Virginia State Legislature Commends Mosque with Terror Links

The Virginia State Legislature this month passed a joint resolution Commending the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center on the 30th anniversary of its founding. This is the mosque that the Treasury Department’s Enforcement Communications System (TECS) says is “operating as a front for Hamas operatives in U.S.” and “is associated with Islamic extremists.” 

It adds that Dar Al-Hijrah has been investigated numerous times for “financing and proving aid and comfort” to jihad organizations and has been “linked to numerous individuals linked to terrorism financing.” Has the Virginia State Legislature gone mad?

The resolution praises Dar Al-Hijrah for “30 years of serving and uplifting members of the Northern Virginia Muslim community and conducting outreach to the region in 2013.” It says that the mosque “works to strengthen the Muslim faith in the region through seminars, sermons, lectures, social activities, and clear operational hours for the observance of daily prayer.” The reoslution also states that it is “encouraging the members of the Muslim community to become productive members of society.”

As if all that weren’t enough, the resolution says that “the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center promotes cooperation, tolerance, and mutual understanding among different faiths,” and “conducts outreach in the community, offering educational classes and making charitable donations to those in need.” It expresses the legislators’ “admiration for the center’s commitment to serving the Northern Virginia Muslim community and peoples of all faiths.”

Amid all this boilerplate bloviating, the resolution also notes that “the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center is affiliated with the Muslim American Society,” which it describes as “a national religious, educational, cultural, and charitable organization.”

These legislators no doubt have no idea of what the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004: that the Muslim American Society is the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. 

In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members. 

Confirming this is Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s English website, which now carries that article. Shaker Elsayed, the mosque’s imam from 2005 to the present, was Secretary General of the Muslim American Society.

Why does it matter that the MAS is the Brotherhood? Because according to a captured internal Brotherhood document, the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. is engaged in a “grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

There is much more that should make the Virginia state legislators ashamed of their commendation. The late jihad leader Anwar al-Awlaki was the imam at Dar al-Hijrah. He is said to have been a “spiritual adviser” to three of the hijackers who attacked America on September 11, 2001. Al-Awlaki was also in regular contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas underwear bomber who tried to blow up a passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

The former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who murdered thirteen Americans in a jihad massacre at Fort Hood in Texas, worshiped at Dar al-Hijrah when he lived in the area and was in touch with al-Awlaki shortly before he carried out his attack.

The Saudi-backed North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, bought the mosque’s grounds in 1983. Mohammed al-Hanooti, the mosque’s imam from 1995 to 1999, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali taught Islamic studies and was a camp counselor at the mosque; he is now in prison for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. Abdelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, a member of the mosque’s Executive Committee, was convicted in November 2007 of contempt and obstruction of justice for refusing to testify regarding Hamas and received an eleven-year prison sentence.

Yet despite all this, this is not the first time the Virginia legislature has behaved as if this mosque were just another house of worship. In 2010, the Virginia General Assembly had Dar al-Hijrah’s Johari Abdul-Malik open the legislative session with a devout Islamic prayer. Abdul-Malik once defended Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who is in prison for financing al-Qaeda.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.