Margaret Hemenway
After another deadly attack on American citizens on U.S. soil, Houston authorities are busy reassuring Muslims that they have nothing to fear – from Americans! The shameful media spin from the Houston Chronicle is that,
"Some Muslims fear backlash after rampage: In the wake of Fort Hood tragedy, Houston authorities try to assure the faithful steps are being taken to keep followers safe."
Hardly comforting news to families and loved ones of the thirteen dead from Major Nidal Hasan's bloody rampage and to fifteen other victims who remain hospitalized. When Major Hasan was supposed to be delivering a medical lecture, he was instead, preaching the Koran. At one point, he said, referencing the Koran:
1. If you don't believe, "you are condemned to hell" (Koran 9:49, 9:68, 9:73, and others)
2. If you don't believe, "your head is cut off" (Koran 8:12, 47:4)
3. If you don't believe, "you're set on fire" (Koran 33:64, 48:13, 76:4)
4. If you don't believe, "burning oil is burned down your throat." (Koran 18:29, 44:43-46)
Amazingly, given these militant views, Hasan was honored by being permitted to participate in an advisory group for the incoming Administration, for the purpose of establishing security priorities (under auspices of George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute). Hasan's name and affiliation, the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine, appear on page 29 of the Presidential transition task force recommendations forwarded to the Obama White House in 2009.
Much earlier wake-up calls from Islamic extremists in uniform were ignored and downplayed by Pentagon leadership: In 2003, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, Muslim convert, fragged commanding officers at a military camp outside Iraq, killing two and wounding 15 others. Akbar's justification: "You guys are coming into our countries," he said, "and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." The Defense Intelligence Agency subsequently issued an internal report warning that Muslim soldiers pose a possible security threat – which the Pentagon brushed aside.
Maj. Hasan, despite his hefty body count, is only a small actor in a grossly underreported phenomenon which has penetrated into the highest levels of the federal government, including the Pentagon, by Islamists and Islamist sympathizers. This penetration has blinded U.S. leadership to the internal threat which manifested itself in the carnage at Fort Hood. It can no longer be ignored by those prosecuting war against Islamic extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, unless this same leadership wants to be accused of criminal neglect and gross incompetence.
Five years ago, in October 2004, Abdurahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council, pled guilty and was sentenced to 23 years in prison for his role in a Libyan plot to kill Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Supplemental federal documents indicated Alamoudi's involvement in financing the terrorist organization Hamas. A year earlier, in October 2003, Senators Kyl and Schumer listened to compelling testimony in a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about terrorist penetration of the U.S. military and prison systems via corruption of the Muslim chaplain program (founded by Alamoudi) and how this terrorist infiltration coincides with a larger foreign-sponsored campaign to build terrorist networks inside America. (Alamoudi is a Wahhabi-backed member of the Muslim Brotherhood or MB, an international movement founded in 1928 that seeks the destruction of all state and geographic divisions, rejects the concept of the nation-state and all forms of secularization, and works to create a global pan-Islamic state with government based on Muslim Sharia law.) The MB has a long track record of supporting terrorist leaders from Egyptian Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah. Not surprisingly, this sensational hearing received little media attention, even though conducted only two years after the cataclysmic attacks of 9/11.
There is a saying: behind every Islamic terrorist is an imam. Given the prevalence of Saudi-funded (Wahhabi) mosques in America, and hearing now that Maj. Hasan may have attended the same radical mosque where two 9/11 hijackers attended services, there is a reason for alarm. According to testimony from the Kyl/Schumer Judiciary hearing, chaplains are "only one avenue terrorists and their allies used to penetrate and compromise our civil institutions. Recruitment and organization of ideological extremists in armed forces and in prison systems is a centuries-old problem, as is the difficulty that civil societies have had in understanding and confronting this challenge."
For several years, the small Muslim chaplain corps in the military was damaged by those with a political agenda. Consider the case of Muslim convert, James Yee, who penetrated one of the nation’s most secure terrorist detention facilities at Guantanamo, Cuba, breaking through the heavy compartmentalization designed to keep detainees from communicating with one another. In 2005, after the FBI broke up a Muslim spy ring at Gitmo involving Muslim military personnel, the Pentagon's counterspy unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (since disbanded by Secretary Gates), warned that Islamic legal doctrine was compromising devout Muslim soldiers' loyalty. While in Saudi Arabia, Yee “often visited a Saudi-sponsored tent at the Khobar Towers military base to pick up Islamic books and texts translated into English.” Yee admitted “the Saudi Air Force and the Saudi royal family paid for him and other Americans to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.” Two years later, during his second pilgrimage, he began to search out a program in the Middle East that would teach him “Islamic theology and sciences and Arabic.” The Washington Post noted that after Yee left the military, he spent four years in Syria studying Islam and returned to the U.S. as a trained imam. He joined the military in the late 90’s as a “Muslim cleric” and was “endorsed” by Alamoudi's American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council.
