Misled

is a weekly columnist for The New Republic Online and the author of The New Iraq. Now a year and a half into Abdurahman Alamoudi's 23-year prison sentence for violating anti-terrorism sanctions, it might seem hard to remember why both the Clinton and Bush administrations used to embrace him, for years, as a leader of Islam in America. It might seem troubling that an FBI spokesman, as recently as 2002, had dubbed Alamoudi's organization, the then-Washington-based American Muslim Council, "the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States." It might seem perplexing that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a statement praising Alamoudi's group as "the premier, mainstream Muslim group in Washington," had dismissed warnings about the organization and its long-serving director as "Muslim-bashing."But the reasons Alamoudi enjoyed this status are not so difficult to understand. He purported to represent millions of American Muslims, who deserve a political voice in Washington. And, throughout his public life, he spoke out against terrorist attacks in the United States. In a typical speech to thousands of American Muslims at the annual convention of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) in Chicago in 1996, for instance, he told the audience, "Once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it. ... There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means to do it." To a large extent, his reputation as an influential moderate Muslim became self-perpetuating, his stature enhanced each time he met with a mainstream politician or clergyman. The pages of his organization's newsletter and sympathetic publications reported that he had held meetings with President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake in the mid-'90s. The State Department reportedly sent Alamoudi on diplomatic junkets to Muslim countries in the late '90s. Bush administration officials had picked up where their predecessors in the White House left off, granting Alamoudi and his associates photo opportunities with the president and an open- door policy with senior administration officials. What these mainstream politicians and government institutions largely missed, however, was that, if you listened to Alamoudi carefully, he stopped sounding so moderate. While he generally advised against attacks in the United States, he enthusiastically endorsed terrorism against Israeli, Jewish, and Western targets abroad. In that very same 1996 address to the IAP, he said: "I think if we are outside this country, we can say, `Oh, Allah, destroy America'" and that "[y]ou can be violent anywhere else but in America." During a conversation recorded shortly before his 2003 arrest, he again counseled against attacks in the United States, but he called for strikes in Europe and Latin America. He expressed the view in Arabic that the Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya had been "wrong," but only because "many African Muslims have died and not a single American died," and he went on to say that "I prefer to hit a Zionist target in America or Europe or elsewhere.... I prefer, honestly, like what happened in Argentina.... The [Buenos Aires] Jewish Community Center. It is a worthy operation." In July 2004, Alamoudi pleaded guilty in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court to smuggling Libyan money into the United States and concealing his financial transactions and foreign bank accounts from the IRS. He also admitted to having participated in a plot to kill the crown prince of Saudi Arabia--the present King Abdullah--in consort with Al Qaeda affiliates in London. This picture of Alamoudi leads to a troubling conclusion: During the time he was holding himself out as a spokesman for Islam in America, Alamoudi's words and deeds amounted to a toxic moral influence on American Muslims and a repugnant misrepresentation of that community to the politicians and priests who embraced him. Worse, Alamoudi is hardly one of a kind. Many of those recently held out as moderate leaders of the American Muslim community--and embraced as such by American politicians--are anything but. For over a generation, supporters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah have promoted their views and solicited support in numerous U.S. mosques, Islamic centers, and convention halls--as journalists and a litter of indictments and convictions in recent years have documented for the public. The opportunistic acceptance of the United States by Islamists like Alamoudi as "the dominion of truce"--a concept that has been spelled out in detail by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, both inside and outside the United States--is inherently shaky. It is a truce that asks to be breached--as recent cases of terrorist planning by American Muslims in the United States suggest. The American Muslim community and the U.S. political establishment can and should do better than this. In contrast to various