by Steven Emer­son
IPT NEWS

Much has been writ­ten about the U.S. government’s cur­rent bout of schiz­o­phre­nia in its out­reach to the Amer­i­can Mus­lim com­mu­nity, specif­i­cally related to the Depart­ment of Jus­tice. While fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors in Dal­las have labeled sev­eral Islamist orga­ni­za­tions as unin­dicted co-conspirators – describ­ing them as front groups for Hamas and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood — in the ter­ror­ist financ­ing trial against the Holy Land for Relief and Devel­op­ment (HLF), the FBI is meet­ing with the very same groups to hold out­reach events and the Civil Rights Divi­sion of the DOJ is set­ting up booths at their con­fer­ences.

As wrong­headed and short­sighted as these poli­cies are, they do not hold a can­dle to a recent out­reach event held by the FBI’s Detroit field office at the end of last month. As reported in the Detroit Free Press (see: Detroit’s FBI chief: Vio­lence extrem­ism cuts across reli­gions), two top FBI offi­cials from that office “spoke to about 50 Mus­lims inside the Islamic Orga­ni­za­tion of North Amer­ica, or Tanzeem-e-Islami.” The Free Press described the orga­ni­za­tion as merely “a Sunni mosque with a pri­mar­ily Pak­istani con­gre­ga­tion” and tells us that the meet­ing was noth­ing more than “part of an effort by the FBI to reach out to Mus­lims and other communities.”

While out­reach to the Mus­lim com­mu­nity remains an impor­tant endeavor, offi­cials at the FBI and other law enforce­ment agen­cies have become far less dis­cern­ing in deter­min­ing who the gate­keep­ers and spokes­men for the Amer­i­can Mus­lim com­mu­nity should be.

	Israr Ahmad

Take this recent meet­ing with Tanzeem-e-Islami, a group founded in Pak­istan in 1975 and headed by a man named Dr. Israr Ahmad. The FBI might be unaware, but Ahmad is often cred­ited with ini­ti­at­ing the vicious rumor, spread through­out the Mus­lim world, that Israel was respon­si­ble for the 9/11 attacks. On the heels of the attacks, he sent faxes to var­i­ous U.S. mosques and Islamic cen­ters, stat­ing:

The secret Israeli ser­vice Musad [sic] orches­trated these ter­ror­ist attacks ... [which] are a vital link in the chain of events that the Jews are under­tak­ing to ful­fill their dream of world domination.

It turns out that Dr. Ahmad is a rather pro­lific writer on such top­ics, and anti-Semitic con­spir­acy the­o­ries per­me­ate his writ­ing. Canada’s National Post reported in 2006 that, accord­ing to Ahmad:

Islam’s renais­sance will begin in Pak­istan … because the Arab world is liv­ing under sub­ju­ga­tion. Only the Pak­istan region “has the poten­tial for stand­ing up against the nefar­i­ous designs of the global power-brokers and to resist the ris­ing tides of the Jewish/Zionist hegemony.”

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg when it comes to Ahmad’s opin­ions about Jews. Also reported in the National Post:

Another of his books repeats the Jew­ish con­spir­acy the­o­ries pop­u­lar among neo-Nazis, claim­ing that Jews have “a deeply ingrained ten­dency to con­spire and to maneu­ver things sur­rep­ti­tiously for their own gain.”

The Jews exert a “wicked web of con­trol and exploita­tion” through their own­er­ship of banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies and stock exchanges, he claims.

He com­pares Jews to par­a­sites, calls the Holo­caust “Divine pun­ish­ment” and fore­sees the “total exter­mi­na­tion” of Jews at the hands of Muslims.

Ahmad lives in Pak­istan and didn’t attend the meet­ing. But what’s the best that can be said about the FBI, whose offi­cials meet with mem­bers of a group founded by such a hate-filled man?

Ahmad’s views are not lim­ited to anti-Jewish rhetoric. He’s also a lead­ing advo­cate of Islamic supremacy and the revival of the Caliphate. A sim­ple trip to the Islamic Orga­ni­za­tion of North America’s web­site would have led the FBI to arti­cles call­ing for this. Some of the links are now defunct (per­haps due to bad press from the National Post), but their con­tent can be judged clearly by their titles. Accord­ing to the National Post, the Tanzeem-e-Islami’s “goal is to estab­lish the sys­tem of social jus­tice of the Caliphate [Islamic state] firstly in Pak­istan and then in the whole world,” and that Ahmad’s “ideal state” would include the fol­low­ing three principles:

“(1) Sov­er­eignty belongs to Almighty Allah alone; (2) No leg­is­la­tion can be done at any level that is totally or par­tially repug­nant to Koran and Sun­nah, and; (3) Full cit­i­zen­ship of the state is for the Mus­lims only.”

