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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

MIT’s Muslim chaplain raised money for al-Qaeda groups

May 11, 2015 10:07 pm By Robert Spencer

Suheil LaherEveryone at MIT no doubt assumed that Laher was a “moderate.” To question that assumption would have been “Islamophobic.”

“Al Qaeda’s Base at MIT,” by Ilya Feoktistov and Charles Jacobs, Breitbart, May 11, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

At the end of April, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a permanent memorial to MIT Police Officer Sean Collier. Officer Collier was gunned down by the Boston Marathon bombers, Chechen refugees Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, three days after they blew up the Marathon.

It is painful to learn that in the late 1990s, there were students at MIT who helped recruit for the Chechen jihad and raised funds for Al Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Tsarnaevs’ homeland. It is even more painful that the man who led this fundraising effort was still on MIT’s staff when Officer Collier was gunned down.

Suheil Laher had been MIT’s Muslim chaplain for almost 20 years. Today he continues to preach at the Islamic Society of Boston, the extremist mosque founded by MIT students near campus, where the Tsarnaevs worshipped during their radicalization.

Americans for Peace and Tolerance have just released a mini-documentary, “Al Qaeda’s Base at MIT,” showing how MIT Muslim chaplain Suheil Laher used his leadership of the MIT Muslim Students Association as a vehicle for raising money for Al Qaeda causes around the world. We especially focus on the Al Qaeda affiliate in Chechnya, which Laher and his associates lionized, even as MIT trusted him to be its Muslim students’ spiritual guide.

Suheil Laher came to MIT as a student in 1990 and by 1998, he became the MIT Muslim chaplain. By the year 2000, he also became president of a Muslim charity based in Boston called Care International, which was founded by Osama Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam and was originally called “Al Kifah Refugee Center.” Care International was, in essence, a fundraising vehicle for mujahideen. After the leader of Al Kifah in Brooklyn, “the Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rehman, was convicted for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Boston’s Care International took over as Al Qaeda’s main base in the United States. Laher, then, was quite an important figure in Al Qaeda’s leadership here. His perch at MIT meant that he had easy access to the best American Muslim minds – and their world-class technical skills.

As a religious scholar and an engineer, Laher was both the spiritual and technological leader of Care International. He pioneered the Jihadist use of the new Internet medium to fundraise and recruit for Al Qaeda causes online. Laher’s personal website prominently featured Abdullah Azzam’s notorious call to Jihad, a tract called “Join the Caravan:”

Beloved brother! Draw your sword, climb onto the back of your horse, and wipe the blemish off your ummah. If you do not take the responsibility, who then will?

That same Jihadist tract was found on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s computer.

Laher’s website contained a large collection of his writings and of sermons he gave in the Boston area. These sermons are replete with calls for Jihad, such as this passage:

When the Muslim lands are being attacked, and the Muslims are being raped and killed, the only solution prescribed by Allah is jihad. Jihad is for all times. […] Jihad does not stop. Those of us who have not yet managed to go and physically help our brothers and sisters should support […] our mujahidin brethren with prayer, with money, with clothes, by taking care of their families, and at some point in person. Otherwise, we must face the wrath of Allah.

One of the MIT students who answered Laher’s call to join the Jihad in person was a bright young biologist named Aafia Siddiqui. She started out as a passionate and prolific fundraiser for Care International, but by the time she was arrested by the FBI in Afghanistan in 2008, she was known as “Lady Al Qaeda” and had become the most wanted woman in the world. She is now serving an 86-year prison sentence for attempting to kill the FBI agents arresting her. Her belongings upon arrest included two pounds of cyanide and plans for mass casualty attacks on New York using chemical and biological weapons, as well as literature about the Ebola virus.