governments in Western Europe, where official negotiations with domestic Islamists have been deemed necessary, there is no need to reach such accommodations here. Fortunately, given the largely successful integration of Muslim immigrants in the United States, there is reason to hope that the Alamoudis of America will be superseded over time by more progressive Muslim voices. To some degree, such changes have already begun. But this natural process has been delayed and stifled by American political leaders' unnatural selection of extremists to represent Islam and Islamic aspirations in the United States. Critiques of American Islamist leadership typically come with the disclaimer that most Muslims in the United States do not call for the death of Israelis or Jews, let alone anybody else. This understatement does not begin to capture the disconnect between most American Muslims and groups like Alamoudi's American Muslim Council that have spoken and acted on their behalf. Islam in America, a millions-strong religion, does not resemble a cross section of the Muslim world, the Middle East, or any Muslim country. Among immigrant Muslims to the United States, Shia--who include nearly all of the country's Iranian Muslim immigrants and a significant proportion of South Asians and Arabs--may well outnumber Sunnis. Arab-American Christians outnumber Arab-American Muslims--though demographics and shifting migration trends are poised to taper if not invert this disparity. Black Muslims, relative newcomers to mainstream Sunni Islam, easily represent one of the largest waves of conversion in twentieth-century Islamic history--as well as one of the most remote from the faith's traditional heartlands. If all these disparate groups held a contested election for a single American Muslim community leader, wealth and demographics might easily induce a dead heat between an Iranian Shia businessman in Los Angeles and a black Sunni cleric in Chicago. How strange, therefore, that the most prominent national Muslim legations to Washington have, for decades, been headed mainly by Sunni Arabs and Sunni Pakistanis, many of whom have baldly espoused the tenets of Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood. Both of these ideologies are as anti-Shia as they are anti- Jewish. And Muslim Brotherhood architect Sayyid Qutb, whose teachings are frequently cited in Saudi-subsidized books that have been distributed in numerous American Sunni mosque libraries, was no fan of American blacks, either. In his Arabic-language account of visiting the United States in the late '40s, The America I Have Seen, he called jazz "this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires, and their desire for noise on the one hand, and the abundance of animal noises on the other." Evidence of the radicalism lurking beneath the moderate veneer of many of those who have headed prominent Islamic organizations is not hard to find. Take the case of Sami Al Arian, a former University of South Florida professor. To be sure, Arian shared Alamoudi's opposition to terrorism on U.S. soil, leaving aside a memorable speech about jihad in which he cried, "Let us damn America," from which he subsequently distanced himself. But Arian is currently facing nine counts in a Tampa terrorism indictment--after a jury acquitted him in December of eight counts and failed to reach a verdict on the rest of the 17 originally included in the indictment--arising from the charge that he helped finance and steer the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization. Through his lawyer, Arian has conceded a close affiliation with the Islamic Jihad leadership and extensive financial remittances to individuals affiliated with the group. Arian does not deny having publicly called for the death of Israelis, nor does anyone dispute that a former colleague of his in Tampa, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, now heads the Islamic Jihad organization. Yet Arian's thinly veiled activism did not lose him an invitation to the White House in 2001 or friends and supporters in the United States who have championed his cause in the name of political freedom and Islam in America. Whatever value judgment one places on Arian's strident anti-Israel activism, one cannot help but notice that it indirectly promoted killing projects beyond Israel, including in the United States. Several conferences organized by Arian in Chicago featured Abdel Aziz Odeh--a cleric subsequently listed by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing--as a guest speaker, and one conference gave a platform to Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik now serving life in prison for his central role in the 1993 bombing and subsequent plots to attack New York City. The natural connection between terrorism overseas and against the United States lies in the enduring alliance between Israel and the United States and the inherently transnational nature of the militant ideology Arian and Shallah espoused. Though