potential Constitutional issues, trumpeting the fact that the radiation
monitoring has been done without search warrants -- even though no actual
searches have been carried out. Also, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse
maintained that "FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally
protected areas without the proper legal authority," and that it does
not monitor groups in general but only acts on specific information. Is there
any such information in this case? Roehrkasse spoke of official concern with
"a growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show al-Qaida
has a clear intention to obtain and ultimately use chemical, biological, radiological
and nuclear" weapons.
This has been public knowledge for years.
Not long after 9/11, Americans discovered plans for constructing nuclear weapons
in a former Al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul. A 2003 CIA report stated that jihad
terrorists "have a wide variety of potential agents and delivery means
to choose from for chemical, biological and radiological or nuclear (CBRN)
attacks." Other reports have claimed that Osama bin Laden himself met
with Pakistani nuclear scientists; that Al-Qaeda has already obtained nuclear
material on the Russian black market, and that jihadists already having brought
those nukes into the United States. Others asserted that Al-Qaeda was planning
to smuggle nuclear material into the U.S. from Mexico. But even if none of
that is true, there is no doubt that jihadists are working in that direction.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the masterminds of 9/11, has declared that "in
killing Americans
Muslims should not exceed four million non-combatants,
or render more than ten million of them homeless."
But of course, no Muslims who believe that
four million Americans should be murdered are actually on American soil, right?
Unfortunately, we have no way to know this for sure. Political correctness
and unproven assumptions have kept the media and even law enforcement officials
from asking the hard questions they should ask of Muslim leaders in the U.S.
Absurdities consequently abound. One police official lamented: "We'll
come back from a Kumbayah meeting with a local mosque and realize that these
guys who just agreed to help us are in our terror files!" The most notorious
example of this phenomenon may be former Cleveland Muslim leader Fawaz Damra,
who signed the Fiqh Council of North America's condemnation of terrorism and
now faces deportation for failing to disclose his ties to terrorist groups.
Damra, widely respected as a moderate voice up until his arrest, was never
expelled from his communities in Brooklyn or Cleveland (or evidently even
reprimanded) despite having said at a 1989 Islamic conference that "the
first principle is that terrorism, and terrorism alone, is the path to liberation."
The core problem is that peaceful American
Muslims have not moved to expose, expel, or separate themselves from those
who hold such sentiments. There is no wall of separation in the American Muslim
community between Muslims who accept American pluralism and just want to live
ordinary lives and those who hold to the same ideology of jihad and the destruction
or subjugation of infidels to which Osama bin Laden has dedicated his life.
There is no easy or reliable way to distinguish a Muslim who may be working
to launch a chemical or nuclear strike in the U.S. from one who abhors the
very idea. Do the Muslims who hope to perpetrate such violence operate or
at least congregate in mosques? Yes, they do. Sahim Alwan, a onetime leader
of the Yemeni community in Lackawanna, New York and president of the mosque
there, has the distinction of being the first American to attend an Al Qaeda
training camp. Maher Hawash's transition from secular Intel exec to jihadist
was accompanied by an increase in his Islamic fervor and frequent mosque attendance.
This doesn't mean that every Muslim in the
United States is secretly plotting a nuclear strike. But with all the evidence
that Al-Qaeda is making every effort to launch such an attack, would it really
be wise to risk everything on the assumption that none are? Hooper's outrage
over unequal treatment supposedly being accorded to Muslims founders on the
fact that it is only Muslim groups that have declared their desire to launch
a nuclear strike against the United States. We would be foolish -- suicidally
so -- not to take all necessary steps to protect ourselves accordingly. If
Hooper were genuinely concerned about the unfair targeting of Muslims, he
could direct the efforts of his organization to making concerted efforts to
work with law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists in
the United States, and to turn Muslims in America away from the jihad ideology.
The fact that he does nothing toward either of these ends, and instead raises
false Constitutional specters against genuine efforts to protect this country
from a catastrophic attack, speaks volumes. There is no Constitutional right
to harbor radioactive material. This monitoring should continue.