Protecting Mosques in New York

Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | 9/4/2008

The New York Police Department on Tuesday announced plans to beef up security around New York City mosques for Ramadan. This is an understandable step.After all, it has long been known that the Saudis control 80% of the mosques in the United States. 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. She said that 80% of the mosques in this country “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence.” The Saudis would build large mosques for immigrant Muslim communities in the United States, and send a Saudi imam to staff the new facility. The Saudis, said Barsky, have spent as much as $80 billion on such efforts over the last thirty years.

Note also that hate propaganda of just this kind has been found in American mosques -- which should not be surprising not only because of the Saudi connection but because much of this is mainstream Islamic teaching. The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 that hate propaganda against Jews and Christians fills Saudi textbooks used in Islamic schools in America, 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.”

Incidentally, the 1999 valedictorian of the Islamic Saudi Academy was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is now serving thirty years in prison for joining an Al-Qaeda plot to kill Bush.

And finally, note that jihadist activity tends to increase during Ramadan. According to Professor Nizar Hamzeh, a specialist on political Islam at the American University of Beirut, “Ramadan is a month of commitment and renewal to their faith and also to their cause, whether by military or nonmilitary jihad. It is a month of martyrdom and commitment to one’s Islamic ideology.”

In light of all that, it’s easy to see why it would be altogether fitting and proper for the NYPD to heighten security around city mosques during Ramadan. However, that is not what is happening. The New York Daily News ran a story with the headline “NYPD beefs up security for Ramadan,” and readers might have been forgiven for thinking that New York cops would be on alert against terror attacks possibly coming during the month in which Muslims redouble their efforts to serve Allah -- right? Wrong. In reality, the NYPD is beefing up its protection of the mosques themselves. Apparently they are under threat from venomous Islamophobes, and that threat heightens during Ramadan. “Local precincts,” said the report, “will dispatch more officers on foot patrol and in squad cars to patrol the areas surrounding the mosques during the month-long religious observance that begins on Monday.” New York police officers “will also be briefed on the religious guidelines specific to Ramadan in anticipation of the observances,” and “community leaders” were “warned to be mindful of the mosque’s donation boxes, some of which were robbed last year.”

Any vigilante attack against any mosque in the U.S. is wrong and stupid, and to be condemned. But this is just another indication of how CAIR’s hate crimes propaganda, trumped-up as it is, rules the day: the mosques are well protected, but how well protected are the potential victims of the jihadists who may be inside those mosques? Unfortunately, it is increasingly too politically incorrect to worry much about them. Polls show that fewer Americans believe that terrorism is a serious threat now than at any time since before 9/11. “Islamophobia” is the problem, not Islamic terrorism. But as we march bravely into this grand new future, we may suffer a rude awakening or two, courtesy of people who were duly grateful that their mosques were so ably guarded during Ramadan.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is coming this November from Regnery Publishing.