Closed for Business

Closed for Business

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/10/closed-for-business/

Posted by Robert Spencer on Aug 10th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing, and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).

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On Monday, authorities in Hamburg, Germany announced that they had finally shut down the Taiba mosque, which as the Al-Quds mosque in 2001 was a meeting place for several of the 9/11 jihad terrorists, including Mohamed Atta, and which continued to be a hotbed of jihad activity thereafter: a May 2010 report from Hamburg’s Interior Ministry called the mosque “the central attraction for the jihadist scene.”

Christoph Ahlhaus, Hamburg’s secretary of the interior, announced Monday: “Today we closed the Taiba mosque because young men were being turned into religious fanatics there. Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war. Hamburg cannot become a cradle for Islamists capable of violence.”

Yet that is exactly what it was. In March 2009 eleven Islamic jihadists who met in the Taiba mosque went to Pakistan, apparently to attend a jihad training camp. The mosque’s imam, Mamoun Darkazanli, may have aided al-Qaeda – and as the mosque was closed this week, his whereabouts were unknown.

The Hamburg mosque was not singular. In recent years mosques have been used to preach hatred; to spread exhortations to terrorist activity; to house a bomb factory; to store weapons; to disseminate messages from bin Laden; to demand (in the United States) that non-Muslims conform to Islamic dietary restrictions; to fire on American troops; to fire upon Indian troops; to train jihadists; and much more.

The record of mosques in the United States is not much better. As long ago as January 1999, the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani declared in a State Department Open Forum that Islamic supremacists controlled most mosques in America: “The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques,” he said, “that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US. So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it.”

Terrorism expert Yehudit Barsky affirmed the same thing in 2005, saying that 80% of the mosques in this country “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence.” The Center for Religious Freedom found in 2005 a massive distribution of hateful jihadist and Islamic supremacist material in mosques in this country. And in June 2008 federal investigators found that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, despite promises to stop teaching such material, was still using books that advocated that apostates from Islam be executed and that it was permissible for Muslims to kill and seize the property of “polytheists.”

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