Posted on 06/01/2004 5:38:30 AM PDT by SJackson
The U.S. government wrongly arrested Brandon Mayfield. But did it wrongly note his numerous connections to militant Islam and the global jihad?
The U.S. government wrongly arrested Brandon Mayfield, 37, of Beaverton, Ore. on May 6. A fingerprint sent from Madrid apparently connected him to the March 11 bombings there that killed 191 people and injured 2,000. When the Spanish government two weeks later identified the fingerprint as that of an Algerian, the Department of Justice requested that Mayfield be released, and he was.
Putting aside the technical mistake, the Department of Justice has come under severe criticism for having built its case against Mayfield in part by noting his Islamic affiliations. “I am an American Muslim,” Mayfield declared on release; “I have been singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim.” His father Bill concurred: “They picked him out because they wanted someone who fit this profile. This was the closest they had, and he was a Muslim.”
“If you are Muslim you are suspect,” commented Samer Horani of the Islamic Center of Portland. Dave Fidanque of the American Civil Liberties Union piled on: “as far as the Justice Department is concerned, if you’re Muslim and attend particular mosques that are suspect, you’re presumed guilty until you’re proved innocent.” And the New York Times disapprovingly notes that the decision to detain Mayfield “was clearly influenced by his Muslim ties.”
But did U.S. law enforcement err in noting Mayfield’s identity?
No, this was entirely appropriate. It would have been myopic to ignore Mayfield’s many connections to militant Islam and the global jihad.
· He prayed in the same Bilal Mosque as did several individuals (Maher Nawash, Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal) who pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiring to help the Taliban. The mosque’s website includes links to militant Islamic organizations, including some “charities” closed down by the U.S. government for funding terrorism. Saudi specialist Stephen Schwartz finds Bilal to be “a fairly typical Wahhabi-controlled mosque.”
· While studying law at Washburn University in Kansas, Mayfield helped organize a branch of the Muslim Student Association, a group described by analyst Jonathan Dowd-Gailey as “an overtly political organization” espousing “Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism … and expressing solidarity with militant Islamic ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.”
· In 2002, Mayfield volunteered to represent Jeffrey Leon Battle – who subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to levy war against the United States and was sentenced to 18 years in prison – in a custody dispute over his then-6-year-old son. Strangely (according to Quanell X, national spokesperson for the New Black Panthers and a friend of Battle’s), Mayfield flew to Texas at his own expense for Battle’s sake.
· Someone in Mayfield’s house was in telephone contact with Perouz Sedaghaty (a.k.a. Pete Seda), director of the U.S. office of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a number of whose foreign branches have been designated as terrorist organizations.
· Mayfield advertised his solo law practice in a “Muslim” yellow pages run by Jerusalem Enterprises Inc., a company owned by Farid Adlouni. Adlouni is a person “directly linked in business dealings” with Wadih El Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary in the 1990s and convicted of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens in 2001.
In addition:
· Mayfield’s political profile fits that of many disaffected, U.S.-hating terrorists: he strongly opposes the USA Patriot Act, inveighs against U.S. foreign policy related to Muslim countries, and is “particularly angered,” according to his brother Kent, by close U.S. relations with Israel. Mayfield speculates that the Bush administration knew in advance about 9/11 but chose to let the attacks go ahead so as to justify going to war. And on his release from custody, he compared the U.S. federal government to Nazi Germany.
· In common with many violence-prone Islamists in the United States (including Maher Hawash, Mohammed Ali Alayed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the “Lackawanna Six”), Mayfield went from being a nominal Muslim to one whose Islamic beliefs “got more and more intense.”
Are government prosecutors, when they have apparently incriminating physical evidence, supposed to shut their eyes and disregard these many connections and patterns? The Department of Justice was simply doing its job in pointing them out.
Even Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – an Islamist group with multiple connections of its own to violence – admits that “no Muslim is more than six degrees away from terrorism.” Governments worldwide must take this reality into account.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Sounds kind of bigoted. Fact is, there are darned few who can be trusted and it has nothing to do with Muslim or not. Face it, most of the time you can't even trust yourself.
There is a thread on the subject of Saudi/Wahab control in the US.
If you are running with a gang of devils, you are likely to be one.
I plead guilty. But after reading hundreds of accounts of Muslims that want to destroy western civilization in the name of Islam, and hardly any muslims providing any retort to the contrary, I have finally thrown away the blinders. At this point, the burden of proof is on any muslims who don't want to be lumped in with the Islamakazis to make their loyalty clear. I will not hold my breath.
Fact is, there are darned few who can be trusted and it has nothing to do with Muslim or not. Face it, most of the time you can't even trust yourself.
Sorry you're feeling that way. There's a name for that.
From http://dictionary.reference.com :
pro·jec·tion
Psychology.
1. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others: “Even trained anthropologists have been guilty of unconscious projectionof clothing the subjects of their research in theories brought with them into the field” (Alex Shoumatoff).
2. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
Not to be a smart ass, but I have lots of people I trust, and I trust me number 2 after the Lord.
The title of this thread is absolutely correct. If you want to worry about "feelings", then I suggest you worry about the religion of peace and the desire to conquer all religions.
There are only two that are completely trustworthy. Your mother and the Lord. The order is whichever you prefer. As far as trusting anyone else, it's more like Reagan's policy. Trust but verify. A Muslim will lie to you, but at least he's upfront about it and you shouldn't be talking to him anyway.
Mom's with the Lord, I try to remember what she taught me. Take care.
Damn right
We should not hate the enemy, it clouds the judgement and ruins the aim.
Yes, that little nugget stays in my mind as well.
And you should be! Surely religius beliefs and ties are even stronger than the nationalistic ties which caused people to be suspect during WW-II.
Sounds about right.
Absolutely. If I became a KKK member and identified myself as such (and many of them are church-goers), I would be spat at and ostracized. What the hell's the difference between one hate group and another-- because one is cloaked in a deranged sickness called "religion" and people are too blind/stupid to see it? What I find interesting is that a couple European countries have banned Scientology; why not Islam? I'll take Tom Cruise over Osama Bin Laden any day of the week.
Yeah, well that happens sometimes. I can't work up a whole lot of sympathy.
Well, let's see. I can remember one American Muslim soldier who tried to kill his commanding officer and some of his fellow soldiers because he didn't want to kill another Muslim. Personally, I don't think they belong in our armed forces. In fact, I don't really think they belong in our country. I guess we're stuck with the ones that are born here, but I certainly don't believe we should provide a safe haven for Islamic foreigners to proselytize on our soil while they are plotting our destruction.
I just wish our president and our lawmakers could grasp that fact. It isn't so difficult.
Well the differences between these skinhead/neo-nazi/kkk people that exist today is that Christian Identity and British Israelism is a genuine heretical perversions, which are not theologically supportable (and there are fewer than 50000 adherrents in the US). Liberals like to link these CI types to Christian fundamentalism or evangelism.
OTOH these Islamicist terrorists are pretty much well supported by their own theology. That is as far as I can tell.
islam's other big weapon besides terrorism is a high birth rate. They squirt out babies. There's already over a billion muslims.
The more politically correct term is "a billion particles of filth".
"The world has become too small for Jeffersonian Democracy and Islam to peacably co-exist."
I just wish our president and our lawmakers could grasp that fact. It isn't so difficult.
Actually, I think both our President and many (not all by any means) lawmakers do grasp the fact. But it's far more politic and pragmatic to deal with this situation they way they are.
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