CAIR's Corey Saylor asks: "Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?" He asks this, mind you, about apparent surveillance of The Islamic Center of San Diego, where, according to the article, "two of the 9/11 hijackers worshiped in early 2000."
He asks this, mind you, as a member of a "civil rights" group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas jihad terror funding case in 2007, and which has had several of its officials arrested and convicted on various terror-related charges.
He asks this, mind you, in the context of protesting against the surveillance of several Southern California mosques, suggesting that there is no probable cause here despite the testimony of the Muslim Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, as far back as 1999, that 80% of American mosques were controlled by "extremists," and the findings of the Center for Religious Freedom in 2005, that hatred of Jews and Christians and Islamic supremacism were widely taught in American mosques.
"Reports concern Muslims: Alleged checks on San Diego, L.A. mosques spark calls for hearings," by H.G. Reza for the Los Angeles Times, May 29 (thanks to Twostellas):
A report that mosques in Los Angeles and San Diego are under federal surveillance has resurrected fears in the Muslim community about government monitoring and led two civil rights groups Wednesday to call for congressional hearings.The request for public hearings followed a newspaper article last week that cited FBI and Defense Department files pertaining to surveillance of mosques and Muslims in Southern California.
Corey Saylor, Washington spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the article in the San Diego Union-Tribune "has again raised concerns that our community is being watched."
"We've heard about this in the past, but this article appears to be the first confirmation that surveillance is taking place," Saylor said. "Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?"
Council chapters in Anaheim and San Diego joined the American Civil Liberties Union and Islamic Shura Council of Southern California in asking the U.S. House and Senate judiciary committees and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for hearings. In a letter to the committee chairmen and ranking minority members, the groups said hearings are needed to determine the extent of the surveillance and whether people are being monitored because they are Muslim.
[...]
The civil rights groups also want the hearings to determine if the U.S. military has engaged in domestic surveillance in violation of federal law. The Islamic Center of San Diego, where two of the 9/11 hijackers worshiped in early 2000, was the only mosque mentioned in the San Diego Union-Tribune article. The report did not specify which other mosques in Los Angeles and San Diego were allegedly under surveillance. But Saylor said it would not be surprising if mosques in Orange County were also monitored.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, members of the Islamic Center of Irvine and other local mosques have complained about FBI agents questioning them about imams' sermons and how often they attend services. In 2006, J. Stephen Tidwell, then-FBI assistant director in Los Angeles, met at the Irvine mosque with about 200 people who questioned him about government monitoring.
The meeting was prompted by media reports that the FBI was monitoring Muslim students at UC Irvine and USC. Tidwell denied that monitoring was taking place, telling the audience that "we still play by the rules."
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said the congressional hearings would compel the government "to say why they're amassing this information." "There's a lot of suspicion of the Muslim community," she said.
ACLU lawyers regularly go to mosques to advise worshipers that they do not have to answer questions from FBI agents about how long they have been in the United States, how often they attend services and what they get out of the sermons, Ripston said.
Why can't they answer questions like that? Which side is the ACLU on? As if we didn't know already.
"Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?"
Short answer? Yes. If I lived by a dealth cult who's goal was to kill or be killed for their deity, then I would want to monitor them as well.
yes, given its mainstream beliefs, islam is a "probable cause" for concern. the inclusion of islam as a faith protected by civil rights law is wrongheaded.
"federal surveillance"
Which means what, exactly? Is mail being opened? Are telephones tapped? Have listening devices been planted? Is e-mail being accessed?
Or are agents simply entering the premises?
No other faith would bar others from its services. Even a government agent has rights.
Wouldn't it be nice if being a Muslim were, indeed, a personal choice. A child born of a Muslim father is Muslim by birth, and the shahada is whispered into his ear while he is still wet. He/she never exercised a personal choice in this regard. Only a few, mostly Western women, actually choose Islam for a faith, and that's usually when they marry a Muslim. Adopting a particular faith as a personal choice implies the possibility of NOT adopting that faith or leaving that faith. Those options just aren't in the cards. If the sacred texts of Islam define this very personal choice, then it is quite likely that other personal and moral choices are also controlled by the sacred texts in equally sinister ways. Hence, surveillance.
