American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

THE FREE PRESS

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2002 by Steven Emerson
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 0-7434-7750-2

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Introduction: “Take Up Arms and Arms Alone!”

1. How I Made “Jihad in America” and Lived to Tell About It

2. Anatomy of Infiltration

3. World Trade Center I

4. The Source: A Journey to Jihad Headquarters

5. Hamas: the Original Infiltrator

6. Jihad in the Academy

7. Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, and the Birth of al Qaeda

8. Fighting Back: A Story of Unsung Heroes

Appendices

A: Current and Recent Militant Islamist Groups in the United States

B: Current and Recent Terrorist Front Cells and Groups with Direct Association with Terrorists

C: The Terrorists’ Support Networks

D: A Brief History of Islamic Fundamentalism

Notes

Index

T
HE VEILED COMMANDER STOOD UP,
a Hamas flag in one hand and a Koran in the other. The crowd roared “Allahu akbar walillahi’l-hamd!” (“Allah is great and to Allah we give praise!”)—the slogan of the international Muslim Brotherhood movement. This was the moment everyone seemed to have been waiting for.

His face still veiled in a red-and-white checkered
keffiyeh,
the Hamas commander spoke: “Greetings…from the occupied land…I extend thanks to all those who stood on our side at times when our allies were few.” He gave a report describing in methodical detail Hamas terrorist attacks, reveling in the bloody results of each assault: “Naturally the war has moved into Israel’s ’48 boundaries. One day in Tel Aviv, one of the brothers entered a building and began stabbing all the people…. The last operation I am going to tell you about is the operation of the bus—”

The anticipation was too great—shouts of “Allahu akbar!” erupted from the crowd, which sensed exactly what he was going to discuss. “[One of our fighters] was on the bus to Jerusalem, Bus 405 and he steered it off the road…. And the bus plunged…sixteen Jewish soldiers were killed!” In fact, seventeen civilians, including one American, were killed when a fundamentalist steered this particular bus into a ravine. “…I call upon my brothers to take up arms with us…to take up arms and arms alone!” The crowd responded with a thunderous ovation and chanting of “Allahu akbar!”

The date: 1989. The location: Kansas City. The commander was addressing and thanking the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Occupied Land Fund, two organizations holding a conference in the country they called home.

The dream of a world under Islam has engendered Muslim dissidents everywhere in the world over the last two decades. Almost every Islamic country has its militant faction, often two or three. The Hamas of Palestine, Hizballah of Iran, the Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, An-Nahda of Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Gama‘at al-Islamiyya of Egypt, the Jama‘at Muslimeen of Pakistan, and the Holy Warriors of the Philippines and Chechnya—all share the same goal of an Islamic world, or, as they refer to it, a
Khilafah.

In the past twelve years, however, these groups have achieved a new level of coordination, owing to their exploitation of the civil liberties of the United States. None of these small national groups was ever able to coordinate its worldwide efforts with the others until they came to the United States. Operating in our open society, with freedom of speech and assembly and with only casual oversight from the FBI, the CIA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the worldwide network of militant Islamic organizations has finally been able to coordinate. They have operated here both in order to direct activities in the Middle East, and to target America. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were only part of the results.

After September 11, 2001, everyone in America knows full well the power and persistence of these militant radical groups. It is a certainty that terrorists, already living among us, will continue to pursue their destructive agenda. Whether they succeed may depend in part upon whether we can recognize how they operate. This book offers a twelve-year-long story of the arrival and flourishing of terrorists in the United States, explaining where they are, how they interconnect, how they recruit, how they raise money, and how they use our legal system as a cover.

Call it jihad, American style—or the American Jihad.

I
N DECEMBER
1992
I was a staff reporter for CNN, covering what I consider one of the worst stories imaginable—a press conference for pool reporters.

In this case the conference was given by Lawrence Walsh, the former special prosecutor for the Iran-
contra
affair, who was issuing a statement in reaction to then-President George Bush’s pardon of former secretary of state Caspar Weinberger. It was the kind of situation where more than a dozen reporters ask the same question over and over, then go back and write the same story.

In short, I was bored. In Oklahoma City, I found myself with nothing to do on Christmas Day. As I walked around looking for a place to eat, I passed a large group of men dressed in traditional Middle Eastern clothing.

These men had congregated outside of the Oklahoma City Convention Center. I realized there was some kind of convention going on. Drawn to the scene, I wandered inside and found a bazaar of vendors hawking all kinds of radical material. There were books preaching Islamic “Jihad,” books calling for the extermination of Jews and Christians, even coloring books instructing children on subjects such as “How to Kill the Infidel.” It was a meeting of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), an umbrella group that included many smaller groups.

