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By Daniel Pipes
www.danielpipes.org

The Jewish High Holidays this year fall in early October, and that’s when a massacre was planned against two Los Angeles synagogues, as well as other targets, according to an indictment just handed down against four young Muslim men.

Law enforcement traces the origins of this plot to 1997. That’s when Kevin Lamar James, a black inmate at New Folsom Prison, near Sacramento, California, founded Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS, Arabic for “Assembly of Authentic Islam”). JIS promotes the sort of jihadi version of Islam typical of American jails. As the indictment puts it, James, now 29, preached that JIS members have the duty “to target for violent attack any enemies of Islam or ‘infidels,’ including the United States government and Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel.”

James, serving a 10-year prison sentence for an armed robbery in 1996, recruited acolytes among fellow prisoners. Volunteers swore to obey him and not to disclose the existence of JIS. On release from prison, they promised to get directives from him at least every three months, recruit Muslims to JIS, and attack government officials and supporters of Israel.

Levar Haney Washington, 25, allegedly joined the JIS and swore allegiance to James just before his being released from New Folsom in November 2004, having served his six-year sentence for a 1999 assault and robbery. On getting out, Washington immediately began recruiting at his mosque, Jamat-E-Masijidul Islam in the Los Angeles area. “He regarded Osama bin Laden very highly,” reports one person whom Washington tried to recruit.

Two men, both 21 years old and without criminal records, did sign up: Hammad Riaz Samana, a lawful Pakistani immigrant and student at Santa Monica College, and Gregory Vernon Patterson, a black convert who had worked at a duty-free shop in Los Angeles International Airport. The three, plus James, now face up to life in prison for conspiring “to levy a war against the Government of the United States through terrorism.”

They did so in five ways. They conducted surveillance of U.S. government targets (military recruitment stations and bases), Israeli targets (the Los Angeles consulate and El Al), and Jewish targets (synagogues). The trio monitored the Jewish calendar and, the indictment notes, planned to attack synagogues on Jewish holidays “to maximize the number of casualties.”

They acquired an arsenal of weapons. To fund this undertaking, they set off on a crime wave, robbing (or attempting to rob) gas stations eleven times in the five weeks after May 30. They engaged in physical and firearms training. Finally, they tried recruiting other Muslims.

But Patterson dropped a mobile telephone during the course of one gas station robbery, and the police retrieved it. Information from the phone set off an FBI-led investigation that involved more than 25 agencies and 500 investigators. The police staked out Patterson and Washington, arresting them after they robbed a Chevron station on July 5. Washington’s apartment turned up bulletproof vests, knives, jihad literature, and the addresses of potential targets. Patterson was waiting to acquire an AR-15 assault rifle.

The JIS story prompts some worried observations.

Although Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales lavished praise on “the work of able investigators at all levels of government” in solving this case, law enforcement was as clueless about the JIS gang as was its British counterpart about the 7/7 bombers. If not for the lucky break of a dropped principal recruiting grounds for a criminal form of Islam. As Frank phone, the jihadis probably would have struck. It is extremely disturbing to see law enforcement pat itself on the back for ineptitude.

American prisons are comparable to the banlieues in France, the Gaffney observes, “The alleged New Folsom State plot had better rouse us out of our stupor.” Will it? Senate hearings in 2003 on prison jihadism yielded distressingly few results.

The emergence of a primarily African-American Islamist terrorist cell signals a new trend. Native-born Americans have taken part in terrorist operations before, but (again, as in London), this case this marks their first large-scale plot.

Terrorist plans that fail don’t make headlines, but they should. This was a near-miss. Home-grown radical Islam has arrived and will do damage.

Even though most Jews resist acknowledging it, the Muslim threat is changing Jewish life in the United States. The golden age of American Jewry is coming to an end.

www.worldtribune.com

Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment’s research center, published an article titled “The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda.” the Aug. 31 edition of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa.

Following are excerpts: “…As I watched the horrible sights of this wondrous storm, I was reminded of the Hadith of the Messenger of Allah [in the compilations] of Al-Bukhari and Abu Daoud. The Hadith says: ‘The wind is of the wind of Allah, it comes from mercy or for the sake of torment. When you see it, do not curse it, [but rather] ask Allah for the good that is in it, and ask Allah for shelter from its evil.’

“When the satellite channels reported on the scope of the terrifying destruction in America [caused by] this wind, I was reminded of the words of [Prophet Muhammad]: ‘The wind sends torment to one group of people, and sends mercy to others.’ I do not think — and only Allah [really] knows — that this wind, which completely wiped out American cities in these days, is a wind of mercy and blessing. It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire.

“But I began to ask myself: Doesn’t this country [the U.S.] claim to aspire to establish justice, freedom, and equality amongst the people? Isn’t this country claiming that everything it did in Afghanistan and Iraq was for truth and justice? How can it be that these American claims are untrue, when we see how good prevails in the streets of Afghanistan, and how it became an oasis of security with America’s entrance there? How can these American claims in the matter of Iraq be untrue, when we see that Iraq has become the most tranquil and secure country in the world?”

“But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America’s] cities to shreds? Have the storms joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

“How sad I am for America. Here it is, poor thing, trying with all its might to lower oil prices which have reached heights unprecedented in all history. Along with America’s phenomenal efforts to lower the price of oil in order to salvage its declining economy and its currency — that is still falling due to the ‘smart’ policy America is implementing in the world — comes this storm, the fruit of Allah’s planning, so that [the price of] a barrel of oil will increase further still. By Allah, this is not schadenfreude.

“Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year… and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

“But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R’ad [‘The Thunder’ chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: ‘The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.’ [Koran 13:31].”