While I am not sure that the mormon sect in Texas is "Christian" or not, it was a reglious institution that certainly did not qualify as a "threat" in the same way that islam is considered a threat; yet it was raided and hundreds of children were taken from their families.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7335841.stm
This relatively non-threatening religous group was obviously under surveillance more than this mosque in San Diego and the Authorities moved in like a paramilitary group.
Where was the ACLU then?
Why is a mosque exempt from surveillance when other religions apparently are not?
Why the duplicity and double standard when dealing with islam?
"Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?"
Yep, especially since no Muslims, none, do anything to reverse the well founded "probable cause". All they do is rub salt in our wounds 24/7, so don't look for the perception to change any time soon.
Besides, if what was said in these mosques became fully disclosed to the average citizens, the outcry would be to have them all closed down.
So on that note, an investigation should be conducted but not for the reasons cited.
If you keep saying that Sharia law must rule over all countries in the world, somebody is bound to notice.
Mosques in Iraq and Gaza have been centers of military activity, and have been used not only as weapons-storage facilities, but as American soldiers well know, are used as places from which to fire on Infidels or to hide those being pursued by Infidels.
In the countries of the still non-Islamic world, the authorities in France and Italy (the famous "moschea di Viale Jenner" in Milan) and elsewhere have found mosques to be places not only where plots are sometimes hatched, but where they have found, even in false ceilings, in addition to weapons of every kind, false passport, and what can only be described as terrorist propaganda. One hopes that, in any Congressional investigation of the monitoring of mosques, all of this material will be presented to the American public, and presented not once, to be overlooked or ignored, but presented again and again, with the lists of the kinds of things that have been found in mosques in Europe -- and that would be found here, too, were there more Muslims, and were they surer of what they could get away with.
Finally, the monitoring of the dangers from mosques is not, and should not, be limited to searches for weapons, genocidal propaganda including videocassettes proudly displaying decapitation techniques, but also cover, of course, what is said in the sermons, the khutbas. For the routine whipping up of Muslims -- as in Bangladesh, where after a particularly moving sermon exiting Muslims were prompted to beat to death a poor passing Hindu (it must have been quite a sermon)-- is a phenomenon well known not only to intelligent Infidels, but to Muslims.
In fact, let's find out what they do in Muslim countries worried about Islam. Kemal Ataturk, who so intelligently saw Turkey's future fate dependent on its ability to curb the political and social power of Islam, did many things to systematically constrain Islam -- ranging from the Hat Act, to giving women the right to vote, to ending the use of Arabic script (the better to break the connnection to the retrograde world of Arab Islam), to commissioning a Turkish translation of the Qur'an and the writing of a careful Qur'anic commentary (tafsir) also in Turkish (and also to attenuate, or sever, the link to what he saw as the hapless, hopeless world of Arab Islam, where Arab identity and Islam were mutuallly reinforcing. He banned the hijab in government universities. He made the army the bastion of Kemalism, and the officers corps was off-limits to anyone who showed too keen a devotion to Islam.
But Ataturk also did something else. He not only had the mosques monitored, but insisted that the government-controlled religious authorities would, from now on, write or in some cases vet the khutbas -- for he, Ataturk, knew that thohse khutbas were not merely about private devotion, about Man and the Creator, but potentially dangerous whipping-up-of-Muslim-hysteria affairs, and for the good of the Turkish state, and the people of Turkey (including, of course, its remaining non-Muslims) those khutbas had to be monitored, had to be controlled.
Nor is it much different elsewhere in the Muslim lands. In Tunisia, where Habib Bourguiba had taken Islam's measure, and worked to reduce itrs influence, and especially its constraints on women, his successor Ben Ali runs an enlightened and rather mild despotism, but still -- it is a despotism. For he, and those who follow in the Destour Party line, know what they are dealing with. And in order to deal with the sinister likes of Gannouchi, they have to adopt measures that in the heretofore-removed and spoiled West we have difficulty reconciling with our delicate sensibilities as to what is proper, and what improper.
