Nothing To Do With Islam

I’m always puzzled when government officials say that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. If that is the case, why are guards at Guantanamo Bay required to wear gloves when they handle the Koran? Why did we give Osama bin Laden an Islamic burial at sea? Somehow, when you investigate terrorism, Islam keeps popping up.

The nothing-to-do-with-Islam San Bernardino murderers attended the Dar-al-Uloom mosque in Riverside. The mosque’s spokesman, cleric Roshan Zamir Abbassi, says that he barely knew Syed Farook and “didn’t know his terrorist wife at all.” But those claims don’t seem to be holding up.

Abbassi maintained at a press conference that he didn’t know Farook any better than he knew the reporters in the room. But members of the mosque say Farook was a fixture there. He had been coming to pray and study at least three times a week for two years. In fact, he memorized the Koran at there, something you cannot do without learning Arabic, a subject Abbassi teaches.

His other assertion that he never even saw Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, also strains credulity. Malik joined her husband in shooting 35 of his government co-workers at a Christmas party.

“No one knows anything about his wife,” assistant imam Mahmood Nadvi agreed. “She never came to prayer.

But longtime mosque member Gasser Shehata, who claimed to have prayed “shoulder to shoulder” with Farook, said Dar-al-Uloom prepared a chicken-and-rice dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding last year. Reportedly, hundreds of congregants attended the walima reception, including the mosque leadership.

Abbassi himself is a suspect figure:

Asked if Farook was radicalized at the mosque, Abbassi snapped, “Never.” He said the mosque teaches only peace, insisting no one has even an “extremist idea.”

“In Islam,” he said, “we are against innocent killing.”

Abbassi recently posted a message on Facebook condemning the United States and other Western nations for their Mideast policies, arguing they are equally guilty of violence to achieve political and religious goals. His mosque’s Web page features a video claiming that the San Bernardino shooting was carried out by the US government in a “false flag conspiracy,” and that Farook and Malik were “patsies” assassinated “by government-sponsored perpetrators.”

Right. Abbassi’s brother also has problematic associations:

Another person of interest is Abbassi’s brother, Mohammad Sabir Abbassi, a Muslim activist who serves as a trustee and English teacher at the San Diego mosque once headed by the late al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

FBI Agent Joel Anderson said in court filings that Farook indicated he was a big fan of Awlaki and listened to a series of sermons about jihad and martyrdom called “The Hereafter.”

Farouk reportedly was a member of an extremist sect called Tablighi Jamaal, which I don’t recall hearing about before:

In his filing, Anderson says Farook studied the ultra-orthodox Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat. US officials say the cult, with 50,000 members, is rife with jihadists, and jihadi groomers are recruiting at mosques in at least 10 states.

“We have significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,” said Assistant FBI Director Michael Heimbach, “and we have found that al Qaeda used them for recruiting.”

Homeland Security Department veteran Philip Haney said Dar-al-Uloom was among the mosques his agency was investigating as part of a probe of the Tablighi movement.

Dar-al-Uloom is the mosque that the San Bernardino terrorists attended.

“Individuals who were already in the case in 2012 went to that mosque,” Haney claimed in a Fox News interview.

He said he ID’d some 300 jihadists and terrorists tied to the movement in the United States before the Obama regime pulled the plug on the investigation in 2012. Known Tablighi alumni include the Lackwanna Six, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, shoe bomber Richard Reid, dirty bomber José Padilla and would-be Brooklyn Bridge bomber Iyman Faris.

So why did the Obama administration pull the plug on the Tablighi investigation in 2012?

[I]n 2012, [Phil] Haney says that his team was paid a visit by the Department of State and its own Civil Liberties Civil Rights Division.

Haney says officials accused him of unfairly profiling Muslims because Tablighi Jamaat, the sub-group of Deobandi, was not on a list of specially designated terrorist organizations.

Another Obama coup that has gone mostly unremarked.

The Farook/Malik case illustrates the fact that when you poke around in the background of an Islamic terrorist, you find…Islam. That isn’t a surprising conclusion, unless you work in the Obama administration.

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