Islamic Jihad is focused on Palestine, it is not a discrete national liberation movement. The group posits the centrality of the Palestinian cause within a broader armed struggle to reclaim all Muslim lands from rulers deemed un-Islamic--and arguably, by extension, all those who support them. Alamoudi, Shallah, and Arian also appear to have had something in common with scores of other American Islamists and Islamist institutions subsequently charged by prosecutors with abetting terrorism overseas. While they may have frowned upon attacks on U.S. soil, their indictments suggest they had no qualms about flagrantly transgressing the country's laws. The 42-count Texas indictment against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, an avowedly pro-Hamas organization whose supporters were ubiquitous in Sunni American mosques and Islamic centers throughout the '90s, does not merely allege $12.4 million in material support to a terrorist group; it charges conspiracy, tax evasion, and money-laundering. The 2002 North Carolina conviction of Mohamed Hammoud on charges of materially supporting Hezbollah and several associates on charges of smuggling, racketeering, and money-laundering is stunning not merely because of its gravity--the defendants had funneled over $1 million to the group and sent advanced military technology and global- positioning systems--but also because their tactics are reminiscent of other organized crime syndicates. Hammoud and his co-defendants had organized an inventive cigarette-smuggling ring from North Carolina to Michigan. Unlike common criminals, these Islamists' crimes are the result not of a moral lapse, but rather of a consistent moral position. Many radical Islamists subscribe to a traditional Muslim legal convention that divides the world into the "dominion of Islam" (Dar Al Islam), where Islamic law prevails, and the "dominion of war" (Dar Al Harb), where war prevails pending the country's Islamization. A debate has been aired publicly in the Muslim community as to which sphere the United States belongs. But, if the United States is within the dominion of war, all kinds of criminality may be permitted. As an article in Al Zaitounah, the flagship publication of the IAP, reported in 1994, "Some Muslims permit themselves to take money from non-Muslims in America, whether individuals or companies, and avoid reimbursing them, on the grounds that America is an infidel country." Al Zaitounah interviewed three senior Muslim Brotherhood clerics on the question of whether the United States was part of the dominion of war. Their responses left a good deal of wiggle room as to the answer. Qatar-based Youssef Al Qaradawi, at the time a star attraction at well-attended Islamist conferences in the United States, clarified at the outset that Israel was the dominion of war and that "it must be dealt with on this basis until all rights and lands are restored to their owners and justice takes the place of the scum regime that is present there now." (It bears noting that Yitzhak Rabin, then- prime minister of the "regime" to which Qaradawi referred, had signed the Oslo accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) a few months earlier. ) Asked whether the United States belongs in a similar category, Qaradawi replied, "The bifurcation of the world into two dominions, a dominion of war and a dominion of Islam, does not necessarily mean that war must be waged against every dominion that is not a dominion of Islam. Some dominions should be fought, while other dominions could be affixed to the dominion of Islam by pacts and truces, as has been the case in Islamic history." Noting that one of the four schools of Sunni Islamic law, the Shafii school, had allowed for a third designation, "the dominion of truce" (Dar Al Ahd), Qaradawi suggested, "It may be generally possible to classify America and Western states as the dominion of truce, because they share treaties, common interests, and embassies with Arab and Islamic countries and do not--at least for the time being--pose a direct, unveiled aggression to Muslims or Muslim countries." The other two clerics did not substantively differ with Qaradawi. A decade later, it would be difficult for any American follower of Qaradawi to avoid concluding that the cleric's conditional acceptance of the United States as "possibly" the "dominion of truce" no longer applies--if it ever did-- based on its own logic. Qaradawi himself has confirmed his view that America's invasion of Iraq was a direct aggression against an Arab country and a Muslim people--calling for armed jihad against the occupier. So did 26 Saudi clerics in a joint edict released in November 2004. In a December sermon, he also called upon God to protect Iraq from "the American Satans." Though Qaradawi has been banned from entering the United States since 1999, he can still reach thousands of Arabic-speaking U.S. homes via Al Jazeera, on which he hosts a weekly program about Islamic life. This strand within