While Laher’s sermons preached the general Islamic obligation to do Jihad, Care International’s website along with its newsletter “Al Hussam” (“The Sword”) promoted what Laher and his fellow Care leaders saw as the concrete performance of that responsibility. In the late 1990s, Care International focused its fundraising activity on the Russian breakaway republic of Chechnya. Specifically, Care International backed the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists under the leadership of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

Basayev can arguably be described as one of the cruelest Islamic terrorists in modern Jihadist history. Our documentary recounts one of his cruelest acts: the Beslan School Massacre. On September 1, 2004, during a ceremony marking the first day of school, Basayev’s men surrounded the school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia and took over 1,100 people hostage, nearly eight hundred of them children. They murdered several people on the spot in front of the children and herded everyone into a sweltering gymnasium, where the hostages were kept without food or water for three days as bombs were hung up from the rafters and basketball hoops above them. On the third day, the terrorists started setting off the bombs and Russian security forces stormed the school as shell-shocked children ran the other way and were shot in the back by the terrorists. Three hundred and eighty five people were murdered, among them one hundred and eighty six children. Subsequently, Shamil Basayev bragged about his “success” at Beslan and the fact that the attack only cost him 8,000 Euros to launch. He was killed by Russian security forces in 2006.

Care International raised huge amounts of money for jihad around Boston, $1.7 million according to Federal authorities. A large portion of this money came through checks that were specifically earmarked for “Chechen Muslim fighters.” Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Care International hosted dispatches and communiques from Basayev and his forces in the field. A Care International “Al Hussam” newsletter praised a previous Basayev hostage operation against a Russian hospital’s maternity ward:

Minute by minute the whole world watched with agony, as some of the Mujahideen (not exceeding 80), under the leadership of Mujahid Shamil Basyev took 1500 Russians […] We cannot depend on anybody’s help; we have to fight evil with evil. The operation of the Mujahid Shamil Basayev is perfect proof.

How could MIT’s Muslim chaplain have led a group that applauded and funded such a savage?

In 2003, the FBI began investigating Care International for terrorism financing. At the same time, Basayev and his organization were designated as foreign terrorists. The flow of money from Boston to Chechnya stopped. After the Beslan Massacre, Basayev complained that the lack of funding prevented him from seizing more schools in Moscow and Leningrad. Because Basayev was not officially considered a terrorist before 2003, there was little the FBI could do to prosecute Laher and his fellow activists. Three Care leaders, including the group’s treasurer, received minor sentences for tax evasion. After being questioned by the FBI, Laher walked free and continued to influence students at MIT for more than another decade. His successor as MIT’s Muslim Chaplain, Hoda Elsharkawy, is herself closely linked through her husband to Laher and to Islamic extremism in Boston, which will be the focus of our future reporting.

While Laher officially stepped down from his post as MIT chaplain in 2014, he continues to preach at mosques in the Boston area, including the Tsarnaev’s own mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston – giving a sermon there as recently as May 1, 2015….

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Filed Under: academia, mosques Tagged With: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Suheil Laher


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    May 11, 2015 at 10:48 pm

    American politicians have to become better informed about the jihad threat which has infiltrated into the heart of almost every institution thanks to the terminally naïve Barak Obama and his terminally naïve Democrats.

    The CIA and FBI have been showing signs of rebelling against the insane willful blindness of the Obama administration.

    Hopefully, Democratic politicians will soon wise up and shake free of Obama’s delusion that deep down jihadists are nice guys.

    • ma says

      May 11, 2015 at 10:55 pm

      very well said and I agree totally!

    • spot on says

      May 12, 2015 at 11:47 am

      Why should they bury Jihadists 20 feet deep? Because deep down they are nice guys.

  2. mortimer says

    May 11, 2015 at 10:50 pm

    Why is Suheil Laher not in jail?

    • Susan says

      May 11, 2015 at 11:59 pm

      I think it is against the law to jail muslims.

      • Lia Wissing says

        May 12, 2015 at 4:51 am

        Can’t be. It’s only against the law to withhold prayer mats & qur’ans. May the wrath of allah simply fall on them en masse!

  3. mortimer says

    May 11, 2015 at 11:58 pm

    One look at Suheil Laher should send the FBI and CIA jihad alarm to maximum alert!

    We know who they are…just put a GPS bracelet on all of them with a built-in microphone to hear every word. Don’t like it? Go back to Berzerkistan.

