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23 February 2013
By El-Hajj Mauri' Saalakhan
Assalaamu Alaikum
(Greetings of Peace):
A book was recently
published that has already begun to receive a lot of
attention in certain quarters; the author (white, Jewish,
and an establishment figure) will no doubt
receive many invitations from well established Muslim
organizations in the days to come, and he will be
feted by some of
our desperately needy brethren as another savior to
the rescue. With that said, however, the book that Mr.
Aaronson has written is indeed worthy of note.
I begin with the
following criticism on some of the book's contents:
1. Aaronson appears to
accept the official narrative of the 9/11 conspiracy
(that renegade Muslims were solely responsible for the
attack), which is not surprising.
2. He parrots the
oft-repeated error -
promulgated throughout most of America's establishment
media - that the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheikh
Omar Abdul Rahman, was responsible for, and
convicted of, the 1993 attack on the World Trade
Center in New York. NOT TRUE.
(And I have yet to see
one media organization reference the fact that there
was an Egyptian national by the name of Emad
Salem, who
served as a FBI
informant/agent-provocateur during
that period, who had to go to the hospital for
treatment of an inner-ear attack immediately following
that 1993 WTC bombing; a character who later admitted
in a taped conversation between him and his
FBI handler "John" (who had no idea the conversation
was being recorded) the obvious! The 1993 attack was
an approved operation. Emad Salem was later
reportedly paid a lot of money, and given a new
identity, as a result of services rendered. The
late Bill Kunstler wrote about this in his book
titled, My
Life As A Radical Lawyer.)
3. Lastly, when
discussing the Newburgh 4 case, Aaronson references "an
inflammatory speech Siraj Wahhaj gave during a [MANA
conference] dinner" in
Philadelphia. (Imam Siraj was also described as an
"idol" of the alleged leader of the Newburgh 4, James
Cromitie.)
I immediately wondered on
reading this paragraph (page 141) if Aaronson himself
was present at the dinner program, or if he later
heard the speech via recording (and came to this
conclusion himself); or if he is again parroting an
establishment line on a Muslim leader who some regard
as controversial and suspicious? I was present at that
dinner in question, and there was nothing
inflammatory about Imam
Siraj's speech in my view.
With that out of the way,
I should also note that these criticisms (which
underscore the establishment
mind-set that Trevor Aaronson is coming from) are
what make his book all the more valuable as a much
needed critique on the FBI's (and by extension, US
government's) "Manufactured
War On Terrorism."
Here are a series of relevant excerpts that will be
part of a power-point presentation that I plan to
deliver this coming Saturday at a community forum in
Lanham, MD. ("Terrorism
and Our Youth: Myth vs. Reality").
"What became clear from my reporting is that in the
decade since 9/11, the FBI has built the largest
network of spies ever to exist in the United States –
with ten times as many informants on the streets today
as there were during the infamous COINTELPRO
operations under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover – with
the majority of these spies focused on ferreting out
terrorism in Muslim communities… Every year, the U.S.
government allocates $3 billion to the FBI to prevent
the next 9/11, more money than the Bureau receives to
combat organized crime." (page16)
"In addition to the roster of 15,000 informants that
the Bureau maintains – many of them tasked with
infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States –
for every informant officially listed, there are as
many as three unofficial ones, known in FBI parlance
as ‘hip pockets.' Informants can be doctors, clerks,
imams. Some might not even consider themselves
informants. But the FBI regularly taps all of them as
part of a domestic intelligence apparatus whose only
historical peer might be COINTELPRO, the program the
Bureau ran from the 1950s to the 70s to discredit and
marginalize groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to
the Communist party to the Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr.'s civil rights organization."
"The FBI's vast army of spies, located in every
community in the United States with enough Muslims to
support a mosque, has one primary function: to
identify the next lone wolf. According
to the Bureau, a lone wolf is likely to be a single
male age 16
to thirty-five. Therefore, informants and
their FBI handlers are on the lookout for young
Muslims who espouse radical beliefs, are vocal about
their disapproval of U.S. foreign policy, or have
expressed sympathy for international terrorist groups. If
they find anyone who meets the criteria, they move him
to the next stage; the sting, in which an FBI
informant, posing as a terrorist, offers to help
facilitate a terrorist attack for the target."
(page 27)
"According to government and federal court records,
the Justice Department has prosecuted more than 500
terrorism defendants since 9/11. Of these cases, only
a few posed actuals threats to people or property such
as: Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who opened fire on a El Al
ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport on
July 4, 2002; Najibullah Zazi, who came close to
bombing the New York City subway system in September
2009; and Faisal Shahzad, who failed to detonate a car
bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010. Of the rest of
the approximately 500 defendants, more than 150 were
caught conspiring not with terrorists but with FBI
informants in sting operations. The remainder of the
Justice Department's post 9/11 terrorism prosecutions
involved crimes such as money laundering or
immigration violations in which the link to terrorism
was tangential or on another continent, and no
evidence in these cases suggested credible safety
threats to the United States." (pages 234-235)
"To this day, the FBI continues to manufacture
terrorism crimes in Muslim communities. By not
challenging the FBI and the Justice Department, the
public and the media have tacitly condoned sting
operations against men with no capacity on their own
to commit serious crimes." (page 226)
An interview exchange between the author of The
Terror Factory and
the former executive assistant director of the FBI's
National Security Branch, Arthur Cummings, went as
follows (pages 226-227):
Cummings: We're at war with an idea.
Aaronson: "But you can't kill an idea, can you?"
Cummings: No.
Aaronson: So that means this indefinite war, with
terrorism stings, is something we'll have to live with
for decades?"
Cummings: "That's right."
If none of the other aforementioned excerpts from
this important book serve as the much needed wake-up
call that
far too many of our leaders have
been stubbornly resisting, that last exchange between
Aaronson and Cummings should. Islam
and Muslims(the GREEN scare) have officially
replaced Communism
and the former Soviet Union (the
RED scare) as the enemy the otherAmerikkka needs
to justify the unjustifiable for decades to
come!
I also hope that after reading this book, and hearing
this author speak, Muslim "leaders" and organizations
who could be counted upon (by the war making
establishment) to reflexibly issue press statements congratulating the
FBI every time they made a "manufactured" arrest, will
think twice before doing so in the future. Time will
tell.
In the struggle for peace thru justice |
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