Terror suspects, fugitives and radical speakers have passed through the Cambridge mosque that the Tsarnaev brothers are known to have visited.
By Oren Dorell
The mosque attended by the two brothers accused in the Boston
Marathon double bombing has been associated with other terrorism
suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and
is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances
that can lead to extremism.
Several people who attended the
Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been
investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the
mosque's first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an
assassination plot against a Saudi prince.
Its sister mosque in
Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has
invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee
appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as
criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on
Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace
and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques.
The
head of the group is among critics who say the two mosques teach a
brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West,
distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of
government, dress and social values.
"We don't know where these
boys were radicalized, but this mosque has a curriculum that radicalizes
people. Other people have been radicalized there," said the head of the
group, Charles Jacobs.
Yusufi Vali, executive director at the
Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not
spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few
worshipers.
"If there were really any worry about us being
extreme," Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and
Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the
Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly
meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent
reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community.
The
Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned
by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge
mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the
Boston mosque.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, attended the Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of
setting two bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264
others at the April 15 Boston Marathon.
The FBI has not
indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal activity, but
mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in terrorist
activity:
• Alamoudi, who signed the articles of incorporation
as the Cambridge mosque's president, was sentenced to 23 years in
federal court in Alexandria, Va., in 2004 for his role as a facilitator
in what federal prosecutors called a Libyan assassination plot against
then-crown prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Abdullah is now the Saudi
king.
•
Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was
arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters
and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a
rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents,
for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an
86-year sentence.
•
Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in
2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had
traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use
automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal
investigators in Boston alleged.
• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a
former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi
Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna's co-conspirator. He
fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges of providing support
to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a foreign country.
• Jamal Badawi of Canada, a former trustee of the Islamic Society of
Boston Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indicted
co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in Texas
over the funneling of money to Hamas, which is the Palestinian wing of
the Muslim Brotherhood.
What both mosques have in common is an
affiliation with the Muslim American Society, an organization founded in
1993 that describes itself as an American Islamic revival movement. It
has also been described by federal prosecutors in court as the "overt
arm" of the Muslim Brotherhood, which calls for Islamic law and is the
parent organization of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Critics say the Muslim American Society promotes a fraught
relationship with the United States, expressed in part by the pattern
discussed by Americans for Progress and Tolerance in which adherents are
made to feel cut off from their home country and to identify with a
global Islamist political community rather than with America.
Zhudi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy,
said the radical teachings often follow a theme of recitation of
grievances that Islam has with the West, advocacy against U.S. foreign
policy and terrorism prosecutions, and efforts "to evangelize Islam in
order to improve Western society that is secularized," he says.
Jasser, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and author of the 2012 book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot Fights to Save His Faith,
says the teachings make some followers feel "like their national
identity is completely absent and hollow, and that vacuum can be filled
by (radical) Islamic ideology, which is supremacist and looks upon the
West as evil."
The Cambridge mosque was founded in 1982 by
students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and
several other Boston-area schools, according to a profile by the
Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Its members founded the sister
mosque in Boston in 2009.
The leadership of the two mosques is
intertwined, and the ideology they teach is the same, Jacobs said. Ilya
Feoktistov, director of research at Americans for Peace and Tolerance,
said much of the money to create the Boston mosque came not from local
Muslims but from foreign sources.
More than half of the $15.5
million used to found the Boston mosque came from Saudi sources,
Feoktistov said, who cites financial documents that Jacobs' group
obtained when the mosque sued it for defamation. The lawsuit was later
dropped.
Vali said that the vast majority of total donors were in
the United States and that "no donations were accepted if the donor
wanted to have any decision-making influence (even if benign)."
Vali
characterized Americans for Peace and Tolerance and its founder,
Jacobs, as anti-Muslim activists who spread "lies and half-truths in
order to attack and marginalize much of the local Muslim community and
many of its institutions."
"It's the new McCarthyism in full swing," he said.
