When Curly went wrong
Yet another convert to Islam gets the idea that jihad has something to do with killing Infidels. Yet again the Muslim community in the U.S. is not called to account by anyone for failing to institute even a single program to teach against this understanding of Islam that they supposedly reject.
“Accused Alabama terrorist to plead guilty to federal criminal charge,” by Brendan Kirby | bkirby@al.com By Brendan Kirby for AL.com, April 10 (thanks to Patrick Poole):
MOBILE, Alabama — An accused terrorist with ties to Birmingham has announced he will plead guilty to the federal charge.
Dom Soto, an attorney for Randy “Rasheed” Wilson, told a judge at a pretrial conference this week that his client will plead guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. A hearing has been scheduled for April 19 before U.S. District Judge Kristi DuBose.
A plea agreement has not been filed yet, but Soto said prosecutors have indicated they intend to seek a sentence of 15 years in prison.
“We”re free to argue for less,” he said. “It’s pretty disheartening.”
Wilson, converted to Islam along with his mother after she married an Egyptian man, attended the Birmingham Islamic Society as a young boy and was living in Mobile when a grand jury indicted him last year, had planned to fight the charges. Soto had urged DuBose to dismiss the charges on grounds that they were unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. She rejected those arguments last month.
Soto said his client had a change of heart.
“He just wanted to plead guilty and get it over with,” he said.
Prosecutors allege that Wilson conspired with Mohammad Abdul Rahman Abukhdair, a Syracuse, New York, native he met online in 2010 and who later moved from Egypt to Mobile. Authorities secretly recorded hours of conversations between the two and others in which they discussed committing violent acts in the name of violent jihad, according to the FBI.
Federal agents arrested Wilson in December as he and his family were about to get on a plane in Atlanta bound for Morocco. He planned to rendezvous there with Abukhdair and, according to the allegations, move to another African country where they could insinuate themselves in a jihadist struggle.
According to testimony from an FBI agent at a detention hearing in December, Wilson and Abuhkdair discussed committing violent crimes in Mobile in order to raise money to pay for their travel expenses. Those conversations, which took place in December 2011 and January 2010, focused on robbery.
One idea, according to the testimony, was to target the owners of local businesses for home invasion robberies.
Soto said Wilson was not confident that a jury selected in Mobile would be able to look past some of those inflammatory conversations from two years ago and put them in context.
“Some of the things that he’s said on the tapes are pretty bad,” Soto said….