FORT HOOD AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST

Much has been written already about what happened at Fort Hood last week but precious little as to why it happened. To understand why it happened it may be useful to start by reminding ourselves again that the mass murder at Fort Hood was the first act of suicide terrorism on American soil by a homegrown Islamic extremist.

To come to this conclusion we do not need to know what motivated Major Malik Nidal Hasan, but only that he was a Moslem and that he was on a suicide mission.  There is no doubt about the former and little doubt that somebody embarked on mass murder in a military base had much hope of coming out alive.

These two facts are crucial for understanding what happened  because for a mainstream practicing Moslem, suicide is just about the most abominable sin against Allah a believer can commit according to both the Koran (Surah An Nisaa 4: 29-30) and the Hadith literature (Sahih Bukhari 7:670).

And it is the outright rejection of this traditional Koranic prohibition and the elevation of suicide terrorism into the preferred ‘martyrdom’ instrument of Jihadist violence by radical Islamists that is the key distinction between moderate, mainstream Moslems and Islamic extremists. Indeed, this difference is so fundamental that any Moslem that justifies and extols suicide bombing should be seen ipso facto as a security risk if not a ticking time bomb.

The real question then, is not what made Major Hasan commit mass murder, but how he became a terrorist. It is a question of seminal relevance given the strong probability that homegrown terrorism might well be a greater threat to homeland security in the future than foreign jihadists.  And the fact that the US government under both President Bush and now President Obama, has studiously avoided acknowledging the threat, let alone addressing it in a systematic way.  

Yet, Washington‘s tolerance of the intolerable will not make the problem go away. Only a week before the massacre at Fort Hood, the FBI killed one and arrested a dozen radicalized African-American converts in Detroit, who believed in and trained for violent jihad against fellow citizens, and were radicalized in the U.S.  long before they reached out to foreign jihadists for training and support.

To understand the nature of the problem a quick look at the origins and evolution of Islamic extremism in America and its sponsors is essential.  Radical Islam made its first appearance in America in 1963 at the University of Illinois with the founding of the Moslem Student Association (MSA) by a group of Moslem Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Moslemin) immigrant activists with money from the Saudi front-organization Moslem World League (MWL).

In the decade following the founding of the MSA, many of today’s self-proclaimed leading Islamic organizations were spun-off from it and began acting independently though neither the ideological nor the organizational ties with the Moslem Brotherhood and its Saudi paymasters were ever severed. These included the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and a number of smaller groups.

In the 1990s, this network was augmented with a number of other radical Islamist organizations affiliated with the Ikhwan, such as the Moslem Political Affairs Council (MPAC), the Hamas front-organization Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), later renamed Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the above ground incarnation of the clandestine Brotherhood, registered in 1993 as the Moslem American Society (MAS).

What they all had in common was strict adherence to the hate-filled Wahhabi-Salafi Islamist ideology and a visceral dislike for America and the West,  leading at least some of them to see their ultimate objective as "destroying Western civilization from within," as an internal Ikhwan document put it succinctly.

To understand the magnitude of the problem it is worth recalling that as early as the period of 1980 to1985, according to the Moslem World League Journal, some 60 American Islamic organizations were financed by Wahhabi interests and, in 1991, the Ikhwan counted 29 American Islamic organizations among its allies, while the MSA, which openly lionizes Osama bin Laden, now boasts over 1000 college chapters in North America.

With the help of huge inflows of mostly Saudi money, these radical networks, which should more appropriately be seen as branches of the same organization, run by a few dozen individuals through a system of interlocking directorships, have made radical Islam the dominant idiom of the American Moslem establishment, despite the fact that most American Moslems are well-integrated, economically prosperous and not given to extremism.

Taken together this network, which controls a majority of American mosques, Islamic cultural centers, charities and schools,  is nothing short of an Islamist fifth column radicalizing large numbers of American Moslems and increasingly capable of infiltrating our government and key institutions including the military.

Unfortunately, neither the U.S. government nor the FBI or the military understand that what this fifth column is engaged in is not religion but political sedition and the subversion of our constitutional order under the guise of religion. Both of which are prohibited under current U.S. law.

In just one typical example of the Islamist modus operandi, in October, 2004 a gentleman by the name of Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in prison for terrorism-related activities and is currently serving his sentence in a federal penitentiary. Prior to that, Alamoudi had been a kingpin of the Islamist network as a key official in a dozen top Islamist organizations and five charities suspected of funding terrorism.

Despite that, Alamoudi evidently enjoyed unimpeded access to the White House under both Presidents Clinton and Bush and also served as a State Department "goodwill ambassador" in the Middle East and a U.S. Information Agency speaker abroad. Last but most, as a founder of an organization called American Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (AMAFVAC), this radical Islamist became the first exclusive endorsing agent for Moslem chaplains for all branches of the U.S. armed forces and was able to infiltrate Islamist extremists in the military virtually at will.

It is within the tentacles of this vast subversive enterprise that Major Hasan, like thousands of others, became radicalized and eventually a terrorist long before the war in Iraq came along to annoy him. And it is not difficult to trace his transformation into a mass murderer by simply looking at the institutions where he was indoctrinated.

First, at Dar al-Hijrah in Falls Church, Va., one of the largest and most radical mosques in the country, where his mentor was Imam Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American-born jihad and suicide bombing advocate;  and then at the Moslem Community Center in Silver Spring, Md. , under Imam Faizul Khan, yet another Moslem extremist, a key figure in the Washington D.C. Islamist scene, and an official at both ISNA, an unindicted co-conspirator at a terror finance trial, and the Saudi front MWL.

All of the above is factual information easily accessible to anybody with an internet connection. Yet, the U.S. government, our counter-terrorism organs and the military have all refused to recognize or act upon it and twelve young Americans have paid the ultimate price for this clear dereliction of duty by their superiors.

Whether this was the result of sheer incompetence or obsequious political correctness or both, the American people have the right and duty to ask their representatives to conduct a broad investigation of this catastrophic failure and take appropriate measures to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And do it soon. If not, the next suicide bombing in the homeland is not a matter of if, but when.

Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.