American Islamist culture, however thin, is relevant to the rash of initiatives by some Muslims in America to assist Al Qaeda, which federal prosecutors have brought to light since September 11. It was through a predominantly Arab-American mosque outside Buffalo, New York, that six American- born Yemeni ethnics--mostly employed, married, and college-educated, all registered Democrats--met a pair of preachers who lured them to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and a meeting with Osama bin Laden. A journalist who visited the young men's hometown of Lackawanna, New York, described the Al Qaeda trainees as "the cool, assimilated guys in the community." The FBI agent who elicited their first confession--from a member of the group who had been intercepted in Bahrain--recalled in a "Frontline" interview, "[W]hen we got on the plane on our way to the States, and he met the case agents from Buffalo, one of his biggest concerns [was], `How are the Buffalo Bills doing?' That tells me that he really likes what he has here." These youths had experienced an integrated, American Islamic cultural environment that condoned suicide bombings in Israel as surely as it cheered the home football team. When a local Al Qaeda preacher and his Saudi colleague sought to recruit them, they apparently did so by building on the moral foundation that formed the bedrock of their religious environment--by asking them to take a short walk from the dominion of truce to the dominion of war. Other members of the community, to be sure, took issue with the preachers' arguments. The apprehension of the so-called "Lackawanna Six," in fact, was reportedly the result of information provided to the FBI by the Yemeni-American community--and the Saudi preacher had not lasted long in the local mosque. But the case may have been as much a learning experience for Al Qaeda and its affiliates as it was for the United States: It demonstrates that some number of second-generation American Muslims can be lured into American killing projects within the framework of their indigenous religious milieu--provided the recruitment is carried out discreetly, outside the purview of other American Muslims who disagree with Al Qaeda. Effective recruitment in the United States may be tricky and time-consuming, but it is doable--and some of the blame for this state of affairs rests on the failings of America's Islamist leadership. Further evidence of the pernicious effect the radicalism of these so-called moderate Muslim leaders have on their flocks can be seen in several other recent terrorism cases. Consider the businessman in Brooklyn who allegedly helped Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al Moayad channel money to Hamas and Al Qaeda (part of the multimillion-dollar total that the sheik allegedly raised and remitted). Before Moayad's conviction last spring in a Brooklyn federal court for conspiring to support both organizations, jurors were treated to a taste of the cleric's flamboyant personal style through clandestine recordings of his meetings. Moayad not only celebrated a suicide bombing in Israel, he also bragged that Osama bin Laden held him in the highest esteem and had called him "my sheik." On the basis of his many explicit recorded comments, it's hard to imagine anyone who partnered with Moayad being deluded into thinking he wished to kill only Israelis or support only Hamas. As for the studious distinction between Israelis and American Jews, it was plainly confused by 34-year-old Ahmed Hassan Al Uqaily, an Iraqi-born resident of the United States for over a decade who worked for a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in Nashville, Tennessee. In October 2004, he paid an undercover agent $1,000 for two M-16 machine guns, four hand grenades, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. A Tennessee judge sentenced him in October 2005 to four years and nine months in prison for illegally possessing the weapons, which he had planned to use to attack two Jewish facilities--in the Nashville area. Of course, law-abiding American Muslim leaders do not bear responsibility for the crimes of some misguided souls in Lackawanna, Brooklyn, Nashville, Washington, Richardson, Chicago, Charlotte, and a handful of other cities where Islamist killing projects and terrorism financiers have been busted since September 2001. But they do owe their flocks, and all Americans, a firm moral stand against the global murder fetish that aroused some of their jailed and far-flung counterparts. They should consistently repudiate Islamist civilian carnage--whether in Tel Aviv and New Delhi or New York and Riyadh--and relentlessly counter the set of teachings that sanction it. Such leadership has been too slow in coming--a tragedy for which some of the blame extends beyond the Muslim community. Washington's cozily intertwined Muslim advocacy groups tend to pool personnel, ideals, and Saudi largesse and co-habit Qaradawi's permanent floating dominion of truce. By