The Obama administration is making more than symbolic moves to pressure Iran, as federal prosecutors file complaints to seize 4 mosques and a New York skyscraper owned by an Iranian front group.

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors Thursday took steps to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government.

In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets of the Alavi Foundation and an alleged front company.

The assets include Islamic centers in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston, more than 100 acres in Virginia, and a 36-story office tower in New York.

(Hat tip: KT.)

A member of the neo-Nazi National Front in Glasgow decided to put some of that rabble-rousing anti-Islam populist rhetoric into action, by allegedly threatening to murder Muslims and blow up mosques.

A man has admitted he threatened to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque and execute a Muslim a day unless all Mosques in Scotland were closed.

Neil MacGregor, 36, who described himself as a “racist”, made the threats after watching an internet video of a British hostage being beheaded in Iraq. Glasgow Sheriff Court heard that he sent an email to Strathclyde Police and made a threatening phone call.

He telephoned and emailed Strathclyde Police to make the threats from a flat in Glasgow, between 30 January and 15 February 2007.

The court heard that the email read: “I’m a proud racist and National Front member. We as an organisation have decided to deal with the current threat from Muslims in our own British way, like our proud ancestors.

“Our demands are very small. Close all mosques in Scotland. If our demands aren’t met by next Friday, we’ll kidnap one Muslim and execute him or her on the internet, just like they did to our Ken Bigley.”

MacGregor then followed up the email with a call threatening to blow up Central Mosque.

(Hat tip: Killgore.)

And the hits just keep on coming, with an Orange County Weekly exposé on an FBI informer who insisted he was hot on the trail of terrorist plots at OC mosques—until he turned out to be a convicted felon and con artist: The FBI, the Islamic Center of Irvine and Craig Monteilh: Who Was Conning Whom?

If there’s a precise moment when the FBI first began to have a sinking feeling about Craig Monteilh, it likely occurred sometime in the spring of 2007, when his handlers read a small detail buried in one of his surveillance reports. Monteilh had been spying on the Islamic Center of Irvine and other mosques for several months. He’d earned the friendship and trust of a small group of Muslims, all of whom, he claims, were actually terrorists bent on carrying out violent attacks in Orange County. Their targets included shopping malls such as Fashion Island, South Coast Plaza and the Irvine Spectrum and, somewhat improbably, abandoned buildings in downtown Los Angeles.

According to his report, Monteilh was walking into a mosque in Tustin with a couple of the terrorists whose cell he’d infiltrated when he noticed a group of young Middle Eastern-looking men unloading several barrels from a van and hauling them into the mosque. At the time, Monteilh insists, he didn’t really think too much about what he saw. He was too busy focusing on the terror plot that he and the terrorists planned to discuss at the mosque that day.

“I looked at them like this, really quick, ‘Salaam aleikum,’” Monteilh recalls two years later in an interview at his house in Irvine, re-enacting the casual sideways glance and standard Islamic greeting—“Peace be unto you”—that he says he uttered that spring day. “I kept walking because we had other business. But I put it in my report that I observed six to eight young Middle Eastern Muslims loading barrels in the back of the mosque.”

But when Monteilh’s FBI handlers read his report, he claims, they began arguing about whether or not he was a liar. “They went, ‘What the hell is this?’” Monteilh recalls. “‘He’s lying.’” The FBI refuses to comment on anything Monteilh says, so assuming any of this happened the way Monteilh says it did, one could easily imagine what went through his handlers’ minds when they read his report: Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to hire a convicted felon and con artist to spy on Orange County’s Muslim community after all.

Read the whole sad story.

The British Channel 4 show Dispatches has done a followup to Undercover Mosque, with an undercover female reporter this time—and the revelations about what’s being preached in British mosques are no less shocking than the first go-round.

Continue reading…

A senior member of Britain’s General Synod of the Church of England is just begging for a fatwa.

A senior Church of England member called yesterday for the building of mosques to be banned.

Alison Ruoff said more construction would lead to Islamic no go areas dominated by exclusively Muslim populations living under sharia law.

Mrs Ruoff, a member of the General Synod, the Church’s parliament, added: “If we don’t watch out we will become an Islamic state. It’s that serious.”

Here’s more background information on that story from earlier, about MPACUK’s hunt for “Zio-Con frauds.”