When I asked admittance to the main meeting hall, I was told that as a non-Muslim I couldn’t enter. But I found my way into a group of “recent converts,” where I was befriended by a man who sponsored my admission. I ended up sitting through the entire program. It was a shocking experience. Given simultaneous translation by a jihadist next to me, I was horrified to witness a long procession of speakers, including the head of Hamas, Khalid Misha’al, taking turns preaching violence and urging the assembly to use jihad against the Jews and the West. At times spontaneous shouts of “Kill the Jews” and “Destroy the West” could be distinctly heard. I had heard such declamatory speakers many times in the Middle East, but it was astonishing to hear it all being preached here in a Middle American capital such as Oklahoma City.

I had some contacts in the FBI at this point and called one to see if he knew that all of this was going on. He said he didn’t. Even if the FBI had been cognizant, however, there wouldn’t have been much they could do about it, owing to the FBI’s mandate to surveil criminal activity and not simply hateful rhetoric.

Just how far behind the FBI had fallen in keeping abreast of these potentially dangerous subversive groups became clear a year later when I attended a five-day Muslim conference in Detroit in December 1993. This annual gathering featured speakers and representatives from some of the world’s most militant fundamentalist organizations, including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and many others. After five days of listening to speakers urging Muslims to wage jihad, I was startled to hear that a senior FBI agent from the Detroit office would be making an unscheduled appearance on the program. Sure enough, the official showed up. After making some perfunctory remarks about civil rights, the official asked for questions from the visibly hostile audience. A series of scornful responses followed, including that of one audience member who asked, tongue in cheek, if the agent could give the group any advice on “shipping weapons” overseas to their friends. The FBI official said matter-of-factly that he hoped any such efforts would be done in conformance with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms guidelines.

Returning to Washington again, I asked FBI officials if they knew that their Detroit colleague had spoken at this radical gathering. They assured me it was impossible. After checking, however, they admitted within a few hours that their man had indeed been there, mistakenly thinking it was “some kind of Rotary Club.”

I soon learned that the FBI could do little or nothing to monitor such groups. Congressional restrictions imposed following disclosure in the 1970s of abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies had long since prevented the FBI from performing “blanket surveillance.” Investigations could only be done on particular individuals and then only if these individuals appeared to be in the act of committing a crime. Regulations, as former FBI official Oliver Revell has stated, forbade them from compiling even “open source” information—articles that appear in the newspaper, for instance—without receiving prior permission to open up an “investigation.” Indeed, individual FBI investigators could be personally sued for engaging in surveillance activities that went beyond these guidelines. Several agents had been the targets of such lawsuits and most FBI agents had become extremely wary of straying outside the lines. Even more significant, the FBI was particularly hamstrung if these groups operated under the auspices of “religious,” “civic,” “civil rights,” or “charitable” groups. This has provided cover for recruiting and fund-raising by jihad warriors in the United States.

*  *  *

But I was faced with a difficult moral dilemma. I hadn’t started investigating anyone to any great degree. All I had at that point was a collection of books and pamphlets and promotional material by which these groups advertised themselves to a very select audience. I didn’t know whether it was all rhetoric or whether there was really substance to all this. I had a few videos showing that Hamas had definitely established itself in this country, but that was about it. Would I be risking my career by following up this story, in what might prove to be a wild goose chase?

I decided to take a proposal to Richard Carlson of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Already I was thinking in terms of a video. I’m a print journalist by background but here was a story that would be much easier to tell as a TV program. The most dramatic material I was collecting was already in video form anyway. The training and recruitment videos, the fiery speeches at mosques and conventions—it would be hard to convey the blood-curdling nature of this material except by letting it speak for itself.

Carlson liked the idea and passed it up the line. Before long I was passed over to the Public Broadcasting System, the network subsidiary of CPB. I ended up dealing with Bob Coonrod and Ervin Duggan, who was then president of PBS. They were very enthusiastic but couldn’t generate much interest within the bureaucracy of PBS. Finally, Dugin took matters into his own hands and provided me with some research and development money.

And so in 1993 I left CNN to work full-time as an investigator of terrorist networks in the United States. I founded The Investigative Project, which has employed a shifting staff of from two to fifteen people. What we discovered is that, indeed, international terrorist organizations of all sorts had set up shop here in America. They often took advantage of religious, civic, or charitable organizations. Usually this was more than enough to fool the public, the police, and especially naive leaders of religious or educational institutions, who were more than willing to encourage and sponsor these groups in the name of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.” Meanwhile, U.S.-based terrorists have been able to use these organizations to ferry equipment to Middle Eastern terror groups, to offer financial support to the families of suicide bombers, to coordinate efforts with other terrorist networks around the world, and ultimately to plan and support terrorist acts in the United States.

