Two More Terrorists Traced Back to ‘Jihad U.’
Last week, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty for trying to murder 289 innocent civilians on Christmas Day 2009: he claimed he is guilty under U.S. law, but innocent under Islamic law. Earlier this month, North Carolina resident and al-Qaeda English-language propagandist Samir Khan met his end in a drone strike targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Anwar al-Awlaki, former imam at the Dar al-Hijrah terrorist factory in Falls Church, Virginia.
Both Abdulmutallab and Khan had connections to Awlaki, but they also had one additional tie: they were both former members of the extremist AlMaghrib Institute. (I first wrote about AlMaghrib’s extremist teaching back in February 2007.) With Khan’s death and Abdulmutallab’s guilty plea, the pair join a long line of terrorist operatives who have graduated from “Jihad U.”
Samir Khan’s connection to AlMaghrib goes back to at least October 2004, when his profile on AlMaghrib’s online forums was established (his profile is still online).
According to CNN, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab flew to Houston and attended a 16-day AlMaghrib seminar featuring hate sheikh Yasir Qadhi and dedicated to teaching young Muslims “the nuts and bolts of Islam.” A Houston TV station reported that sermon audio sets by Anwar al-Awlaki were on sale during the conference. Abdulmutallab also attended two additional AlMaghrib events held in the UK.
Here are some other AlMaghrib Institute alumni who’ve turned to terror:
- Daniel Maldonado was arrested by Kenyan authorities traveling with Somali al-Shabaab operatives. He was convicted of training with a foreign terrorist organization and sentenced to 10 years in prison. His AlMaghrib profile (under his convert name Daniel Aljughaifi) is still on their internet forums. I wrote about Maldonado’s connection to AlMaghrib back in June 2007.
- Nuradin Abdi was one of the founding leaders of the AlMaghrib Institute chapter in Columbus, Ohio, and was indicted in June 2004 as part of an al-Qaeda cell that was planning on attacking civilians in a shopping mall. He pleaded guilty to material support for a terrorist organization and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He will be deported after serving his sentence.
- Tarek Mehanna is currently awaiting trial on charges he conspired to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. A recent New York Times Magazine profile of AlMaghrib Dean of Academic Affairs Yasir Qadhi notes that Mehanna was a student of the program, but it attempts to distance Qadhi from Mehanna and the other terror graduates of AlMaghrib: “Qadhi said he had little or no interaction with these former students and that none had approached him for counsel.” In Mehanna’s case, that is demonstrably false. In a post published by Qadhi immediately after Mehanna’s arrest (which has now been removed, but is reprinted here), the AlMaghrib dean admits that Mehanna had written for his Muslim Matters website.
- The New York Times Magazine profile of Yasir Qadhi also notes that two members of the D.C.-area “Pakistan 5,” Ramy Zamzam and Waqar Khan, were part of the AlMaghrib program. Another member of the cell, Ahmed Minni, is also known to have been associated with AlMaghrib. The Pakistan 5 were arrested in December 2009 in Sargodha, Pakistan, attempting to join a terrorist group intent on fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. One of the men had left behind a video tape announcing their intentions. They were tried in Pakistan and sentenced to 10 years. A January 2009 event announcement for an AlMaghrib seminar in Maryland shows Ramy Zamzam as the student services coordinator.
- Misbahuddin Ahmed was arrested in August 2010 in Canada as part of an Ottawa-based terror cell. In addition to promoting jihadist propaganda online, Ahmed and his sister were both members of AlMaghrib’s Montreal chapter, according to the Ottawa Citizen. Why the New York Times Magazine failed to include Ahmed in their AlMaghrib “roll of terror” is unknown.
- According to an Islamic leader in Canada, Sayyid Ahmed Amiruddin, several members of the Toronto 18 cell were active in the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre in Mississauga, which a CBC video report said is closely associated with AlMaghrib. One of the board members of the mosque was implicated in the plot. Amiruddin told the CBC that he watched as the suspects were radicalized, including entering his mosque dressed in military fatigues.
Considering AlMaghrib’s abject failure in deradicalizing their own students, it is all the more amazing that the National Counterterrorism Center has enlisted AlMaghrib dean Yasir Qadhi as an expert in deradicalization — notwithstanding his complaints at a meeting attended by a top Department of Homeland Security official that he was on the terror watch list.