the time Alamoudi was indicted in 2003, the American Muslim Council's preeminent mainstream status in Washington had been supplanted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (cair). Its long- serving executive director, Nihad Awad, had been a prominent officer of the IAP, whose conferences Alamoudi memorably addressed. In November 2004, a federal judge declared the IAP civilly liable for the Hamas killing of an American citizen in the West Bank. Awad left the association to found cair in 1994--but, rather than try to distinguish himself from his former colleagues, Awad has also declared his support for Hamas in his new capacity and declined to denounce the movement's bloody tactics. Furthermore, he has acknowledged that cair received money from the Holy Land Foundation, the avowedly pro-Hamas charity that now faces federal charges of supporting terrorism. The Holy Land Foundation was co-founded by Mohammed El Mezain, who went on to work for a new nonprofit entity, KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development. KindHearts has funneled money back to some of the same groups as Holy Land. Its 2003 tax return shows that $77,571 was transferred to the IAP. Among its remittances to overseas coffers in 2002, $100,000 went to the Sanabil Association for Relief and Development in Lebanon, which the Treasury Department designated a Hamas- supporting entity in August 2003. Mezain has since been charged with aiding Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation by federal prosecutors, and he has departed KindHearts; but a veteran of at least one other Islamist charity shut down by the government for providing support to terrorist groups also works for the organization. All these American Islamist leaders and organizations, in turn, have maintained direct, public affiliations with the Plainfield, Indiana-based Islamic Society of North America (isna), the largest and oldest umbrella organization of Muslim groups in the United States and Canada. Its numerous ties to Brotherhood and Hamas activists do not amount to an indictment of isna as a whole or the tens of thousands of predominantly Sunni Muslim Americans who attend the group's annual convention. For that matter, nor does the fact that alleged Islamic Jihad backer Arian, according to several published conference proceedings, co-founded isna. These links do not devalue the $20,000 isna donated to victims of Hurricane Katrina in September or the vaguely worded condemnation of "terrorism" that the group added its name to back in July. (See Judea Pearl's insightful tnr Online article on the document, "Word Choice," on September 13, 2005.) But they do underscore the commonplace acceptance of Hamas and Islamic Jihad within the culture of interlocking Islamist institutions that have achieved the most prominence in America. This gut-wrenching state of affairs poses a recurring dilemma for outsiders whenever an Islamist leader in the United States seeks the same status-boosting acknowledgement from elected officials that other political interest groups do. When isna invited President Bush to address its annual convention in Rosemont, Illinois, last September, a total rebuff would have snubbed tens of thousands of American Muslims in attendance--but an acceptance would have elevated the mainstream communal esteem of their questionable leadership and affiliates, as surely as Alamoudi had been endowed a mainstream status he did not deserve. (Bush sent Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes as his representative.) The circumstances under which some Sunni Islamists rose to prominence in the United States are intimately linked to U.S. government policy decisions: Isna's most radical affiliates, including the IAP and the now-defunct Muslim Arab Youth Association (maya), promoted militancy in support of the Afghan Jihad during the later years of the cold war--when President Reagan himself stood squarely behind the Afghan fighters they championed. In the '80s, the IAP and maya jointly brought Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden's acknowledged spiritual mentor, on tours of American Islamic centers from his base in Peshawar, Pakistan. Azzam's sojourns across the Atlantic were truly within the borders of a "dominion of truce" at the time, in the sense that the United States and Azzam's Wahhabi backers in Saudi Arabia were aligned in support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. Yet, even then, Azzam used the occasion of his U.S. visits to push for attacks far beyond Afghanistan. In a Brooklyn mosque, as has been widely reported, Azzam memorably declared that the "jihad of the sword" was global, and he explicitly called for its fulfillment inside the United States. Camera pans of the sermon's audience in a video recording of the event subsequently revealed the presence of a co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mahmud Abouhalima, taking in the cleric's message. American groups like maya and the IAP, which