Read American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us Online
Authors: Steven Emerson
Tags: #Politics, #Non-Fiction
With technology, publications, fund-raising, and recruiting, Hamas does it all in the United States. Of course, it is still highly active in the Middle East, and it will always target Israelis as its highest priority for actual operations. But as confrontation with the West heats up, Hamas operatives are ready to turn their formidable apparatus against American targets.
Furthermore, some evidence suggests that Hamas has coordinated with other groups here in the United States. Leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad have spoken of efforts to coordinate with their “brothers” in Hamas (see
Chapter 6
). Gatherings of multiple groups have helped reinforce their mutual interests.
Consider the statements of one particular Iranian-American imam, Muhammad al-Asi: “Let me say that Hamas, the [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, and the Islamic Resistance in the Occupied Lands are part of a general Islamic revitalization, political-military reinstatement in the arena of the world, that is not confined to the Occupied Lands and that strictly belongs to the general Islamic condition throughout the world.”
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He has even gone so far as to say that if Muslims in the United States are not able to take time off to volunteer with these organizations, then they need to “establish contact with these groups and see what aid they want from the U.S.”
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Al-Asi is a controversial figure. He was previously the imam of the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Maryland
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and the director of the Islamic Education Center there.
47
At one time he was the imam of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., but in 1983 he was forced out; nonetheless he still preaches on the sidewalk outside on Fridays. The Islamic Education Center in Potomac has received substantial funding in the past by the Alavi Foundation, which the FBI claims is “entirely controlled by the government of Iran.”
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According to an article in the December 1995 edition of
The American Spectator,
the Islamic Education Center in Potomac “offers Farsi-language primary school classes that are fully accredited with the Iranian national educational system. It also offers religious education classes for adults and children, and distributes Iranian government propaganda. At the center’s bookstore, interested parties can purchase the original version of Khomeini’s
fatwa
—or religious order—condemning British author Salman Rushdie to death for having blasphemed against Islam. The
fatwa
instructs Muslims throughout the world that it is a ‘religious duty’ to assassinate Rushdie. The bookstore also sells videotaped speeches by anti-Semitic fanatics such as the Swiss-based Ahmed Huber, who extols Ayatollah Khomeini as the living continuation of Adolf Hitler.” In short, al-Asi is strongly pro-Iranian, yet that has not stopped him from praising Hamas and linking up with other organizations.
Al-Asi has been present at a number of radical Islamic conferences through the years including those held on behalf of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, where he made incendiary statements regarding striking at American interests worldwide (“If the Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim World, and specifically where American interests are concentrated—in Egypt, in Turkey, in the Indian subcontinent, just to mention a few. Strike at American interests there!”). When the United Association for Studies and Research convened a conference including radicals from groups ranging from Hamas to Hizballah to the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, al-Asi appeared and gave a presentation on the issue of “The Islamic Movement and the Need for a Comprehensive Political and Intellectual Organization.”
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He has also appeared at conferences of the Islamic Association for Palestine. Al-Asi has even been hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran; on January 30, 1990, he was hosted by Ayatollah Khamene’i, the religious leader in Iran who succeeded the Ayatollah Khomeini after he died.
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* * *
In meeting after meeting here in the United States, the same people and organizations mix and match. Through some people, connections are forged with Iran; through others, with Osama bin Laden; through others, with countries like Sudan. America’s role in facilitating these connections is more than peripheral.
Having looked at a single organization with several American tentacles, it may be helpful to next flip the microscope around, and look at a single tentacle of a different organization. Perhaps the most disturbing story of American terrorist infiltration is the story of one unusual tentacle that reached its way into the University of South Florida in Tampa.
O
N A FORMER SANDY AIRSTRIP
near Tampa sits a remarkable, very contemporary Sun Belt college campus. The University of South Florida, founded with only 2,000 students in 1960, has grown rapidly during its short four-decade life. With branches in St. Petersburg, Sarasota-Manatee, and Lakeland, it now sprawls across 164 buildings and boasts an enrollment of 37,000. While drawing students from far and wide, its main constituency is from the Tampa region, including many Latinos.
Few large urban universities are as academically competitive. The average SAT score of entering freshmen hovers around 1100. The university’s graduate programs are broad and deep, including specialties in medicine and biotech. Meanwhile, the Tampa area has emerged as a top southern hi-tech center, with many entrepreneurial ventures growing out of town-gown relationships in the familiar pattern of Stanford in Silicon Valley or M.I.T. in Cambridge. On its Web site, the university calls itself “one of the great legacies of the watershed social and intellectual developments of mid-twentieth century America.”
1
Unfortunately, the University of South Florida has also been a center of the American jihad movement.