One has to wonder if deradicalization is actually a goal of the AlMaghrib Institute, considering the river of hate that streams from its instructors and staff. I’ve previously reported here at PJ Media on Yasir Qadhi’s “Hoax of the Holocaust” rhetoric and his promotion of the cause of his teacher, terror ringleader Ali al-Timimi.
Qadhi is joined by other AlMaghrib faculty members, including: Saeed Rageah, who has publicly called for Allah to “destroy” the enemies of Islam and to “damn” the “infidels”; AlMaghrib head of Islamic history Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, who says that gays should be killed and pronounces Jews and other non-Muslims as “filth”; AlMaghrib Vice President Waleed Basyouni, who has spied Jewish plots and claimed that only Muslims can really know God (and who is described by Dateline NBC as “an outspoken critic of extremism”); and AlMaghrib founder and President Muhammad Alshareef, who has expounded on such interfaith themes as “Why the Jews Were Cursed.”
So as “Jihad U.” mourns the death of their alumnus Samir Khan and the conviction of regular AlMaghrib participant and would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Homeland Security officials and the establishment media continue to be mystified why students of the AlMaghrib Institute continue to graduate into terror.
This is just surreal! Only the gov’t.could have a guy on the terrorist watch list whom advises the gov’t on fighting terrorism! The fact that even the TSA complained about this situation is even MORE scary!
Q. President Obama, this Jihad U is a dangerous outfit. What are you going to do about it?
A. (Obama, feet up on his desk in the Oval Office, farts, and gives Q the finger)
Are you KIDDING?
Obama supports the agenda of Islamic expansionism every chance he gets.
He is a traitor by the definition in the US Constitution, and he deserves to be impeached and removed as such – and then tried in criminal court, convicted, and subjected to the traditional punishment involving the use of industrial hemp.
Why the interest in taking prisoners? After all, have the people changed all that much who advocate that others shed blood in the name of Allah?
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When are conservatives going to wake up and call for an end to all immigration and a national policy that focuses on returning our population to 200 million?
The world is killing itself with babies and war because of resource depletion. Why should we join them?
As the U.S. was the lone power other than the Soviet Union to stem the tide of facism in Europe and Asia during WWII, so will it be the lone island of sanity to handle the coming population crisis, but not if it itself is overwhelmed by failures from the Third World and their crazy feuds and con artistry.
Ask yourself what percentage of people in the Third World pay for electricity, music, films, software, books, cable and pay taxes compared to the West. The answer is that con artists care nothing for such considerations and they are also awash in fake products and illegal shanty towns on public land. Immigration is not improving America but destroying it.
How much federal and state treasure has been spent in the last decade on keeping muslims from killing us in America? 45,000 dead in Mexico in drug wars in the last 5 years according to the BBC – they are depraved.
At 1389 Blog we have been campaigning for a rollback of Muslim immigration, from the get-go. Under no circumstances should Muslims be allowed to set foot on the soil of any non-Muslim nation or territory, and all who are already present should be repatriated as the enemy aliens that they are. If a US-born citizen embraces Islam, that act should be considered equivalent to renouncing US citizenship. If that makes the individual in question a stateless person, then so be it.
I would also argue that, with economic conditions being what they are, we should allow no immigration at all (except for Christian refugees from Muslim persecution) until such time as we have a genuine labor shortage (unemployment 2 percent or less).
Islam is completely incompatible with the US Constitution and with life in any civilized society. Islam is not a religion in the sense that the First Amendment was intended to protect. Instead, it is an expansionist, enemy, totalitarian political ideology that seeks to rid the world of everything but itself.
Terak Mehanna
The Boston Herald reports that Occupy Boston protesters welcomed supporters of accused terrorist Terak Mehanna, claiming he is a “victim of anti-Muslim bias.” Mehanna provided “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” and acted as a “media wing” for al Qaeda. Mehanna also traveled to Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, seeking training from terror groups to fight American soldiers. Occupy Boston hosted the rally in support of Mehanna, yet claims not to take a position on his conviction.
There simply are NOT enough bullets in the world.