hosted and boosted Azzam in this country, are in some ways comparable to Islamist groups in other pro- Western countries, once encouraged by their host governments out of deference to their struggle against a common, godless enemy: Egypt's late president, Anwar Sadat, gave the Muslim Brotherhood a chance to flourish in his country, hoping that the movement would serve as a counterweight to his communist and socialist opposition--a policy that did not survive his assassination by a radical Islamist. Israel's government, prior to the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, used to engage Sunni Islamists in Palestine, hoping that they would serve to challenge the PLO's monopoly on Palestinian politics; it was in this manner that Hamas was born. The fact that Hamas espouses suicide attacks on civilian targets does not erase its social function as a provider of some health and human services to Palestinians. But it does--and should--undermine the movement as a moral voice on any national or global stage. In a similar vein, both Alamoudi's American Muslim Council and Nihad Awad's cair have fought for Muslim civil rights in the United States, among other just causes. But their avowed support for Hamas and other manifestations of radicalism should call into question their pretext of speaking on behalf of millions of American Muslims--and disqualify them as interlocutors on behalf of American Muslims to the United States government. This is not to preclude the possibility that they may revise their views--or that true moderates may emerge from within the ranks of organizations tinged by an older generation of poor leadership. It is, in fact, to demand that such a transformation occur. If the United States were France--where a massive, ghettoized Arab Muslim underclass encircles the capital city in an exurban wall of rage--then sending politicians to build bridges with domestic Islamist leaders might be a necessary measure, among other necessary measures. During the bloody riots around Paris last fall, the pro-Muslim Brotherhood Union of Islamic Organizations of France (uoif) appears to have joined the government in calling for calm by pitting religion against the rioters. Since 2003, the uoif has been the largest constituent member of the French Interior Ministry's French Council for the Muslim Religion--a body established to bring French Islam into the mainstream by granting it official status. A fatwa issued by the uoif declared, "It is not acceptable to express feelings of desperation through damaging public properties and carrying out arson.... Under Islam, one cannot get one of his or her rights at the expense of others." Though some observers labeled the riots an "intifada" or "jihad," Islamist voices in France that extol jihad in Palestine and Iraq were successfully enlisted to try to undermine that ideological conception when it came to French terrain. Having achieved official recognition by the French Interior Ministry, the Brotherhood group evidently found enough common ground with the Republic to add its voice to calls for calm. In doing so, the uoif issued the fatwa despite its grievances about the country's foreign policy--which supports harsh crackdowns by the Algerian regime on Algerian Islamists--and the second-class status of Muslim immigrants to France. This dominion of truce-style accommodation appears to be valuable to the French: The Muslim Brotherhood movement may well command more popularity among France's predominantly North African Arab Sunni Muslim immigrant population than the Republic itself. But the United States has succeeded where France and much of Europe have failed. As Spencer Ackerman observed in these pages recently (see "Religious Protection," December 12, 2005), American Muslims enjoy social integration and acceptance, religious tolerance, economic opportunity, and a higher standard of living than the general population. These blessings mean that American imams, unlike their French counterparts, are not in the position of shepherding socially restive flocks. According to demographers, Jews and Muslims in the United States overwhelmingly co-habit the two coasts and a handful of urban areas in between. Nowhere since Baghdad in the 1930s--where a plurality of Jewish urban elites famously commingled with their Sunni and Shia counterparts in business, the professions, civil service, and music--have the points of intersection between the two faiths been so manifold, so easygoing, and so fruitful. Nowhere else has the medieval distinction between dominions of "war," "Islam," and "truce" been so irrelevant, so anachronistic. For this reason, the United States does not need to countenance Islamist interlocutors who endorse militancy and radicalism abroad, even while calling for a truce at home. It can find and promote true moderates more representative of Islam in America. The United States owes this much to its Muslim community, and its Muslim community owes this much to itself.

By joseph braude