Appallingly, the subjects of MPACUK’s search were actually exposed by the BBC, in a strange and pathetic attempt to cover their butts after covering up a story about the prevalence of radical Islamic hate literature in British mosques: Newsnight told a small story over a big one.

But the real oddity of all this is that the actual contents of the report have been validated.

Extremist literature was available in the mosques, and in some cases still is. The mosques could not dissociate themselves from the literature and, in most cases, did not even try to: they jumped on the receipts instead.

One mosque insisted that the next-door bookshop selling extreme stuff had nothing to do with it, yet the extremist books in question which the shop sells are by a former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (author of a famous essay in which he literally asserted that the Earth is flat) who was a founding sponsor of the mosque!

I don’t blame Newsnight for reporting questions about receipts, though I deplore their methods. I do blame them for trying to kill the much, much bigger story about the hate that is being preached in our country.

Policy Exchange researches all sorts of public policy - police reform, school choice, housing, as well as on Islamist extremism. Next week comes its big report on improving philanthropy. I find it repellent that the might of the BBC is deployed to threaten and bully a charity in this way.

More important, however, is the fate of Muslims in this country. It is not often realised that the British citizens most persecuted by Islamist extremism are Muslims themselves.

The researchers that Policy Exchange used to find the extreme literature were all Muslims - no one else could pass unnoticed in a potentially hostile environment. Because their safety was and is threatened, the think-tank protects their anonymity. On air, Newsnight revealed where some of them were.

Yesterday an Islamist website repeated this and called for supporters to help hunt them down. The BBC has unintentionally exposed them to the risk of harm.

What these brave Muslims undeniably found was evidence of widespread, obnoxious material that is a risk to decent Muslims and to British social order. The BBC chose, in effect, to side with their extreme opponents and to cover up the report, because of an obsession about a few pieces of paper.

Previously at LGF:
Video: Saudi Hate Literature in British Mosques

One of the most disheartening and disappointing things about the Bush presidency has been his insistence on remaining blind to the agenda of radical Islamists. Diana West is exactly right in this column: Guess Who Came to Iftar for Dinner?

I wasn’t going to write about Ramadan in official Washington this fall season — not again. But I just can’t resist. First, there are all the holiday trappings of this by-now annual column — such seasonal staples as my all-time favorite “war on terror” quotation from Abu Qatada, the Al Qaeda-linked cleric. I just love to trot it out around Ramadan after President Bush has said something utterly ignorant about Islam meaning peace, or, addressing the Muslim pooh bahs he always has at the White House for a fast-breaking Iftar dinner, how the jihadists have “twisted” Islam.

“I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam,” Abu Qatada said about six years ago. “Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?”

Ah, me. Good stuff.

Then there’s the holiday excitement of combing through the White House Iftar dinner guest list looking for unindicted co-conspirators. Since I had to put this column together before White House Iftar 2007, I turned to White House Ramadans past, reading through the president’s old speeches — 2001 through 2006 — to see if I’d missed anybody he’d singled out for a mention.

And I had! White House Ramadan is so much better than bingo. In 2003 and 2004, President Bush asked Faizul Khan, who is affiliated with the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and serves on the board of directors of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to give the blessing. This year, the Justice Department officially labeled ISNA as a U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement aiming to establish a global Islamic empire, and also as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas fund-raising Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development trial still awaiting a verdict in Dallas.

A Somali mosque in Toronto is completely open about their agenda of Islamic supremacism, contemptuously posting an article telling Muslims to stay completely away from the infidels’ holidays.

Also forbidden: watching sports or soap operas, walking dogs, family photos, wedding bands, Western hats, and mingling and shaking hands with the opposite sex.

TORONTO - A Toronto mosque is telling Muslims not to say “Happy Thanksgiving” or invite friends into their homes for turkey dinner on the holiday weekend.

The Khalid Bin Al-Walid Mosque says to “avoid participating” in dinners, parties or greetings on Thanksgiving because it is a kuffaar, or non-Muslim, celebration.

A two-part article on the mosque Web site says Muslims should also “stay completely away” from “Halloween trick-and treat nonsense,” Christmas, New Year’s, anniversaries, birthdays and Earth Day.

“How can we bring ourselves to congratulate or wish people well for their disobedience to Allah? Thus expressions such as:Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, etc, are completely out,” it says.