But those who have been born into Islam but are aware, to one degree or another, of its powerful hold over the minds of primitive men (and most men, everywhere, are mostly primitive, so the reigning ideology or faith had better be a benign one for the sake of everyone)know what is at stake. It is they, in Turkey and Tunisia and elsewhere, who know perfectly well that a mosque is not a purely religious place, a place of individual worship as we think, for example, of churches and synagogues. No, it is a meeting-place for a collectivist faith, a faith that regards Believers as members of an army, an army from which they cannot desert (i.e., cannot become apostates) or if they do so, may be condemned to every kind of punishment, beginning with total outcast status, and ending, in Muslim lands, with death.
If the security services of the Western world have found not the equivalent of hymnals, but AK-47s and grenades, and videocassettes showing the beheading of Infidels and including calls for Jihad, if they have discovered, in their monitoring of mosques, the most bloodthirsty of sermons, and if even the governments of many Muslim countries, especially those of such countries attempting, in their different ways, to constrain the fearful political -- or geopolitical -- power of Islam, then why is not sensible, why is it not a rational act of self-defense, for us, in this country, to regard mosques not as places of worship akin to churches and synagogues and Hindu temples, but as something much more, just as Islam is much more than what we in the West considere to be a religion, but is a politics and a geopolitics, and until that is understood by more people, we will continue to be far more vulnerable than we, or the now chastened and coming-horrifiedly-to-their-senses people of Western Europe, deserve to be.
This may be a case of be careful what you wish for, you may get it. If the public hearings are truly open to the reasons that people need to be concerned about the presence of mosques and the teachings of Islam in their community, that can only be a good thing. The more publicity it gets, the better.
interesting idea, george mc.
the joining of organizations like jihadwatch to CAIR to support congressional hearings would get publicity, as would calls for GREATER inquiry into what happens in mosques, and an inquiry into the benefit of removing civil rights protection for the only "religion" that is a danger to society.
Here they go again, spending (wasting) the taxpayers money.
You go to any church in this country and you take a video camera with you.If they won't let you in then you need to find another church because they have something to hide.I would be willing to bet in almost all cases you'd be welcomed,as many churches tape thier own homilies anyway.
Most christian churches understand that GOD's word is for everyone to hear,not just a select few.
JLP
Mosques should be watched because many of them contain elements of hatred of non Muslims and would be the most likely place to find sedition. This was made clear by Muslim scholar Ahmed Mansour during his visit to a mosque in Cambridge Massachusetts. When he made his findings public. he was sued by the Islamic society of Boston.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/05/17/muslim_reformer_still_a_target/
FINALLY, my tax dollars are actually being spent on a worthwhile cause!
Monitor away, FBI.
Maybe someone can ask ACLU's Corey Saylor this question, come this December when the ACLU is attacking Christianity and a Nativity Scene...'Has faith moved from a personal choice to a probable cause?'.
Just saying.
The case at hand with the Islamic Center of San Diego is more of a neighborhood watch issue for me, being that it is within a few blocks of my home. I became interested in the facility when I was a mere adolescent in the early 90's. I knew something just wasn' right over there. And I can speak from experience when I say the "congregation" is highly suspicious of outsiders. If you enter te grounds you are immediatley questioned if you are a Muslim. Then if you say no, you are asked why not, then you are hounded to accept Mo. One of their tactics (see Stealth Jihad) is to blindly walk in front of traffic when entering or leaving the mosque. Especially at the wee hours of the morning with little or no visibility, you can find the mumeen( faithfull) strutting out in front of oncomming traffic. Not to say that they do not have a right to cross the street, but they have an obligation to not cause accidents or injuries. I cannot count the numerous taxi cab vs. minivan / high-end SUV accidents I've witnessed. Can you say total disregard for OUR cultural standards? The mosque has completley changed the demographics of the neighborhood. Another tactic,like Russians in Kyrgyzistan, they populate,IMMIGRATE, do not assimalate, and breed to outnumber.
