Obama: Rout ISIL Everywhere (Except In U.S. Mosques)

September 12, 2014
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
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Worshippers attend evening prayers at a mosque in Minneapolis, Minn. AP View Enlarged Image
Homeland Insecurity: President Obama has vowed to “hunt down (Islamic State) terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are” in Iraq and Syria. News flash: They’re also in American mosques.

Yet Obama is not going after terrorists in radical mosques. And he’s making it harder for local governments to stop the construction of recruiting and training centers for the enemy.
In fact, as a grand jury investigates another Minneapolis mosque for radicalizing recruits for ISIL, the Justice Department is suing local officials for blocking a new extremist mosque in the area.

Attorney General Eric Holder sued St. Anthony, Minn., after the Minneapolis suburb rejected the Abu Huraira Islamic Center and its 15,000-square-foot mosque over zoning issues. Holder began investigating two years ago at the request of a radical Islamist group after his own department a few years ago named an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism case.

“We applaud this decision,” the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations said. “We urged the Department of Justice to investigate.”

Besides traffic and other problems, local citizens feared the large fundamentalist mosque — which says on its website that Muslims are instructed to fight and take “captives” in “warfare” — will “condone violence.”
It’s a valid concern.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a local grand jury is investigating the nearby Dar Al-Farooq mosque and its youth center in connection with the radicalization and recruitment of as many as 40 Muslims who have left America to fight for the Islamic State.

The investigation centers on a 31-year-old Egyptian volunteer at the mosque, Amir Meshal, whom the FBI released after questioning him for training at an al-Qaida camp in Africa. The paper says authorities suspect he may be recruiting young Muslim men for ISIL.

Al-Farooq says it has asked Meshal to leave the mosque, but the Egyptian cleric who leads prayer at the facility does not exactly inspire confidence that the problem is isolated to him.
Al-Farooq imam Waleed Edreese al-Meneese, who’s also president of the mosque and youth center, recently hosted and spoke with radical Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Al-Meneese, moreover, sits on the board of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, which issues fatwas, including ones condoning “offensive jihad” against America and the West. Recent fatwas also prohibit charity for American troops and cooperation with the FBI in terrorism probes.

Al-Farooq’s website shows open hostility toward Christians, asserting that “God is not Jesus, and Jesus is not God,” and warning that Christians face a “painful punishment.”
Federal authorities thought local terrorist recruiting had stopped after another area Islamic center, the Abubaker as-Saddique mosque, was exposed two years ago as the catalyst for recruiting several Somali-American men for al-Qaida.

The paper says the investigation of ISIL recruiting at the Al-Farooq mosque is “moving slowly because many of those subpoenaed are refusing to talk and have been instructed to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.” CAIR was criticized for gumming up the as-Saddique mosque investigation and appears to be doing the same thing in this case.
Al-Farooq’s director, Hyder Aziz, recently thanked CAIR for briefing his flock on their “rights” in dealing with the FBI.

So just how interested is this mosque in helping authorities ferret out jihadists? A similar question might be asked of the attorney general, who’s launched probes into 28 cases nationwide involving local denials of mosques, many of which have seated radical imams and officials tied to terrorist groups.