Americans would be shocked that vetting for the Muslim chaplain corps was outsourced to foreign entities and individuals, opening the door to hostile infiltration and recruitment. The Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain program was compromised at the onset, due to the fact that Alamoudi founded and guided it, and nominated the first chaplains. Instead of addressing and seeking to minimize this threat, government officials, operating under a prevailing culture of political correctness and respect for "multicultural diversity," painstakingly avoid using the word "Muslim" and "terrorist" in the same sentence. Even FBI Director Mueller was so influenced by Islamic propaganda that he once described Alamoudi's organization (American Muslim Council) as "mainstream."
By June 2002, 9 of 14 Muslim chaplains had received religious training through the Leesburg, Virginia-based Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS was raided, along with 23 other suspect organizations, during the federal government's Operation Greenquest in 2002). The other credentialing organization for Muslim chaplains was AMAFVAC (American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, created in 1991 and operating under the umbrella of Alamoudi's American Muslim Foundation) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA is an unindicted co-conspirator, labeled as such by the Department of Justice stemming from its prosecution of Islamic terrorist financiers in the Holy Land Foundation trial).
Before his transfer to Ft. Hood last year, Hasan served as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and regularly attended Friday prayer at the Muslim Community Center in nearby Silver Spring, Md. Imam Khan, who knew Hasan, was the main prayer leader at this Maryland mosque and also a board member of ISNA. The DOD certified AMAFVAC in 1993 as one of two organizations to vet and endorse Muslim chaplains. In December 1993, Alamoudi attended the swearing-in ceremony of Army Capt. Abdul Rasheed Muhammad (formerly Myron Maxwell), the first Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military, and pinned a new military insignia, a crescent moon badge, on the captain’s uniform. In 1996, Alamoudi was present when the U.S. Armed Forces commissioned its second Muslim chaplain, Lieutenant JG Monje Malak Abd al-Muta Ali Noel, Jr. Alamoudi commented then about cultivating others into politics and law enforcement: "We are grooming our young people to be politicians. We also want them to be policemen and FBI agents."
From about 1993 to 1998 (virtually during the entire Clinton Administration), the Pentagon retained Alamoudi on an unpaid basis to nominate and vet Muslim chaplain candidates for the U.S. military. The State Department was similarly conned and selected Alamoudi as a representative of the United States in its public diplomacy mission, anointing him as a “goodwill ambassador” to numerous Arab states. High level DoD association with Alamoudi-affiliated Muslims continued, with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England attending the opening of the mosque at Quantico, personally promoting Muslim chaplain Saifulislam to Lieutenant Commander and rolling out a red carpet (through his Egyptian aide, former Navy Commander Hesham Islam) to radical pro-Islamist groups like ISNA. Islam was involved in the forcing out, from the Joint Staff, of respected Islamic law scholar, Stephen Coughlin (whom he smeared as a "Christian zealot with a poison pen"); Islam was subsequently exposed by reporter Claudia Rosett as having a falsified official bio, which was quickly yanked from the Pentagon's website.
Are there other sleeper agents or ticking time bombs in uniform, awaiting a lethal opportunity? Undoubtedly. After Alamoudi's arrest and revelations from the October 2003 hearing, corrective measures should have been taken. With 13 more victims at Fort Hood, perhaps now the DoD will begin to address the requisite overhaul of tainted religious training and ecclesiastical endorsement process for Muslim chaplains.
Additionally, as a DoD Inspector General proposed in the wake of the hearing (but was blocked, allegedly, by lawyers in the Office of the Undersecretary of Personnel and Readiness), a standard background investigation should be mandatory for all chaplains prior to being admitted into the chaplain corps. Given the label of "un-indicted co-conspirator" by federal authorities, ISNA should no longer be allowed to vet and certify imams within the United States or to serve as the official endorsing agency for Muslim chaplains in the Pentagon. Last, the DOD should forbid foreign financing by Saudi Arabia of pilgrimages by members of the U.S. Armed Forces. These are basic, common sense first steps for DoD to do what is necessary to protect against Islamic militants within our own ranks – and before more unarmed soldiers are sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Margaret Calhoun Hemenway spent fifteen years on Capitol Hill, in both the House and Senate, and five years as a White House appointee serving President Bush at both DoD and NASA.
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