Nidal Hasan, hero

Strong words from Imam al-Awlaki American-born Muslim leader whose former mosque in Virginia the Fort Hood murderer attended:

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.

Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal's operation.

The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed.

ABC News, citing two unnamed intelligence sources briefed on the situation, says the CIA became aware months ago that Hasan may have been trying to make contact with al Qaeda.

If this is true, heads should roll -- especially if it is established during the investigation that political correctness -- sorry, Gen. Casey, "diversity" -- kept competent authorities from acting swiftly and sensibly against Hasan.

I wonder how many more Fort Hoods we're going to have before US authorities wake up and realize that we've got a big problem in this country with the Islamic leadership class, which is heavily dominated by the radical Muslim Brotherhood. As I once wrote:

The president apparently missed the smoking-gun 1991 document his own Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community - this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie - but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

It should be said again and again that all Muslims are not sympathetic to this stuff. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a serious situation with the major US Muslim organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the Counterterrorism Blog, the Holy Land Foundation trial exhibits show the following:

1) Many of the existing organizations that have set themselves up as the interlocutors between the Islamic community in the United States and the outside world (including government, law enforcement, and other faiths) were founded and controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood from their inception. Many of them changed their names over time to achieve broader national acceptance.

2) The Brotherhood established a highly-structured organization with many different faces inside the United States while deliberately and continually seeking to hide the Brotherhood's links to its front groups.

3) The agenda to be carried out by these groups in the United States in reality had little to do with the organizations' publicly-proclaimed goals, such as protecting the civil rights of Muslims. Rather, the true goal is to destroy the United States from the inside and work to establish a global Islamist society.

4) The primary function of the Brotherhood structures, from the early 1990s forward, was to support, materially and politically, the Hamas movement in the Palestinian territories, as instructed by the office of the general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The Virginia mosque where Imam al-Awlaki preached to a congregation that included Hasan, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, is affiliated with leading Muslim Brotherhood entities in the US. From the center's constitution:

The Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center shall be affiliated with the following organizations:

Muslim American Society (MAS)
North American Islamic Trust (NAIT)
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)

All three of those organizations were named by government lawyers as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial, precisely because they are all Muslim Brotherhood entities. As I recount in this blog post, I once had a run-in with the then-president of ISNA, whom I politely asked to explain how he reconciles members of the ISNA board advocating for Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism with his peace, love and understanding rhetoric. He literally, in an editorial board meeting, shook his fist at me for asking the question, compared me to Hitler, and told me I would one day repent for asking that question. Later, I found that the writing of Sayyid Qutb, the late chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood and a violent Islamic terrorist revolutionary, was being taught to teenagers at the largest mosque in Dallas, via an annual contest sponsored by MAS.

We do not know for sure to what extent political Islam sets the agenda at mosques and Islamic institutions in America, but it's a fact that most mosques in the US are owned by the Muslim Brotherhood's North American Islamic Trust. Dissident Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser and Sheikh Hisham Qabbani say the dominance of Islamists among the leadership of US mosques and Muslim organizations is heavy (Sheikh Qabbani has testified before Congress that 80 percent of US mosques are under Islamist control). Neither our news media nor our government cares to press these people on what they really believe, and what they're really working for. As Zuhdi Jasser writes:

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims. ...

The MSM would prefer to facilitate the current Islamist organizations and Islamist imams. Why? It could be a fear of litigation, minority victim politics, or simple ignorance regarding the goals of Islamism. As in the case with PBS, it could also be the internal influence and infiltration of Islamists within the media and government who will go to great lengths to suffocate the opinions of anti-Islamists, especially anti-Islamist Muslims.

What will it take to get us to put away the soothing narcotic of diversity talk, and ask the tough questions -- and be prepared to act on the answers -- of the Muslim leadership in this country, the questions that ought to have been asked after 9/11. Time to stop pretending.