And Dr. Ahmad is not shy about his objec­tive. An offi­cial bio states:

For the last forty years or so, Dr. Israr Ahmad has been actively engaged not only in reviv­ing the Qur’an-centered Islamic peren­nial phi­los­o­phy and world-view but also reform­ing the soci­ety in a prac­ti­cal way with the ulti­mate objec­tive of estab­lish­ing a true Islamic State, or the Sys­tem of Khilafah.

And Tanzeem extrem­ism is not an abstract threat. There are real time exam­ples on North Amer­i­can soil. Just last month, the New York Times reported on an Islamic extrem­ist in North Car­olina, 21-year old Samir Khan, in an arti­cle titled, “An Inter­net Jihad Aims at U.S. View­ers.” As reported in the Times, before hook­ing up with Tanzeem, Khan:

[m]irrored his teenage peers, from their slang to their baggy pants, until August 2001 when, at age 15, he said, he attended a week­long sum­mer camp at a mosque in Queens, which was spon­sored by a fun­da­men­tal­ist but non­vi­o­lent group now known as the Islamic Orga­ni­za­tion of North Amer­ica (IONA).

“They were teach­ing things about reli­gion and broth­er­hood that cap­ti­vated me,” Mr. Khan said. He said he went back to school know­ing “what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Mus­lim, a strong Mus­lim, a prac­tic­ing Muslim.”

And now Khan is a lead­ing jihadi web­mas­ter. And Dr. Ahmad would be proud of Khan, as Ahmad him­self came to the United States to spread his rad­i­cal ver­sion of Islam, speak­ing at a con­fer­ence spon­sored by the Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica (ISNA) in 1995 – the same group that’s listed as an unin­dicted co-conspirator in the HLF Hamas fundrais­ing trial, and whose 2007 con­ven­tion in Illi­nois included a booth spon­sored by the Civil Rights Divi­sion of the Depart­ment of Jus­tice.

At the 1995 con­fer­ence, Ahmad report­edly told the audi­ence, “The process of the revival of Islam in dif­fer­ent parts of the world is real. A final show­down between the Mus­lim world and the non-Muslim world, which has been cap­tured by the Jews, would soon take place. The Gulf War was just a rehearsal for the com­ing conf
lict.” Ahmad said that all Mus­lims, includ­ing those in the room and the rest of the Amer­i­can Mus­lim com­mu­nity, should be ready for just such a battle.

Tanzeem-e-Islami mem­ber and stu­dent of Ahmad, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, was the “prayer leader” at the Al-Rahman Islamic Cen­ter and alleged spir­i­tual leader of a 17-member cell that pur­chased three tons of ammo­nium nitrate to bomb sev­eral tar­gets in Ontario includ­ing the par­lia­ment build­ing in Ottawa, and the CN Tower and Cana­dian Secu­rity and Intel­li­gence Ser­vice offices in Toronto. The arrests of Abdul Jamal and his fol­low­ers were a part of a series of raids in Europe and North Amer­ica – that began in Bosnia with the arrest of a two-man cell charged in a plot to attack the British embassy in Sara­jevo – all con­nected to a world­wide Inter­net ter­ror­ism net­work with links to al Qaeda in Iraq, among other ter­ror­ist elements.

Tanzeem-e-Islami mem­bers have also part­nered with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood front group, the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety (MAS), whose Pres­i­dent was forced to resign in Sep­tem­ber from his appoint­ment on the Virginia’s Com­mis­sion of Immi­gra­tion, when his rad­i­cal speeches were posted on the Inter­net. The groups issued a joint press release in 2004 dis­cussing their “unity of pur­pose.” As fur­ther evi­dence of their coop­er­a­tion, recently, both groups became mem­bers of an out­fit call­ing itself the North­ern Cal­i­for­nia Islamic Coun­cil.

