Read American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us for Free Online Page B

reason, the extremists have disproportionate influence. One prominent cleric argued in 1999 that “because they are active they took over…more than 80 per cent of the mosques that have been established in the U.S.” 12 Although our pluralist ideals tend to view this statement as an automatic exaggeration, the reality is far more sobering. The vast majority of American mosques are funded with Saudi Arabian money, and most of the funders subscribe to the Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century ideology of extreme purity that supports the spread of Islam through violence. Local imams can be appointed by anyone who chooses to fund and/or found a mosque; hence, the influence of this minority ideology is well entrenched among American clerics.
    To see how the potent mix of strident ideology, foreign nationals and American recruits, money, and a modest amount of technological knowhow can produce mayhem, we need look no further than New York City in the early 1990s.

Chapter Three
     

World Trade Center I
     
     
    W HEN FOREIGN TERROR ORGANIZATIONS first began colonizing the United States, it was not unreasonable to think that America wasn’t a target. A great deal of the conferences and publications I monitored in the 1990s concerned fund-raising for Middle Eastern operations. Yet there were clues that Israel wasn’t the only western target of Hamas, al Qaeda, et al. Unfortunately, most of these clues were missed.
    When El-Sayeed Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City, for example, it was thought at first that he was acting alone, a crazed anti-Semite who was trying to take Middle Eastern politics into his own hands. Although the attack was on American soil, Kahane was associated with Israel and Israeli politics, not American institutions. But was he acting alone? And was he really uninterested in America? Hours after he was arrested, police raided his New Jersey apartment and carted away 47 boxes of personal papers. Much of it was in Arabic and appeared to be religious in nature. The contents were ignored—until after the first World Trade Center bombing two-and-a-half years later. Only then did investigators discover what they had missed—a road map of an international terrorist network headquartered in the United States. In a small wirebound notebook, Nosair had written, “We have to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization such as the tourist attractions they are so proud of and the high buildings they are so proud of.” 1 There were cassette tapes of telephone conversations between holy warriors in the United States, Pakistan, and Europe, showing that the American residents were taking orders from abroad. In one conversation, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, apparently speaking from Peshawar, asked his followers in New Jersey something about an operation involving “camps” in the United States. A man responded, “It was a success. It started Friday evening and ended Monday. It lasted three days and we expect positive results.” 2 This was the first indication that terrorist groups were running training camps on American soil. Unfortunately none of this emerged until after February 26, 1993.
    At 12:15 P.M. on that day, a huge explosion rocked the bottom floors of One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Within seconds smoke was curling up the stairwells of the 110-story building. Thousands of people were trapped on the upper floors. Six people eating lunch in a cafeteria were killed immediately. More than a thousand others suffered injuries ranging from broken bones to smoke inhalation.
    The federal investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing was fast and effective, reassuring Americans that its government could track down domestic terrorists. Furthermore, just a few months after the bombing, another conspiracy to attack multiple targets in New York City was foiled. The popular image of