Mosque Kicked Out Suspected Terrorist Because Of His Radical Views And Support Of Al-Qaeda

thinkprogress.org

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 30, 2011 at 10:24 am

This week, the FBI arrested and charged 26-year-old suspected terrorist Rezwan Ferdaus with plotting to use remote-controlled planes filled with plastic explosives to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. The Massachusetts man began plotting a “violent jihad” against the U.S. early last year “with the goal of terrorizing the United States, decapitating its ‘military center’ and killing as many ‘kafirs,’ i.e., an Arabic term meaning non-believers, as possible.”

Not only did Ferdaus’ radical views tip off the FBI, they got him expelled from his local mosque in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Last year, the Islamic Sosciety of Boston Cultural Center asked Ferdaus to leave because of his radical Islamic views, hostility towards women, and his suspected support of al Qaeda. “I can’t think of a mosque where he was welcome,” said the mosque’s director:

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Mosques and Muslim communities have been instrumental in the fight against homegrown terrorism. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has noted, “About a third of all foiled al-Qaida related plots in the U.S. relied on support or information provided by members of the Muslim community. Indeed, the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the man who tried to bomb a plane over Detroit last year — actually alerted authorities about his son’s “extreme radical views” months before the attempted attack.

What’s more, a Duke University study found that “many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.” “This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulting in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11,” the study concluded.

tags: religion, terrorism, Islam, Muslims
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