Sheik
Basyouny Nehela, the imam of the Cambridge mosque, which is located
across the Charles River from Boston, is on the board of directors for
the Muslim American Society of Boston, which runs the Boston mosque.
The Tsarnaevs attended the Cambridge mosque.
A statement issued by
the Cambridge mosque said the Tsarnaev brothers were "occasional
visitors." The mosque's office manager, Nichole Mossalam, said neither
brother expressed radical views. "They never exhibited any violent
sentiments or behaviors. Otherwise, they would have been reported,"
Mossalam said.
The Cambridge mosque said Tsarnaev, 26, who died
Thursday night in a shootout with police, "disagreed with the moderate
American-Islamic theology" of the mosque. Tsarnaev challenged an imam
who said in his sermon that it was appropriate to celebrate U.S.
national holidays and was told to stop such outbursts, the mosque said
in a statement.
Talal Eid, a Muslim chaplain at Brandeis University, said focusing on individual radicals that prayed in a building is unfair.
"In
2011, the two brothers were right under the nose of the FBI and they
didn't find anything," Eid said, who never met the Tsarnaevs. "How do
you want me as an imam to know enough to tell them they are not welcome
here? How can I figure out those people have that kind of criminal
intent?"
The Muslim American Society says on its website that it
is independent of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, early Brotherhood
literature is considered "the foundational texts for the intellectual
component for Islamic work in America," the website states.
Jacobs
says claims of moderate Islam do not square with the mosque's classic
jihadi texts in its library and its hosting of radical speakers.
Jacobs
said Ahmed Mansour, his co-director at Americans for Peace and
Tolerance, found writings by Syed Qutb, the former leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, and other jihadi texts at the Cambridge mosque's
library when Mansour went there in 2003. Qutb pioneered the radical
violent ideology espoused by al-Qaeda.
Yusuf al Qaradawi,
the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who espouses radical views in
videos collected by Jacobs' group, was listed as a trustee on the
Cambridge mosque's IRS filings until 2000, and on the mosque's website
until 2003, when he addressed congregants via recorded video message to
raise money for the Boston mosque, according to a screenshot of the
announcement that Feoktistov provided.
Vali said Qaradawi was
listed as an honorary trustee years ago only because his scholarship and
high esteem in Muslim circles would help with fundraising.
Yasir
Qadhi, who lectured at the Boston mosque in April 2009, has advocated
replacing U.S. democracy with Islamic rule and called Christians
"filthy" polytheists whose "life and prosperity … holds no value in the
state of Jihad," according to a video obtained by Jacobs' group.
Vali said Qadhi was a guest of a non-profit organization that was
renting space at the Boston mosque and has changed his views since that
video was made.
Jacobs and others say it is not only renters who
express sympathetic views for terrorists. Leaders of the Boston and
Cambridge mosques, and invited guests, have advocated on behalf of
convicted terrorists, urging followers to seek their release or lenient
sentences.
Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, sometimes a spokesman for
the Boston mosque, used Siddiqui's case to speak against the USA Patriot
Act, the anti-terrorism law passed under the George W. Bush
administration. "After they're done with (Siddiqui), they are going to
come to your door if they feel like it," he said, according to a video
obtained by Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
Anwar Kazmi, a
member of the Cambridge mosque's board of trustees, called for leniency
for Mehanna and Siddiqui at a Boston rally in February 2012, in a video
posted to YouTube. He characterized Siddiqui's 86-year sentence as
excessive.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Kazmi insisted
that the Cambridge mosque is moderate and condemns the marathon
bombings. On Monday, the mosque e-mailed members to caution them that
the FBI may question them and that they may want to seek representation.
"This
kind of violence, terrorism, it's just completely contrary to the
spirit of Islam," Kasmi said. "The words in the Quran say if anybody
kills even a single human being without just cause, it's as if you've
killed all of humanity."
Contributing: Yamiche Alcindor
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