| Maher Hawash | Maher "Mike" Hawash | Islamic Center of Portland | Home Front | 20030825 | ||||
| Maher Mofeid "Mike" Hawash | al-Qaeda | Home Front | 20030919 | |||||
| Maher Hawash | Islamic Center of Portland | Home Front | 20030825 | |||||
| Maher Hawash | al-Qaeda | Home Front | 20030428 |
| Fifth Column |
| Sudden Jihad Syndrome |
| 2006-03-14 |
| By Daniel Pipes Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers. I wrote those words days after 9/11 and have been criticized for them ever since. But an incident on March 3 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill suggests I did not go far enough. ... In brief, Taheri-azar represents the ultimate Islamist nightmare: a seemingly well-adjusted Muslim whose religion inspires him, out of the blue, to murder non-Muslims. Taheri-azar acknowledged planning his jihad for over two years, or during his university sojourn. Its not hard to imagine how his ideas developed, given the coherence of Islamist ideology, its immense reach (including a Muslim Student Association at UNC), and its resonance among many Muslims. Were Taheri-azar unique in his surreptitious adoption of radical Islam, one could ignore his case, but he fits into a widespread pattern of Muslims who lead quiet lives before turning to terrorism. Their number includes the 9/11 hijackers, the London transport bombers, and Maher Hawash, the Intel engineer arrested before he could join the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mohammed Ali Alayed, the Saudi living in Houston fits, the pattern because he stabbed and murdered Ariel Sellouk, a Jewish man who was his one-time friend. So do some converts to Islam; who suspected Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgian woman, would turn up in Iraq as a suicide bomber throwing herself against an American military base? This is what I have dubbed the Sudden Jihad Syndrome, whereby normal-appearing Muslims abruptly become violent. It has the awful but legitimate consequence of casting suspicion on all Muslims. Who knows whence the next jihadi? How can one be confident a law-abiding Muslim will not suddenly erupt in a homicidal rage? Yes, of course, their numbers are very small, but they are disproportionately much higher than among non-Muslims. This syndrome helps explain the fear of Islam and mistrust of Muslims that polls have shown on the rise since 9/11. The Muslim response of denouncing these views as bias, as the new anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia is as baseless as accusing anti-Nazis of Germanophobia or anti-Communists of Russophobia. Instead of presenting themselves as victims, Muslims should address this fear by developing a moderate, modern, and good-neighborly version of Islam that rejects radical Islam, jihad, and the subordination of infidels. Rest at link. |
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| Fifth Column |
| Does America Have a "Muslim Problem"? |
| 2005-09-09 |
| By Robert Spencer Does the United States have a âMuslim problemâ? Bret Stephens and Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal say no; on the contrary, they say, âAmericaâs Muslims tend to be role models both as Americans and as Muslims.â Stephens and Rago grant that âit takes no more than a few men (or women) to carry out a terrorist atrocity, and there can be no guarantee the U.S. is immune from homegrown Islamist terror.â However, evidently Hillary Clinton has the measure of Islamic terrorism as well as child-rearing: âBut if it can be said,â Stephens and Rago continue, âthat âit takes a villageâ to make a terrorist, the U.S. enjoys a measure of safety that our European allies do not. It is a blessing we will continue to enjoy as long as we remain an upwardly mobile, assimilating â and watchful â society.â This is an apt expression of the prevailing conventional wisdom that a lack of upward mobility and assimilation causes jihad terrorism. For Stephens and Rago base their sanguine view of American Muslims on purely economic and social factors: â59% of American Muslims have at least an undergraduate education, making them the most highly educated group in America. Muslim Americans are also the richest Muslim community in the world, with four in five earning more than $25,000 a year and one in three more than $75,000. They tend to be employed in professional fields, and most own stock, either personally or through 401(k) or pension plans. In terms of civic participation, 82% are registered to vote, half of them as Democrats. Interestingly, however, the survey found that 65% of Muslim Americans favor lowering the income tax.â Stephens and Rago report that âaccording to Ishan [sic] Bagby, a professor at the University of Kentucky who recently made a study of mosque attendance in Detroit, the average mosque-goer is 34 years old, married with children, has at least a bachelorâs degree, and earns about $74,000 a year. If this is representative of Muslim Americans as a whole, it suggests that the religiously committed among them hardly fit the profile of the alienated, angry young Muslim men so common today in Europe.â On top of this affluence and civic mindedness, âthe overwhelming majority of Muslims arrived here legallyâ; â21% of Muslim Americans intermarryâ; and âMuslim Americans benefit from leaders who, despite some notable exceptions, are generally more responsible than Muslim leaders in Britain and Europe.