Uh huh, I'm sure he was (rolling eyes here)
New York imam shocked *shocked!* that two members of his mosque were plotting Jihad.
“Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?” Noelle Velentzas, a 28-year-old convert to Islam, asked her friend, Asia Siddiqui, who is also a Muslim. Velentzas said to Siddiqui that people should think of them both as “citizens of the Islamic State.” And so in due course they set out to prove that they were both – “bad bitches” and good Islamic State citizens – by plotting jihad attacks in the U.S.
Velentzas considered herself a citizen of the Islamic State, but she was impatient. It was expensive, difficult and risky to make one’s way all the way over there, and anyway there was no need: a citizen of the Islamic State could “make history” by “pleasing Allah” right in the United States. And what would please Allah more than the murder of a large number of infidels – which is exactly what she and Siddiqui set out to accomplish?
The good citizens didn’t realize, however, that their fellow jihadi with whom they were discussing the logistics of various bomb plots was actually working for the FBI. Last Thursday, they were arrested – and not long thereafter, it came to light that they were both active and respected members of the Masjid Al-Hamdulillah mosque in Brooklyn.
The mosque’s imam, Charles Aziz Bilal, had nothing but praise for Velentzas and her family: “They have been an upright family,” he said. “Very honest, very sincere, very dedicated family. They’re family-oriented. They have children in the community, born in the mosque. Good religious people.” He confirmed that both Velentzas and Siddiqui were members of the mosque in good standing.
Bilal dismissed, however, the idea that either one could have learned to be “bad bitches” who were “citizens of the Islamic State” at good old Masjid Al-Hamdulillah. “That’s not what we promote here,” he assured Newsday, and that was that. He characterized Velentzas as “a mother who took care of her daughter, normal. Very friendly, nothing political, nothing extremist.” As for jihad terror activity, he said that if Velentzas and Siddiqui had really been involved in it, “they were doing it on the down low.”
What else did you expect him to say? “Oh, yes, we put them up to it, kaffir”? “Yes, we all knew about what they were doing, and we all approved”?
It is no surprise at all that Imam Charles Aziz Bilal of Masjid Al-Hamdulillah would say these things. What is unfortunate is that the mainstream media takes these statements at face value, with no attempt to determine whether or not he is telling the truth.
This is despite the fact that four separate studies conducted since 1998 have all found that 80% of U.S. mosques were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians.
There are no countervailing studies that challenge these results. In 1998, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi leader, visited 114 mosques in the United States. Then he gave testimony before a State Department Open Forum in January 1999, and asserted that 80% of American mosques taught the “extremist ideology.”
Then there was the Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 study, and the Mapping Sharia Project’s 2008 study. Each independently showed that upwards of 80% of mosques in America were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule.
And in the summer of 2011 came another study showing that only 19% of mosques in the U.S. don’t teach jihad violence and/or Islamic supremacism.
Specifically:
A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshiper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.
That means that around 1,700 mosques in the U.S. could be preaching hatred of infidels and justifying violence against them.
Could Charles Aziz Bilal’s Masjid Al-Hamdulillah be one of them? We will never know without a thorough investigation, which is unlikely to be forthcoming. And without it, suspicions will linger that Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui first learned to be “bad bitches” right down at the local mosque, and that Bilal’s surprise at hearing about the charges against them was…not all that it seemed to be.
Most of today’s right-thinking elites would be aghast at the very existence of suspicions, and would immediately insist that they be buried under flower beds of tolerance and multiculturalism. But how long can the United States and the free world really afford to do that?
