" He would tell us, here's how you kill someone with one hit. "
--Joseph Griffith, 13-year-old ex-neighbor of John Muhammad
" Our confrontation with America used to be like confronting a fortress from outside. Today, we have found a loophole to enter the fortress and to confront it from within."
--Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi after a meeting with Louis Farrakhan
" I know that if he went by what Minister Farrakhan said, he wouldn't be doing sniping, not in the name of Louis Farrakhan and not on the name of Allah."
--Shakeel Muhammad, Nation of Islam follower
D.C. SNIPER TERROR
Suspect's Muslim ties
still unclear
Nation of Islam fending off inquiries as it prepares response
October 25, 2002
By Art Moore
TACOMA, Wash. – Joseph Griffith got closer to John Allen Muhammad than most people in his south Tacoma neighborhood.
John Allen Muhammad
The 13-year-old recalls finding himself at the opposite end of a martial arts stick from the suspected D.C. serial sniper, who at one time offered neighbor boys a weekly self-defense lesson in his backyard.
"He would tell us," Griffith remembered, "here's how you kill someone with one hit."
Jabs straight to the chest began to get a little too violent, said Griffith. Others who participated in the sessions, including neighbor Johnny Tran, 13, nodded in agreement as they stood across the street from the house where Muhammad's family lived from 1994 to 2000.
"We started getting injured – mostly his son John," Griffith said, "and we just stopped."
Former Tacoma, Wash., residence of suspected serial sniper John Allen Muhammad
Griffith says, however, that he was a good friend of Muhammad's now 12-year-old son and spent a lot of time at the family's house at 7302 Ainsworth.
Like other neighbors, he paints a picture of a pious Muslim family that never missed a weekly service.
Griffith said Muhammad's house was adorned with "Islamic signs and posters" on the walls and had a scripture verse on the front door. He and other neighbors noted that Muhammad's wife Mildred stood out with her traditionally conservative Muslim dress, including a head covering.
Neighbor Leo Dudley told the Seattle Times that Muhammad provided security for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington, D.C., in 1995.
While news reports say Muhammad converted to Islam about 17 years ago, he only recently changed his last name from Williams. Members of the Nation of Islam, a black-nationalist sect distinct from Sunni and Shiite Islam that began in the 1930s, generally take on Muhammad as a last name rather than a first.
Crafting a response
A Nation of Islam spokesman, James Muhammad, told WorldNetDaily this morning that the group is still preparing an official response to inquiries about the suspected D.C. sniper's ties to the group.
At a meeting place on South 19th and Hosmer in Tacoma, Nation of Islam followers rebuffed attempts to find out if they knew John Allen Muhammad or could provide information about the group. Instead they gave a phone number for a contact at headquarters in Chicago.
In a room with about 20 chairs aimed toward a video monitor, followers at the Tacoma venue gather to watch sermons and speeches by Farrakhan, whose visage covers the walls. A large banner outside advertises the Million Man March, which took place 7 years ago.
James Muhammad is editor of the Nation of Islam newspaper, The Final Call, which features a story about the D.C. sniper case in its current edition, published before John Muhammad was identified as a suspect.
Titled "Domestic terror shows homeland is insecure," it notes that the shootings have been a concern to African American groups and criticizes the government for not labeling it terrorism.
The article apparently is based on the assumption that the sniper is white.
It quotes an unnamed source, who complains that officials "won't characterize anything that's not (perpetrated by an) Arab or Black or Asian as terrorism."
A guest editorial in the same edition says the "serial sniper is likely the latest in an American Rogues Gallery of homegrown (white) terrorists who acted out their deadly personal or political hatreds." It criticizes President Bush and the FBI , which "still obsessively fixate on the terror threat to America coming exclusively from Muslim, Arab or other foreign al-Qaida operatives."
While the Nation of Islam is still formulating its response to questions about ties with John Muhammad, the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which considers Farrakhan's group to be an aberrant sect, issued a statement on recent developments in the sniper case.