â Unfortunately, however, none of this data amounts to what Stephens and Rago wish it did. It is noteworthy in the first place that they invoke Ihsan Bagbyâs study as evidence of the comfortable assimilation of American Muslims, since Bagby himself has rejected the notion of assimilation: âUltimately,â he has remarked, âwe [Muslims] can never be full citizens of this country. . . because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.â He said this in the early 1990s and may have changed his views since he said this, but note that his quarrel was with American âinstitutions and ideologies,â not with economic injustices real or perceived. While American Muslims may indeed be role models in their wealth and high voter registration rate, it is not at all true that only ill-educated poor people actually commit terrorist atrocities. This has been disproved again and again. A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Marc Sageman, recently conducted a study that led him to conclude that, in the words of the Times of London, âthe typical recruit to Al-QaedaâŠis upper middle class, has been educated in the West and is from a professional background.â Likewise, Princeton economist Claude Berrebi studied over twenty years of data on suicide bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, only to conclude, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, that âonly 13 per centâ of the jihadists âwere from a poor background, compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general,â and that âsuicide bombers were also three times more likely to have gone on to higher education than the general population.â We have witnessed the same phenomenon in the United States. Maher Hawash worked at Intel. He made $360,000 a year. He was in the U.S. legally â in fact, he was a naturalized citizen. I would be surprised if he had not been registered to vote. He married an American. Stephens and Rago would have confidently held him up as a role model and considered inconceivable the idea that he could turn out to be a jihad terrorist. And yet that is exactly what he turned out to be. The WSJ article is yet another manifestation of a fundamental misunderstanding that blankets the public discourse about Islamic terrorism. Even at the Wall Street Journal they donât understand that the primary motivation of the jihadists is a religious ideology, not resentment born of economic injustice or marginalization. Economic injustice and marginalization are things they understand; a religious ideology that can move men to give up good lives and devote themselves to murder and destruction is so far out of their purview that they cannot even imagine it, and take all the evidence of it that is in front of their faces as indications of something else. There very likely are model citizens among American Muslims. But none of the statistics marshaled by Stephens and Rago does one thing to establish whether or not there among all these affluent and law-abiding Muslims there are people who, like Mike Hawash, are nursing jihadist sentiments. Stephens and Rago do include a caveat: âneither a first-rate Western education nor economic affluence offers any inoculation against extremism: Just look at the careers of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, educated at the Technical University of Hamburg, or Daniel Pearl killer Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who did undergraduate work at the London School of Economics.â One may hope that these Wall Street Journal reporters will one day undertake to find out why Atta and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh turned to jihad terrorism â if they arenât too afraid of what they might find. That fear, and the general unwillingness to face the real causes of Islamic terrorism, is what constitutes Americaâs real âMuslim problem.â |
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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Profiling Muslims Works: Amnesty Intl. in Denial |
| 2004-09-21 |
| Edited for the conclusion. Another well written DaniEl Pipes column ... More broadly, Anjana Malhotra notes that of the 57 people detained as material witnesses in connection with terrorism investigations, "All but one of the material witness arrests were of Muslims." In the murky area of pre-empting terrorism, in short, it matters who one is. So, yes, profiling emphatically does take place. Which is how it should be. The 9/11 commission noted that Islamist terrorism is the "catastrophic threat" facing the United States and, with the very rarest of exceptions, only Muslims engage in Islamist terrorism. It would therefore be a mistake to devote as much attention to non-Muslims as to Muslims. Further, Amnesty International ignores that some instances of preemptive jailing have worked. It has foiled terrorism (Mohammed Junaid Babar, Maher Hawash, Zakaria Soubra, James Ujaama) and dealt with other crimes (Mohdar Abdullah, Nabil Almarabh, Omar Bakarbashat, Soliman S. Biheiri, Muhammad Al-Qudhai'een). Further, many material witness cases yet to be decided could lead to convictions, such as those of Ismael Selim Elbarasse, Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, Jose Padilla, Uzair Paracha, and Mohammed Abdullah Warsame. Amnesty International has laid down the gauntlet, placing a higher priority on civil liberties than on protection from Islamist terrorism. In contrast, I worry more about mega-terrorism say, a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan than an innocent person spending time in jail. Profiling is emerging as the single-most contentious issue in the current war. Western governmental authorities need to stop hiding behind pious denials and candidly address this issue. |
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| Home Front: WoT |