Exac­er­bat­ing this abject igno­rance of some FBI offi­cials are the remarks by Spe­cial Agent in Charge Andrew Arena to Tanzeem-e-Islami mem­bers describ­ing the dan­gers of extrem­ists in every reli­gion. Accord­ing to the Free Press, Arena told the assem­bled audi­ence, “There are plenty of peo­ple out there in my faith, the Chris­t­ian faith, who use these extrem­ist views to sup­port their thoughts on racial supe­ri­or­ity, be it the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Aryan Nation, all these peo­ple, these groups...they’re all based on a reli­gious view.” So aside from pro­vid­ing an Islamic suprema­cist sect with more ammu­ni­tion to jus­tify its own anti-Western views, what exactly is Arena hop­ing to accom­plish with his meeting?

Iron­i­cally, Agent Arena could not have been more obliv­i­ous to the nature of the group he was address­ing. The same story states, “Arena said after the meet­ing that in ‘every reli­gion, you have indi­vid­u­als who try to hijack the faith...the Mus­lim faith, the Jew­ish faith, the Chris­t­ian faith.’” In case the exam­ples of Ahmad’s hatred and Islamic supremacy listed above are not enough to con­vince Agent Arena just who the hijack­ers in this sce­nario are, here are some more of Dr. Ahmad’s reli­gious stylings:

In an arti­cle titled, “Why Israel Is Unac­cept­able,” Ahmad refers to Israel as a dis­ease, asserting:

Pak­istan was born nine months ear­lier than Israel. In my opin­ion this was not a coin­ci­dence. For, in accor­dance with a say­ing of the Prophet (SAW) — “Allah (SWT) has not cre­ated a dis­ease with­out cre­at­ing its cure” — Pak­istan was cre­ated as an “anti­dote” to the state of Israel and will face up Israel in the final con­fronta­tion of Truth and falsehood.

And he engages in more of his trade­mark, vir­u­lent anti-Semitism, writing:

It is a his­tor­i­cal fact that Jews have always exploited their friends and allies to their own advantage.

Dr. Ahmad delves fur­ther into Nazi rhetoric, inform­ing his read­ers that:

[t]he Jews have exploited the Protes­tants to accom­plish most of their ill-conceived objec­tives, such as: the pro­mo­tion of sec­u­lar­ism and the estab­lish­ment of interest-based bank­ing sys­tem. The bank­ing sys­tem was used as a bait to clutch the whole of Chris­t­ian world into the jaws of interest-based lend­ing and, thus, into per­pet­ual debt.

And, unsur­pris­ingly, he views the Arab-Israeli con­flict through a, some may say, “hijacked” reli­gious lens:

We need to under­stand that the con­flict over Pales­tine is not between the Arabs and Israel, instead, it is between Mus­lims and Jews.

Lest FBI offi­cials claim that the mem­bers of Tanzeem-e-Islami should not be held respon­si­ble for the hate-filled rant­i­ngs of its leader, a Tanzeem-e-Islami pub­li­ca­tion call­ing for the restora­tion of the Islamic Caliphate titled, “Why Tanzeem-e-Islami?” (pub­lished in Flush­ing NY in 1997), has a page for a signed “Oath of Alle­giance For Join­ing Tanzeem-e-Islami” which includes a “pledge to Dr. Israr Ahmad, Ameer of Tanzeem-e-Islami.”

It seems obvi­ous that many gov­ern­ment offi­cials are hardly dis­cern­ing when it comes to deci­sions regard­ing Mus­lim out­reach and part­ner­ship pro­grams. After all, headquarters-directed FBI out­reach poli­cies, of which this inci­dent is symp­to­matic, require rou­tine meet­ings and coop­er­a­tion with mem­bers of Mus­lim Broth­er­hood front groups like the Coun­cil on American-Islamic Rela­tions (CAIR) and ISNA. Even so, the Detroit field office’s meet­ing with a Tanzeem-e-Islami chap­ter stands out as highly dubi­ous, given its founders’ unapolo­getic brand of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.

Meet­ing with orga­ni­za­tions such as the Islamic Orga­ni­za­tion of North Amer­ica accrues no ben­e­fits to the FBI and only serves to empower extrem­ists such as Ahmad in his quest to spread his puri­tan­i­cal, hate­ful, and intol­er­ant ide­ol­ogy. These FBI out­reach poli­cies imposed by head­quar­ters are under­min­ing our national secu­rity by reach­ing out to rad­i­cals in our midst.