It took us a while to piece all this together. Going to conferences and collecting promotional material had its limits. We could attend mosque services, but much of them was in Arabic. Early on, I hooked up with a friend named Khalid Duran, and he began providing translation services for much of the written and video material. But it was slow going.

Then one day I found myself standing in a Yemeni grocery store in Brooklyn. I looked around and spotted dozens of copies of dusty videos that appeared to have something to do with commandos and rifles. I bought twenty different tapes—much to the astonishment of the store owner. When I got them into Khalid’s hands we realized we were looking at paramilitary training videos for the leaders of Islamic militant groups. One of them was put out by an organization called the Islamic Association for Palestine, in Richardson, Texas. To our horror, it showed the actual torment and forced “confessions” of Palestinian “collaborators” moments before they were executed.

We followed up this material by traveling to Texas, Florida, and New York to try to arrange interviews with the leaders of these groups. For the most part they were not very cooperative. We got very little footage. Slowly, however, we were beginning to accumulate enough material to put together a documentary.

Part of the task, I realized, would be tracing some of these organizations to their origins in the Middle East and beyond. I started in Israel. I had learned by this time that the first calls for worldwide jihad had come from Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian mullah who had set up a waystation in Peshawar, Pakistan for Muslim recruits who wanted to take part in the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. One afternoon, riding around the West Bank in a taxicab, I was talking absentmindedly with my Palestinian driver when I mentioned Azzam. “Oh, his brother-in-law lives here just north of here,” the driver said. He gave me the name of the village of Jenin.

The next day I found another driver and headed for Jenin. All I had was Azzam’s name and the name of the village. When we got there and asked a few people, however, they quickly directed us to his house. Azzam was very gracious and immediately welcomed me in. He told me about his experience in Peshawar and about his brother-in-law. It was a strange encounter. At the time, Palestinian electricity was not very reliable and every ten minutes or so the lights would go out, plunging us into total darkness.

Azzam told me he had other relatives living in Chicago. When I got back to the United States, I called them up and arranged to visit one of Azzam’s nephews. Khalid came with me. We rendezvoused at a small Middle Eastern restaurant in Bridgeview, Illinois, a suburb southwest of Chicago. The nephew was very gracious. He was not aware that I was collecting information and I didn’t make any attempt to misrepresent myself. I simply said I was interested in his family and anxious to write about them. He told me about Hudaifah, one of Abdullah’s sons, and said he was trying to hold together his father’s organization in Peshawar.

Later he took Khalid and me to the Bridgeview Mosque, where Jamal Said was the imam. I could tell immediately that we were deep in the heart of Hamas territory. The walls of the vestibule were covered with Hamas posters and recruiting literature showing masked gunmen brandishing automatic weapons. It was all in Arabic, but you could see daggers plunged into Jewish hearts wrapped up in American flags. They even had a library filled with militant terrorist videos and books. Khalid was there to translate for me. The Friday service was a rather strange experience. Out of eight hundred people, I was the only one wearing a red ski jacket. When the service was over I approached the imam and asked him if he had known Abdullah Azzam. He was very defensive. “I never met with him,” he said quickly and then dismissed me. Earlier that year, two Hamas operatives, congregants of the mosque, were arrested in Israel for transferring money from the United States to terrorists on the West Bank. One of these men, Mohammad Jarad, told the Israelis that he was sent on his mission by Jamal Said.

*  *  *

“Jihad in America” pulled together a fair representation of the material we had collected. We showed Hamas operatives and militant mullahs preaching jihad and violence “with the gun” against Israel and America. We didn’t show the torture and confessions of Palestinian collaborators—that would have been too inflammatory. The documentary continuously stressed the fact that militant Islamists are only a minute percentage of the Muslim population. Nevertheless, the film was attacked, and I was called a “crusader,” a “racist,” and just about everything else. To say it was disconcerting would be an understatement. I never anticipated the degree to which these groups were going to try to deny what was going on. They claimed that I was making it all up and that I had fabricated the tapes. I was also amazed at how far some prominent mainstream newspapers would do the same, some running several highly skeptical and critical editorials. Other newspapers simply used the tried-and-true method of being “even-handed.” On the one hand, Steve Emerson says militant Islamic groups are bringing jihad to America. On the other hand, Islamic groups deny it.

Despite all the skepticism, the fights, and the controversy, “Jihad in America” won the prestigious George Polk Award. It was also named the “best investigative reporting in print, broadcast or book” by the Investigative Reporters and Editors Organization. It won the National Headliner Award and the Chris Award as well.