American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (9 page)

Another incendiary speech was given by Sheikh Ahmed al-Qattan, a Palestinian cleric based in Kuwait: “Greetings to those who shoot at the Jews with the catapult, and to those who poke out the eyes of the Jews with the slingshot…. In 1967…the Jews sang, “Muhammad is dead and he gave birth to girls…[and we answer,] “O sons of pigs and monkeys, Muhammad is not dead and he did not give birth to girls. Rather,
khaybar, khaybar
[death] to Jews; Muhammad’s Army will return!”
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During the Gulf War, the IAP organized an emergency conference in response to the American troop buildup in Saudi Arabia. The participants issued a resolution condemning “the American crusades.” Khalil al-Qawka, a Hamas leader from Palestine, wanted to go further:

Today, America is right here at your doorstep, in everybody’s house. Ba‘al, the idol, is back and stands erect in the Arabian Peninsula. Is there a Muhammad to slay the Ba‘al of our times?…The Marines, dear brothers, are stealing the doors of your houses, and the doors of your mosques, in obstinate and open provocation. They are at our doors. Their plan is to penetrate the flesh of our girls. And our honor, and our values, in order to turn our society into a perverted nation.
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Later, a choir of eight- and nine-year-old children sang revolutionary Islamic songs praising Hamas. In syncopated rhythm, they imitated Hamas knife-stabbings.

The IAP’s 1996 and 1997 conferences held in Chicago featured not only militant Islamic leaders and repeated exhortations to support terrorist attacks, but also condemnations of the United States. The former was typified by Mohammad abu Faris, a Jordanian Islamic leader: “We were blamed in writing that we do not comply with what our religion orders us to. It orders us to fight the Jews and we did not kill them, and [by that omission] we did not perform our religion [religious duty]. Therefore, had we claimed that we do perform what our religion orders us and obliges us to do while we are not doing it—then they [those who have blamed us] would have been right. They wrote that our reality contradicts our religion.”
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Furthermore, abu Faris stated, “There is only one way to liberate Palestine and Al-Aqsa, and that is the fighting, that is the Jihad, that is the slaughtering, that is the butchering…call it dialogue.” At the conclusion of his statement, the assembled crowd erupted in laughter at the mention of any type of “dialogue.”

The latter was typified by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who at the time of his speech before the 1996 IAP annual convention in Chicago was the executive director of the American Muslim Council (AMC) and a politically active member of the Muslim community within the United States. Alamoudi did not advocate violence against the United States, at least not openly: “if we are outside this country we can say O Allah, destroy America, but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it…. There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means…to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America.”
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His message was surely not lost on his listeners.

The 1997 IAP Annual Conference attracted several thousand Muslims for three days of militant lectures focused on Palestine, Islam, Israel, and Jews. Featured speakers included an impressive array of Hamas supporters from the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan, as well as a number of prominent militant American Muslim leaders. Speakers delivered lectures in English and Arabic on panels with titles such as: “Zionism: A Racist and Colonial Ideology,” “Contemporary Movements of Islamic Renewal and the Societal Plan,” “The Settlement Process in the Middle East: Results and Expectations,” “The Dome of the Rock: the First
Qibla
[Muslim direction of prayer] or the Eternal Capital of the Jews?” Lectures varied in their level of militancy and vitriol toward Jews, with the Arabic lectures being decidedly more militant. One presenter was Jordan’s Ahmed al-Kufahi, a member of the Islamic Action Front (IAF) political party. The IAF serves as the political voice of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Jordan. At the conference, al-Kufahi commented on the obligation of engaging in jihad on behalf of the land of Palestine:

In Islam, if your enemy occupies a small piece of your land, then you have to declare jihad against the enemy. Jihad becomes a must and a religious obligation on all Muslims to go and fight the enemy.…women must go for jihad without taking permission from their husbands…slaves without taking permission from their masters…boys without taking permission from their fathers…. Palestine is occupied by the enemy. The occupation of Palestine shouldn’t be dealt with as a regional one [issue] but as an Islamic obligation, because occupation of any Islamic land is a violation to the Sovereignty of Islamic world.
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Ali al-Bayanuni, leader of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, added, “The Palestine issue is the most important issue for Muslims and its liberation and confronting the Zionist challenge should be on the top of our priorities as Muslims, and we should prepare ourselves for that task. Jihad is an Islamic obligation and a must on all Muslims.”
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Year after year, the rhetoric has continued. At the 1999 IAP Annual Conference in Chicago, Salah Sultan, who delivered the Friday prayer sermon, set the tone by indicating that American support of Israel would come back to haunt the United States: “My advice to the American society: See the realities, do not take them from the false media that bank on your credulity and submissiveness. The Zionist regime is a danger to the Jews, a danger to Christians, a danger to Americans.”
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Sultan also encouraged the youth at the conference to strive toward martyrdom for Palestine by saying, “I want every child to sleep on the wound of Palestine and the actions of martyrdom, just like that mother in the country whose son wrote to her that they are to meet in Paradise….”

Blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric spewed from another session at which the Jordanian Sheikh Ahmed al-Kufahi stated, “Jews are the enemies of humanity even before they are the enemies of Muslims, therefore it is necessary to remove them from power.”

As recently as the 2000 IAP Annual Conference, convened in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, fund-raising for Hamas was on full display. Imam Jamal Said from Bridgeview, Illinois, put it like this:

I appeal to you, on this night that is ushering in the holy month of Ramadan, to be generous and give plenty, to keep the light in the houses of our martyrs burning. We have boxes here that say “Help us, help the Aqsa cause, Islamic Association for Palestine!” We want you to fill those boxes. There is no better charity than to pay for the family of a martyr.
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Renowned Kuwaiti sheikh Tariq Suweidan added incendiary comments for his rapt audience: “Palestine will not be liberated but through jihad. Nothing can be achieved without sacrificing blood. The Jews will meet their end at our hands.”
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A fund-raising session was held to raise $200,000 for the Islamic Association for Palestine. As an impetus for giving to the organization, the fund-raiser read aloud the Arabic will of “martyr” Hamdi Yasin, who died while killing an Israeli officer by driving his car into a military checkpoint.

I say, it is not correct when some people say that we commit suicide because we do not value life. We love life, but life in dignity…. I cannot allow God’s houses to be violated without defending them…. At the Law Faculty of Al-Azhar University I was about to receive a certificate in law, but in this phase I prefer another kind of certificate, the other life, martyrdom in the path of God, the other certificate is martyrdom in the path of God. There is a big difference between the two certificates….
Finally I pray to Almighty God that my action may result in the death of the greatest number of God’s enemies possible.
Let them know that our hallowed places, and our brains, and our blood are not cheap. I profess that there is no god but the One God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God. [emphasis added]
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There are other means by which IAP spreads its violent, pro-Hamas rhetoric. One avenue of expression has been the use of an Internet e-mail list which provides news from “Palestine” and press releases from the IAP. In May 2000, IAP president Rafiq Jaber wrote in one of these e-mail postings that the Palestinian Authority must recognize that the only means to deal with the Israelis is through violence. Lauding the success of the Hizballah terrorist organization in prompting an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Jaber wrote, “Maybe the PA [Palestinian Authority] will take a hard look at the slippery road it is now traveling and join the resistance to Zionist occupation in order to liberate the land of Palestine. I firmly believe that Palestine will never be liberated by any other means.”
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On August 28, 2000, IAP distributed a Hamas communiqué on its e-mail bulletin that praised the Hamas terrorist mujahid Mahmoud abu Hannoud for killing Israelis. It stated, “He was able, all praises to Allah, to kill three enemy soldiers and wound nine others, one of whom sustained serious injuries.”
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Another avenue of expression for the IAP has been through its publications. The IAP currently publishes a biweekly newspaper called
Al-Zaitonah
which, like its now defunct English-language counterpart the
Muslim World Monitor,
celebrates successful Hamas terrorist attacks. In 1994 one headline proclaimed: “In its greatest operation, Hamas takes credit for the bombing of an Israeli bus in the center of Tel Aviv.” Other articles warn of “anti-Muslim conspiracies,” for example by denouncing the first World Trade Center bombing as a Mossad-FBI plot (designed, of course, to discredit Islam). Sometimes, IAP simply republishes extremist articles from the right-wing Liberty Lobby plus a stable of left-wing conspiracy theorists. More recently, articles have run in which different organizations have competed for credit in promoting Hamas in the political arena. In one interview in
Al-Zaitonah,
Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the former executive director of the American Muslim Council (AMC), stated, “I request the brothers [in the IAP] not to demand too much from us in terms of Palestine. Our position with regard to the peace process is well-known. We are the ones who went to the White House and defended what is called Hamas.”
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Across the IAP’s many venues, explicit references to Hamas have dwindled since antiterrorism legislation prohibited the provision of material support or resources to Hamas from the United States. But the lack of mention of Hamas has made little difference in practice. Raeed Tayeh, an IAP representative, explained the organization’s agenda at a rally held at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., on October 28, 2000:

I come with three messages that the Islamic Association for Palestine would like to reiterate. I am going to say them in Arabic and then in English. Number one:
kul philastin min Nahar il al-Bahar,
all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Number two:
Kul Philastin Quds,
all Palestine is sacred, not just just al-Quds, and number three,
Aqsa al alahi eluhum,
our
Aqsa
is not their temple.

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InfoCom hosted the Web sites of more than 500 companies and nonprofit groups, including a variety of Islamic groups and charities, including the Holy Land Foundation. Rafiq Jaber, president of the Islamic Association for Palestine, scoffed that InfoCom was “being raided because it’s a Muslim company, like the Holy Land Foundation.”
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Was InfoCom really just an internet service provider? Or was it providing “material support” for Hamas? Was it involved in technology transfers to terrorist-supporting regimes? It is important to stress that InfoCom has not been convicted of any wrongdoing—yet the confluence of location (Richardson) and personnel (Dahduli and the Marzooks) are troubling.