Chuck. Note the date of this article. If only someone in power had listened.
Steven Emerson: Get Ready for Twenty World Trade Center Bombings
JUNE 1997 • VOLUME IV: NUMBER 2
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Steven Emerson is the author of four books on the Middle East and, since 1993, the foremost specialist on the subject of fundamentalist Muslim activities in the United States. Formerly a staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a journalist for U.S. News & World Report and Cable News Network, he produced the documentary Jihad in America that PBS broadcast in November 1994 and won the George Polk Award for best television documentary. Daniel Pipes interviewed him on April 8, 1997.
THE THREAT
Middle East Quarterly: Do fundamentalist Muslims pose a threat to the United States?
Steven Emerson: No doubt. All the major terror groups of a fundamentalist orientation have established deeply routed, well-organized cells and infrastructure here -- Hamas Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, as well as the Algerian groups, Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group. They believe in the use of violence to carry out their doctrine and to achieve their goals. This is not just my assessment but the publicly stated view of top officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation who repeatedly state that deeply entrenched radical Islamic groups have the ability to strike here in the United States at will.1
MEQ: How do these groups intend to achieve their agenda in the United States?
Emerson: They use the United States as a sanctuary in which they can raise funds, recruit new members, directly control Middle Eastern operations, and initiate terrorists attacks. They also use it to spread da`wa [i.e., to propagate Islam].
MEQ: Did the fundamentalists assess the World Trade Center bombing of February 1993 as harmful to their interests?
Emerson: Yes, at this point Islamic fundamentalists are withholding attacks inside this country, so the current threat is much more to Americans overseas and other Western targets. Not only have funds from the United States paid for the terrorist attacks, but actual recruits have been sent from here on actual missions to fight "infidels" and set up jihad battlefronts in Algeria, Bosnia, Israel and the territories, Lebanon, Chechniya, and the Philippines.
MEQ: At some future point things here will change for the worse?
Emerson: The rage against the United States is increasing. In an environment that not only sanctions terrorism but mandates terrorist attacks against "enemies" of Islam, the question is how long the quiet can remain.
MEQ: The absence of attacks in America since 1993 does not mean the problem of fundamentalist violence has abated?
Emerson: Not at all. If anything, the threat is greater now than before the World Trade Center bombing as the numbers of these groups and their members expands. In fact, I would say that the infrastructure now exists to carry off twenty simultaneous World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States. And as chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons become available to them, the threat becomes ever more ominous. Just because someone holding a gun to your head doesn't pull the trigger should not be understood as the threat not existing. It would be suicidal to permit our national security to depend on the good will or rationality of radical fundamentalists.
MEQ: And in the meantime, what are they doing?
Emerson: They use the United States as a base to spread the word of extremism, to proselytize, and to recruit new members to their interpretation of Islam. They also make efforts to become entrenched and legitimate so that they can provide a base here for the entire panoply of radical policies inimical to the democracy, pluralism, and respect for the individual that characterize Western political life.
MEQ: Might the radical groups limit their violence to American interests outside the United States?
Emerson: No, because these groups are unable to restrict their hatred for the United States to certain geographical regions.
MEQ: You told Congress a year ago that "both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have not only raised considerable ... funds in the United States but have also set up operational headquarters in the US where terrorist attacks and military strategies are orchestrated."2 What proof do you have?
Emerson: Example one: Court documents video tapes seen and other intelligence material relating to the investigation by law enforcement officials of Islamic Jihad in Tampa, Florida. Prior to his assuming leadership of Islamic Jihad in Damascus in October 1995, Ramadan `Abdallah Shallah had been an instructor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Equipped with several search warrants, the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service retrieved tens of thousands of documents showing that his Florida office had served as the major operational arm of Islamic Jihad outside Syria.
Example two: law enforcement has identified the Islamic Association for Palestine as the primary Hamas front group in the United States. Its December 1996 conference in Chicago included Islamic extremists from the Middle East, Hamas commanders based in the United States, and radical supporters of Hamas from all parts of the United States. Several of the more secretive sessions included a discussion about killing Jews and other "enemies of Hamas."
Example three: the activities of Hamas in the United States were revealed when materials relating to the case of Musa Abu Marzook, its operative arrested at JFK airport in July 1995, were publicly released. These documents clearly established that Abu Marzook had been dispatching agents to Israel to carry out terrorists attacks. Investigators even found the checks by which he paid his U.S.-based couriers.3
CURRENT ISSUES
MEQ: Given the strength of this proof, why did the Israeli government announce on April 3, 1997, against seeking Abu Marzook's extradition?
Emerson: It feared an outbreak of terrorism just at a time when Palestinian-Israeli relations were already at the breaking point. I think it was a bad decision by the Israelis, who did not hold true to their principles: it showed that terrorists can win. Abu Marzook will be received as a hero who stood up and defeated the United States and Israel. Whenever terrorists make demands it's easiest to cave in and accept the demands, such as releasing someone like Abu Marzook; but as terrorists see that intimidation works and resort to this again and again, the longer-term price will be high. The Israeli decision was not a proud moment for those who believe in counterterrorism and justice.
MEQ: In a related case, why is Anwar Haddam, the leader of the Algerian group Islamic Salvation Front (or FIS), in an American jail since December 1996? Are the charges against him valid?