It all began innocently enough. In 1989, on narrow, dead-end 130th Street, a sign was affixed to the last house on the block memorializing “Izz al-Din al-Qassam…[who] declared Jihad against the British and Zionist invasion of Palestine. He was martyred on November 19, 1935 in Yabrod, Palestine. Al-Qassam has become a symbol of heroism, resistance, occupation, and invasion of steadfast Palestine.” In fact, al-Qassam may be the most exalted figure in recent Palestinian history. As noted by scholar Ziad abu-Amr, he is “the main source of inspiration for the Islamic Jihad movement. Al-Qassam is considered the movement’s first pioneer. He is viewed as the first leader of the Palestinian armed resistance in the history of modern Palestine and the true father of the armed Palestinian revolution.”
2
The Tampa house—being used as a mosque—was named by USF professor Sami al-Arian.
To find a mosque similarly memorialized you would have to go to the Gaza Strip. There the al-Qassam Mosque is a recognized hangout for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that has established as its trademark the decapitating and dismembering of both Jews and Palestinian “collaborators.” Islamic Jihad is not just at war with Israel. The movement sees Israel’s existence as part of a larger American-directed plot against Islam. According to abu-Amr, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad sees Israel and America “as two faces of the same coin.”
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From 1991 to 1995 one of the world’s most lethal terrorist factions used a think tank affiliated with the University of South Florida (along with a separate nonprofit organization) as a base for some of its top leaders. The formula was simple: use the laws, freedoms, and loopholes of the most liberal nation on earth to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world.
At the center of it all was Sami al-Arian. A Palestinian professor of engineering, al-Arian came to USF in 1986 to teach that subject along with computer science. One of his first undertakings was to incorporate the Islamic Concern Project, soon to be renamed the Islamic Committee for Palestine. The ICP’s ostensible purposes were “charitable, cultural, social, educational and religious in which the concept of brotherhood, freedom, justice, unity, piety, righteousness and peace shall be propagated.”
4
Al-Arian and his brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar were among the founding members of ICP’s Board of Directors. Al-Arian was also the chairman of the board of another nonprofit organization, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a think-tank organized “exclusively for educational and academic research and analysis, and promotion of international peace and understanding.”
5
On March 11, 1992, WISE entered into a formal agreement with the University of South Florida outlining a series of cooperative programs for research and graduate-student enrichment, all in the name of “multiculturalism.” Together, the university and WISE would cohost forums, sponsor USF graduate students, and share resources.
When I interviewed al-Arian in the early 1990s, the soft spoken professor denied that either ICP or WISE had any connection to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Rather than being “political,” he said, ICP was a “charitable, social, and cultural type group.” When I asked him who al-Qassam was, he shrugged, “A Muslim scholar.”
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Yet, as I first showed with videotaped evidence in “Jihad in America,” the ICP was already acting as a support group for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The connections between the ICP, WISE, and the University of South Florida would only grow more intertwined as the 1990s progressed.
The ICP and WISE were almost identical organizations. For fifteen months both shared office space and a post office box secured by al-Arian in 1994.
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Even more significant was the match-up in leadership. Al-Arian, Bashir Nafi, Mazen al-Najjar, and Khalil Shikaki were all executive members of both organizations. Shikaki, one of the first directors of WISE, was also the brother of Fathi Shikaki, secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Khalil negotiated the agreement between WISE and the university. Another member of the circle was Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who served as director of administration of WISE and was a member of the Board of Directors of ICP while also employed as an adjunct professor in Middle Eastern studies at USF. Shallah taught a course on Middle Eastern politics that attracted some student criticisms because he referred to Israel only as “Palestine.”
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For legal purposes, however, ICP had no connection to the university. Thus it was on his own time that Professor al-Arian edited
Inquiry,
the official ICP magazine.
Inquiry
routinely ran incendiary attacks on Jews and the United States. One article, for example, argued, “The mistake of the Jews of today who occupy Palestine was made as well by the Roman aggressors of 933 A.D.…[It] is to underestimate the faith in Allah of our people in resisting all forms of evil, tyranny and aggression. Our Jihad is the greatest weapon we have which no nation or Zionist can take away. It is greater than the Japanese suicide
kamikaze
missions for ours is for Allah and He is great.”
Inquiry
also carried many articles about the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In January 1993, the magazine ran a full-length interview with PIJ secretary-general Fathi Shikaki, the brother of its board member. “The movement considers itself an independent, Islamic, and popular movement with Islam as its ideology, grassroots popular action and armed struggle as its means, and the liberation of Palestine as its objective,” Shikaki told
Inquiry.
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To this day, a copy of this interview can be found on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Web site.