  4. Ayatrollah says

    May 12, 2015 at 3:51 am

    I think it is time to redefine groups like Al Qaeda and friends into more of a church social groups, like American ladies who start groups to feed the poor. Over night the problem of terrorism would be fixed. We just don’t talk about it or only for a minute.

  5. More Ham Ed says

    May 12, 2015 at 4:09 am

    MIT; he was busy turning the place into the Muslim Institute of Technology. Dirty beards.

  6. Angemon says

    May 12, 2015 at 5:51 am

    By the year 2000, he also became president of a Muslim charity based in Boston called Care International

    That’s pronounced “CAIR International”.

  7. Always On Watch says

    May 12, 2015 at 7:00 am

    I have to wonder how long it will be before some Muslim saws off an infidel’s head on the campus of MIT.

  8. The Last English Prince says

    May 12, 2015 at 7:17 am

    Years ago I purchased Basayev’s book on jihad off a Chechen web portal. Undoubtedly, my money went toward “the cause” but I wanted to see his writing. What can I say? It was simplistic and not scholarly, but it was about jihad.

    A later available book from another individual was a much better (and certainly scarier) reading selection.

    Yep. We just don’t “get it”.

    I have sat across from a man who was part of a group that inadvertently sent along a satellite phone to a Chechen leader without being aware the NSA had chipped the device. Smoke and fire! Poof! He was gone. But when we discussed the Boston Marathon bombing, his eyes were dry. Completely… dry.

    The Last English Prince

  9. John P. says

    May 12, 2015 at 8:09 am

    Here in the states we suffered through the 911 tragedy followed by many more Jihadist terror attacks, but our politicians still don’t get it. Comments about Islam spoken by our president and other political leaders reveals just how uninformed these men and women are. Obama is the worst apologist for Islam here in the states, but he’s followed by politicians on both sides that still believe that peaceful Islam has been hijacked by the radicals. This analogy is a ridiculous. Non-muslims need to find out about true Islam by reading what it’s founder has to say about it. Read the Koran. As disjointed and backward as it is, you will find that it defines those that DO NOT follow all the teachings of Mohammad as the radicals, and in need of killing. Real Islam is exactly who the jihadis are. Obama and all the other apologist for this evil religion are wrong; the so-called moderate Muslims would be the first ones killed if they were to take up residence in any middle eastern Arab country. The real problem with Western countries is that Neville Chamberlain copycats are in every position of leadership. If Western leadership basically deals with Islamic terrorism (which is true Islam) by appeasement and endless diplomatic sessions that have proved fruitless; then why keep doing the same thing, while all the time knowing that you will get the same results? History shows that Islamic aggression has only been stopped by meeting it with superior military force. It is frightening to think about, but it seems that the real reason is a hidden desire of our leadership to allow for this Islamic expansion, surely they can’t be that ignorant.

    • spot on says

      May 12, 2015 at 12:04 pm

      Many of our politicians met these nice rulers in the ME with all that money and power. They liked them and made friends with them. They received gifts and money from them and considered them “moderate” nice Muslims. They hate to lose these friends and all that money by telling them that they are bad Muslims. Same goes with the Mohammed cartoons. These politicians would rather attack the cartoonist and side with the Muslims.

      We have had the best politicians that money can buy and we need some new politicians.

  10. Jack Holan says

    May 12, 2015 at 9:09 am

    What defies credulity is how the Southern Poverty Law Center can declare Robert Spencer & Pamela Geller members of a Hate Group for distributing information based upon fact and assert Americans rights under our Constitution & Bill of Rights yet ignore the true Hate Mongers such as Laher who simply by timing evades terrorism charges. There exists hundreds if not thousand of Lahers whom are being ignored by the SPLC due political considerations; there can be no other explanation. What about the ADL throwing its good name behind the concept of Sharia rather than defending Pamela Geller’s right Exercise of Freedom of Speech/expression. Even if you erroneously believed hate was the motive that doesn’t change the principle, ADL!

    • Fran says

      May 12, 2015 at 12:34 pm

      How right you are!

  11. Mark says

    May 12, 2015 at 9:11 am

    https://youtu.be/o_qYcJ-GSZc

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