Emerson: Haddam came to the United States in 1993, ostensibly to seek political asylum but really to use it as a base to orchestrate FIS strategy and actual terrorist operations. The INS studied his case and determined in December 1996 that he had been directly involved in promoting acts of terrorism. Haddam was taken into custody when the INS ruled against his application for asylum, initiating the process of exclusion.4 FIS not only has its own military wing but it has major structural connections to the GIA [Armed Islamic Group], an organization that all agree is terrorist. That makes Haddam an official of an organization that has carried out terrorist acts. More importantly, he not only sanctioned terrorism but was involved in orchestrating attacks.
MEQ: Was the shooting spree carried out by a Palestinian gunman at the Empire State building in February 1997, killing one person and wounding six, related to the organized fundamentalist movement? The man, `Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, left behind a note in which he accused the United States of using Israel as "an instrument" against Palestinians?5
Emerson: We don't know at this point. This is still being investigated. Indications exist that others knew of his attack. For example, Abu Kamal apparently purchased his weapon in Florida together with someone else from a mosque in Florida and practiced his new weapon on a target along with another person from that same mosque.
Even if turns out that Abu Kamal acted totally alone, I have no doubt that his compulsion to carry out this would-be massacre resulted from an intellectual environment created by the radical groups. He lived in an atmosphere that demonizes Jews, Americans, and other "enemies of Islam." Terrorism need not be directly organized by an ayatollah sitting in Qum or a Hamas commander in Gaza or Chicago. In the United States, as in Israel and some Arab countries, individuals take it upon themselves to avenge an "assault against Islam" or to "fight in the path of God" by killing innocents.
HOSTILITY TO THE WEST
MEQ: Please characterize the views of fundamentalists toward the United States.
Emerson: They have a visceral hatred of the United States and the values it represents.
MEQ: From what comes this hostility?
Emerson: In their own literature and speaking to one another they are very candid about seeing a profound an all-encompassing war between Islam and the West. Let me give you an exact quote or two from conferences of the Muslim Arab Youth Association, on organization sponsoring annual meetings since the late 1970s. Sheikh Mohammed Siyyam of Hamas declared in December 1989 that "the Islamic solution is the only solution, the fighting, that is the military solution, is the only solution ... America is the sworn enemy and it is from her that the Jews take the weapons and soldiers.6
Kamal Hilbawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, told thousands of radical fundamentalists in Oklahoma City in December 1992, that the Palestinian cause is conflict "between truth and falsehood. Between two inclinations -- one Satanic, headed by Jews and their [Christian] co-conspirators and the other -- religious, carried out by Hamas, the Islamic people in general and the Islamic movement in particular."7
MEQ: These are exceptional statements?
Emerson: Hardly. I have analyzed materials from some ten MAYA conferences and have found repeated exhortations to audiences to strike against "infidels," to instill terror in the hearts of the "enemy", to slaughter Jews, to engage in jihad against the "West" and destroy it, and so forth. You get the picture.
GOALS
MEQ: What are the short-range goals of fundamentalist Muslims in the United States?
Emerson: To strengthen worldwide their movements financially, politically and militarily.
MEQ: What about ultimate goals?
Emerson: Ultimately, incredible as it seems to us, to turn the United States into an Islamic country. They believe the world has to be made Muslim, preferably through da`wa but if necessary through other means. They seek to impose the Shari`a [Islamic sacred law] and even to resurrect the caliphate.8 The success of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan prompted some of them to turn their sights on Western targets. Strange as it sounds, they think that they brought down one super power: one down, one to go. You have to see the World Trade Center bombing in light of that ambition.
They are sometimes publicly explicit about this goal. The Muslim, a British-based Islamic fundamentalist publication, appeals to Muslims, "let us not hesitate in preparing for Jihad against the unbeliever--to subjugate the world to Islam."9 Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (or CAIR) openly declares that he would like to see the U.S. become a Muslim country.10Abdulrahman Alamoudi, head of the American Muslim Council, stated at the Islamic Association for Palestine conference in December 1996 that the United States will become a Muslim country, even if it takes a hundred years.
MEQ: Islamic history shows two main patterns of conversion: from above, by taking control of the state, or from below, through individual conversion. How do they hope to make the United States a Muslim country?
Emerson: Most fundamentalist groups in the United States seek to spread Islam through da`wa, by establishing moral leadership and proselytizing individuals. As the same time, keep two points in mind. First, the radicals also support groups that seek to topple, from above, the non-fundamentalist regimes in the Middle East. Second, strategies change. Hamas, or its precursor, for many years did not carry out violence in Gaza because it deemed themselves not to be ready for this. It adopted violent methods against Israelis only when saw the success of Islamic Jihad, which used violence, and was jealous of its popularity.
LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES
MEQ: If the fundamentalist groups and leaders hate the United States so much, why do they live here?
Emerson: It is an apparent paradox, but the United States is the best place to operate from. American laws make this country the freest in the world -- which is precisely what attracts foreign militants to come here. The FBI labors under serious restrictions that prevents it -- unless there is evidence of specific criminality -- from monitoring groups who advocate violence or other extremist policies. These groups know about the FBI's limitations and take advantage of them. They also take advantage of the fact that they are nearly impervious to infiltration by the authorities, speaking foreign languages and living in a different cultural universe. Living here benefits them in other ways too: modern technology makes it possible for them to spread ideas via faxes and the Internet all over the world, and instantly to transfer monies and give instructions.
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