Nothing really surprising here. This tallies with what the Center for Religious Freedom discovered in 2005. This piece, like the Center for Religious Freedom’s report, blames Wahhabism and ignores the wider problem, but it’s at least some contrast to the PC falsehoods that ordinarily dominate the public discourse on this topic.
“Private undercover team exposes nationwide network of radical, anti-U.S. Islamic centers,” from Insight, with thanks to all who sent this in:
Hundreds of Islamic centers in the United States have become a hot-bed of extremist activity; they promote violence, terrorism and hatred against America.
“Our initial investigation has concluded there are between 400 to 500 radical Islamic centers in the U.S.,” said David Gaubatz, the director of counterintelligence and counterterrorism for the Society of Americans for National Existence. “In those places, they preach an extreme version of Islam that says America and the West is the enemy. They espouse violence, hatred and the need for terrorism.”
Gaubatz is a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who now works for the Mapping Shari”a in America Project (www.mappingsharia.com), which is supported by SANE, a national non-profit group devoted to investigating the 2,300 Islamic centers in the U.S. for extremist activity.
Gaubatz and his investigators are currently active and will soon form a team of about 12. They pose as people interested in converting to Islam or who are current Muslims. Their goal is to infiltrate mosques and Muslim centers. Recently, he and his team penetrated the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, located in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
Sporting a beard and Muslim dress, Gaubatz said he went on May 18 to the center, pretending to be an American interested in becoming a convert to Islam. He discovered the center espoused terrorism and jihad against America.
Odd. Why dress that way if you’re just posing as someone interested in converting?
“They are teaching what they call Jihad Qital, which means physical jihad,” Gaubatz said. “They”re teaching violence and hatred of the United States.”
Gaubatz said that he met the two primary clerics at Dar Al-Hijrah, Imam Shaker Elsayed and Imam Johari Abdulmalik. Both men have been trained in Saudi Arabia. He says another key individual is Yusef Estes, an informal senior leader at the center and an internationally influential Muslim scholar who was trained in Saudi Arabia.
“They put me through the process of learning their faith and ideology,” Gaubatz said. “They felt close to me and they gave me literature and CDs. They told me to study. The literature is very Jihad Qital.”
He said that the Islamic center has deep ties to Saudi Arabia and espouses Wahhabism, a virulent and puritanical version of Islam.
“Many members of the mosque provided me literature to study. Most of the literature they gave me was from Saudi Arabia,” he said. “Their literature preaches that America and the West are decadent and evil, and that Muslims have a moral duty to engage in violence against the infidels.”
Read it all.