10
When Paul Eedle, Reuters’ Egyptian bureau chief, went to Damascus to interview Shikaki in 1993, the secretary-general gave him a copy of the
Inquiry
article as background information.
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In addition to
Inquiry,
the ICP also published two Arabic-language publications,
Al-Islam wa-Filistin (Islam and Palestine)
and
Al-Mujahid.
12
Islam and Palestine
served as a medium for Palestinian Islamic Jihad communiqués. These broadsides regularly glorified the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s terrorist attacks against Israel and celebrated the murder of Palestinians accused of collaborating with the State of Israel. In the October 3, 1990, issue of the Arabic-language magazine
Al-Liwa,
Fathi Shikaki was quoted as saying that
Islam and Palestine
was the most recent in a line of magazines issued by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
13
Islam and Palestine
proudly reprinted the interview on November 8, 1990.
On September 1, 1988,
Islam and Palestine
published a special edition entitled “The Holy Warrior [
Mujahid
] Facing Interrogation and Torture.” The article explained that jihad was a long-term struggle: “[T]he war of Islam against the
kufar
[infidels] and the war of the
ummah
[community] against the Jewish land in Palestine won’t happen in a single attack, but it will be a long and arduous process of struggle. A long line of buried
mujahideen
will make it possible for the Islamic
ummah
to have the power for victory. If the
ummah
wants this power, then there is only one way, the
jihad
way, following
La Illah illallah
(There is no god but Allah). This will happen through martyrdom struggles, or by torture, or by imprisonment, or by deportation, or by embargoes.” The ICP’s contact address in Tampa appeared on the same page. The ICP’s second Arabic-language magazine,
Al-Mujahid,
was much less secretive about its connections with Islamic Jihad.
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The Palestinian Islamic Jihad logo appeared on the front page of each edition, along with the following words: “Publication Produced by the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine—Lebanon.”
When I interviewed al-Arian in 1994, he claimed that he was never connected with the ICP when
Islam and Palestine
was being published. He insisted that
Islam and Palestine
ceased publication around 1989 and that he only took over the ICP in 1990.
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Yet
Islam and Palestine
was published until 1992. Furthermore, on each issue from 1988 through 1992, the addresses listed for subscriptions and letters to the editor pointed straight to Tampa:
ICP
P.O. Box 350256
Tampa, Florida 33695 USA [for issues spanning from April 1, 1988 through August 1, 1989]
Or
ICP
P.O. Box 82009
Tampa, Florida 33682–2009 USA [for issues spanning from September 1, 1989 through December 1992].
While disseminating the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s newsletters, the ICP was also organizing annual conventions in cities across the United States, including Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland. In reviewing more than forty hours of recordings from five major conferences, we found that the ICP:
The rhetoric was lurid and incendiary. At one 1991 rally, al-Arian warmed up the crowd of three hundred supporters with calls for jihad and “Death to Israel.”
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The guest of honor was Sheikh Abdel Aziz Odeh, spiritual leader of the Islamic Jihad, who helped raise thousands of dollars for the cause. (Evidence uncovered at the first World Trade Center bombing trials indicated that Sheikh Aziz Odeh met followers of Sheikh Abdel Rahman at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport prior to that bomb blast to discuss terrorist acts on American soil. Even today, Odeh remains an unindicted coconspirator in that deadly attack.)
Tape recordings of ICP conferences show that funds were solicited for the explicit purpose of “sponsoring martyrs.” At a Chicago conference held in 1990, one speaker enumerated the “operations” (i.e., terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic Jihad martyrs). “We are giving you a list of sixteen martyrs,” says the speaker. “Some of these died in amphibious operations. Some died in assault operations. The families need your assistance. Each martyr needs one thousand dollars. Is there someone here to sponsor ten martyrs?”
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Six months after my 1994 documentary “Jihad in America” identified the ICP as a fundraiser for Islamic Jihad, Michael Fechter of the
Tampa Tribune
wrote a trail-blazing two-part frontpage series exposing ICP and WISE’s connections with terrorist groups:
On the University of Florida campus, Sami al-Arian is an award-winning young engineering professor.
In his off hours, he presided over a nonprofit organization that helps raise money in the name of two groups that claim responsibility for bombings that have killed hundreds in Israel and around the world….
Al-Arian refused requests for a face-to-face interview, but did answer some questions over the telephone. He asked for questions in writing but did not respond to a registered letter.
In the limited interview with the Tampa Tribune, al-Arian discussed one of the Islamic Jihad’s and Hamas’ tactics, the suicide bomb. “When people have nowhere else to go, (when) they are being humiliated day in and day out…This is not an irrational act,” he said.