| Last of Portland Seven Head to Jail |
| 2004-02-09 |
| The final three members of a group of Muslim men from the Portland area who tried to enter Afghanistan to join the Taliban were each sentenced to prison time Monday. They were among six men and one woman accused of conspiring to wage war on the United States. Palestinian-born Maher Hawash, 39, was sentenced Monday to seven years in prison. Ahmed Bilal, 25, was sentenced to 10 years and his brother, Muhammed, 23, was sent to prison for eight years. Good riddance Hawash, a former Intel software engineer, was the last of the group to be arrested. The Bilal brothers, among the original group of those arrested in October 2002, had pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban and to firearms charges. Two other men who were allied with the Bilal brothers and Hawash have already been sentenced to 18 years in prison. The federal government has said the sixth man, alleged ringleader Habis Abdulla al Saoub, 37, was killed in a shootout in Pakistan. Have they dug him up to make sure? The lone woman in the group, October Lewis, was sentenced to three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to wiring money to the group to assist their efforts. Enjoy your stay. |
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| Home Front | |
| Affidavit claims mosque leader helped finance Portland Seven | |
| 2003-08-25 | |
A man charged with trying to fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was secretly recorded saying that the leader of Portlandâs largest mosque funded the overseas trip with money that came from mosque members, according to a newly released FBI affidavit. Jeffrey Battle, a member of the so-called Portland Seven, also was secretly recorded telling how Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, religious leader of the Islamic Center of Portland, participated in a prayer session at the mosque with the group just before the men left. No charges have been filed against Kariye, who is on probation for federal fraud charges he admitted to earlier this year.
Heâll have plenty of time to contemplate his relationship with God in the slammer. Six men were indicted on charges they traveled to China in October 2001 in a failed effort to reach Afghanistan to fight U.S. troops. One remains a fugitive; another, Maher "Mike" Hawash, recently pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities. One woman was indicted on charges she helped fund the trip. Prosecutors and investigators have long suspected that a larger group was behind the efforts of the Portland Seven. The affidavit by Portland FBI agent Mark McBryde made public Friday relies heavily on excerpts from recorded conversations between a government informant and two defendants. Most excerpts come from Battle, who defense attorneys have said in court filings was boasting and exaggerating when talking to the informant. "He was, er, lying. Yeah, thatâs it, lies, all lies!" The affidavit said Battle described the Portland mosque as "the only mosque to teach about jihad" and that Kariye told his followers they should fight with other Muslims in Afghanistan against Americans. Battle said he had "talked to Kariye about jihad," the affidavit said. Another defendant, Patrice Lumumba Ford, told the informant that Kariye "has spoken out very strongly for jihad," the affidavit said. Battle also described how the trip was financed. He told the informant that Habis Al Saoub, a Jordanian who remains a fugitive, "approached Kariye regarding financing for the trip by the jihadists." Battle said Kariye gave Al Saoub $2,000 for each of the men and the money was acquired from members of the mosque. Later, after his arrest, Battle told investigators that he got $2,000 from Al Saoub, and he believed the money came from "brothers" at the Portland mosque. Got them on tape, and Hawash has flipped. | |
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| Home Front | ||
| Portland Man Strikes Plea Deal on Terror Charges | ||
| 2003-08-07 | ||
A software engineer pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge of aiding the Taliban, agreeing to testify against other suspects in exchange for the dropping of other terrorism charges. Maher Hawash one of the so-called "Portland Seven," will serve at least seven years in federal prison under the deal, which was approved by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism. "You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing. "Yes, your honor," Hawash replied.
Some serious poop. Nice to see he didnât walk because his Miranda rights werenât told to him in Arabic. | ||
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| Home Front | |
| Seventh charged with war plot | |
| 2003-04-28 | |
US federal authorities have charged a seventh person with plotting to aid al-Qaeda and Taliban forces fighting US soldiers a month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Maher Hawash, a 39-year-old Palestinian software engineer, was charged with conspiracy to levy war and two counts of conspiring to provide material support to the two groups. He has been in custody since late March. The Justice Department said Hawash was part of a Portland-based group of six other suspects who have already been charged over the alleged plan. Hawash flew to Hong Kong on October 24, 2001, where he joined five of the other defendants, Jeffrey Battle, Patrice Ford, Habis Abdullah Al Saoub and the brothers Ahmed and Muhammad Bilal, according to the Justice Department.
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