"We are concerned that because a suspect in this case has the last name of 'Muhammad,' American Muslims will now face scapegoating and bias," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad.
"Police reports indicate the suspects acted alone, based on their own motivations," Awad said. "There is no indication that this case is related to Islam or Muslims. We therefore ask journalists and media commentators to avoid speculation based on stereotyping or prejudice. The American Muslim community should not be held accountable for the alleged criminal actions of what appear to be troubled and deranged individuals."
Law enforcement authorities, according to the Seattle Times, think John Muhammad and his accomplice James Lee Malvo, 17, may have been motivated by anti-American sentiments in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The sources said both were known to speak sympathetically about the men who attacked the United States.
Media converge on Tacoma duplex where Muhammad, Malvo stayed earlier this year
Malvo also is a Muslim, according to a high school student who spent time with him last summer. The teen, who didn't want to be named, said she befriended Malvo when he and Muhammad spent a little more than a month – in July and early August – at the duplex where federal authorities conducted a backyard ballistics search Wednesday. The house is several miles from where Muhammad lived with his wife and three children.
The police chief of Bellingham, Wash., where federal agents searched a school attended by Malvo last fall, said he has been assured by the FBI that the two men were not acting with any group.
"It appears they have acted on their own," said Randall Carroll in a news conference yesterday.
Pattern of dismissal
Daniel Pipes, a leading researcher of radical Islam, says that while there is little information at this point with which to assess the sniper's motives, officials typically are downplaying the terrorism angle.
"It's a pattern," he told WorldNetDaily.
Recalling the July 4, Los Angeles airport murder of Israelis by an Egyptian, he said "authorities not only don't want to connect it to al-Qaida, but don't want to see it as terrorism."
"So they just make it into some work dispute, or whatever," Pipes said. "They immediately come to conclusions that are hard to justify."
If John Muhammad is a Nation of Islam follower, that should be an issue for investigators, Pipes contends
"It's who he is," said Pipes, "It's an identity."
Pipes says that converts to Islam are most likely to turn anti-American when they adhere to two specific forms, either the militant Islam imported from the Middle East and South Asia, or the black-nationalist Nation of Islam.
He notes that the group's longtime leader, Elijah Muhammad, began telling followers in the 1940s that they are not American citizens, and many other leaders have spoken with intense hostility toward the U.S.
While Farrakhan often makes patriotic appeals in his sermons, and condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, he has said that "God will destroy America at the hands of Muslims." The Nation of Islam leader often makes news as he is warmly received by leaders on the U.S. list of terrorist threats, such as Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.
Gadhafi said after a 1996 meeting with Farrakhan: "Our confrontation with America used to be like confronting a fortress from outside. Today, we have found a loophole to enter the fortress and to confront it from within."
Other voices
Shakeel Muhammad, who lives in the Tacoma house where the public is invited each Sunday at 3:30 to watch a video of Farrakhan, said he has been a follower of the Nation of Islam since the 1980s but is not a registered member.
Emphasizing that he spoke only for himself, he insisted that nothing in the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan would inspire the suspected D.C. sniper's actions.
"I'm sure John Muhammad had some other voices too," he told WorldNetDaily. "I know that if he went by what Minister Farrakhan said, he wouldn't be doing sniping, not in the name of Louis Farrakhan and not on the name of Allah."
He said he knew of no other influences in the area that would lead John Muhammad in that direction.
"He could have gone to a Christian church and gotten a spirit in him," Shakeel Muhammad said. "I don't know where he got that from. I would say the devil was in him doing that."
One known local radical voice was a group of mostly black converts to Islam who federal authorities tied to a ranch in Bly, Ore., believed to have been scouted as a possible al-Qaida training camp. Tacoma resident Semi Osman, a native of Lebanon, pleaded guilty in August to weapons violations in exchange for dropping immigration-related charges.
Authorites say, however, that they know of no ties between the group and John Muhammad.
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