I think Jihad Watch should contact CAIR and the ACLU and ask to join the request for hearings. Let congress know that it is a concern of both sides of the debate.
Of course the risk is that CAIR would take the position that if Spencer wants it, then it must be bad for Islam and withdraw support. So never mind, let them hang themselves.
As always, the Left (ACLU) sides with anything inimical to America and freedom.
From whence comes the money?
OT (or maybe not). At the top of the chain from Scott McClellan's 'tell all' book through the publisher and up through various holding companies we find... George Soros.
As always, the Left (ACLU) sides with anything inimical to America and freedom.
From whence comes the money?
OT (or maybe not). At the top of the chain from Scott McClellan's 'tell all' book through the publisher and up through various holding companies we find... George Soros.
A mosque is not a religious establishment in the ordinary meaning that one would associate with, say, a church or a synagogue or a temple. Islam does not have anything in the way of a religious service, and therefore has no need of a building dedicated to such nonexistent ceremony.
In reality, a mosque is just a meeting hall. It serves as a focal point for community affairs, of any kind. That's why, for instance, stockpiling and storing weapons in a mosque is permitted in Shari'a.
Treating Islam as a "religion" (in the Christian sense, mainly) is a fundamental error. Islam is a political ideology.
"A report that mosques in Los Angeles and San Diego are under federal surveillance has resurrected fears in the Muslim community about government monitoring and led two civil rights groups Wednesday to call for congressional hearings."
Yeah, I agree, there should be congressional hearings on why only mosques in those two cities are being monitored. Oh wait, . . .
A more salient question would be "Has faith moved from a personal choice to a automatic immunity for all criminal behavior and an complete abdication of personal responsibility?"
Someone above mentioned the "Christian" polygamists who were raided, while Muslim polygamy goes uninvestigated, even when authorities are aware of it.
Any other group of people committing violent crimes to this degree would have been investigated up the wazoo a long time ago.
Read the book, the Holy Holy Qur'an and the ahadith; they are a clarion call to commit crimes (according to the corrupt infidels' laws): murder for non-believers and apostates, wife beating, thievery, child sexual abuse, polygamy, and more.
"Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?"
No, not all faith
"A report that mosques in Los Angeles and San Diego are under federal surveillance has resurrected fears in the Muslim community about government monitoring and led two civil rights groups Wednesday to call for congressional hearings."
With all of the Muslims who have been arrested in this country for terror related crimes, I hope that they're monitoring more than the L.A. and San Diego mosques for crying out loud, including all CAIR offices.
I should also mention that there is another mosque in San Diego that should be scrutinized. I won't name it here, but it is on the same street as the main gate entrance to MCAS Miramar. I hope,in the most sincere meaning of the word, that someone at a federal level, even a local level, is monitoring that location. The attendants seem to adhere to the Tablighi school. It also seems that there is a push to gain hispanic converts with ample distribution of Spanish language Qurans and tracts, of course published by the usual suspects. Do the math.
If they squawk that loudly, they've got something to hide.
As a rule of thumb, the mosques of those Muslim spokesmen who squawk loudest, should be investigated first, without warning. Thoroughly, from basement to attic, with sniffer dogs. Forensic examination of all finances and all computer material; and non-Muslims fluent in Arabic (or Farsi, or other appropriate language) and knowledgeable about which authors and 'scholars' are most popular among the jihadis, examining all documents, books, electronic materials, etc.
Churches and synagogues in the San Diego area could call their bluff, you know.
Set up a little video surveillance type screen on the fence outside, such that during services everything that is done and said may be viewed by every passer by; or install a webcam or webcams and webcast continuous footage, 24/7, of the interior of the church and/ or synagogue, together with the hall, office and meeting rooms.
Nothing to hide. WYSIWYG.
Then challenge the mosques to do likewise.
What a bummer that Muslims were put on notice after 9/11.
Muslims don't monitor churches in Muslims lands, they remove them.