In 2003, the Khalid mosque, which mainly serves the Toronto Somali-Canadian community, apologized for a newsletter that compared wishing someone a Merry Christmas to congratulating a murderer.

At the time, a junior employee was blamed for the slight, but the mosque’s Web site has since posted similar edicts covering not only Christmas but also virtually every other Western celebration.

Muslims who participate in the holidays are termed ignorant and hypocritical.

While not all are religious holidays, the Internet site says Muslims are required to be different from non-Muslims “in matters which are representative of them or are characteristic of their identity.”

Also banned, it says, are: watching sports or soap operas, walking dogs, family photos, wedding bands, Western hats, mingling and shaking hands with the opposite sex.

Former White House and Pentagon official Douglas MacKinnon is exactly right in this article about the radical Islamic influence in American mosques: Message to PC police: We have a responsibility to monitor U.S. Mosques.

New York Republican Congressman Peter King has become the latest target of those who value political correctness and pandering over the national security of our nation.

For recently speaking his mind and worrying about the influence radical Islam has in this nation, Congressman King is being predictably attacked by the left-leaning media, by the Democratic National Committee, and certain Muslim organizations. What exactly did Congressman King say to incite the anger and rage now being directed at him? Only things that seem to be of concern to a great many Americans.

Among his statements, Congressman King said, “There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam…We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them…I think there has been a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community…too many Mosques in this country do not cooperate with law enforcement…85 percent of Mosques in this country are controlled by extremist leadership.”

Did the Congressman say anything that is not true? Is what he said not verified by a recent Pew Center survey, by the U.S. government, and by a number of news accounts of homegrown Muslims being taken into custody for plotting against our nation. Do facts no longer matter when it comes to protecting the United States from within?

According to that recent Pew Center survey, a quarter of younger Muslim-Americans support suicide bombings in some circumstances. That’s right. They support suicide bombings. 25% of Muslim-Americans refused to give an answer when asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of Al-Qaeda. 5% of Muslim-Americans said they had a favorable view of the group that attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and tried to attack the White House or Capitol building.

If we accept the Pew Center’s estimate that there are 2.35 million Muslims in the United States, then 5% of that number would be 117,500 Muslim-Americans who have a favorable view of Al-Qaeda. A number that should not only send chills down our spines, but cries out for eternal vigilance.

What about the American Mosques themselves? According to various reports, at least 80% of U.S. Mosques follow or are influenced by the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia. Among other things, this sect believes it is a “religious obligation” to hate Christians and Jews and to think of the United States as “enemy territory.” In 2006, Bernard Lewis, one of the world’s leading scholars on Islam, called Wahhabism, “The most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam.”

Why do those on the left in our country not want us to speak of this? Why do so many Democrats not want us to question the motives of those from within who look favorably upon Al-Qaeda? Surely it’s not for crass political reasons or to pander for votes.

MSNBC, meanwhile, is joining in the smears against Rep. King, as they take his statements completely out of context, say they’re going to show the context, then air an edited version—and then proceed to let Ibrahim Hooper, spokesliar for unindicted Hamas co-conspirators CAIR, spew his victocrat nonsense for several minutes with absolutely no opposing viewpoint:

The leftists at Politico tried to stage a hit on Rudy Giuliani and Peter King today, and I received more than a dozen emails pointing me at their deceptive piece: Giuliani adviser criticized for remark.

WASHINGTON - A homeland security adviser to Rudy Giuliani came under fire Thursday for claiming there were “too many mosques” in the United States — and defended himself by saying his point was that not enough Muslim leaders cooperate with law enforcement.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and the top GOP member on the panel, said his comments to the Politico Web site were taken out of context. Democrats said Giuliani should drop him as a campaign adviser.

“I stand by everything I said other than the fact that the Politico totally took it out of context,” King said Thursday.

In the Politico interview, King said: “Unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country, there’s too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be finding out how we can infiltrate, we should be much more aggressive in law enforcement.”

After King complained, Politico posted video of the entire interview.

UPDATE at 9/20/07 8:29:27 pm:

Unindicted Hamas co-conspirators CAIR are also involved in this attack: Giuliani Adviser Under Fire for Comments.

The congressman was denounced by the DC-based Council on American- Islamic Relations, a group that has long accused King of lobbing unfair attacks against American Muslims.

“We call on Republican leaders and other people of conscience to repudiate Representative King’s bigoted remarks and to support the civil and religious rights of all Americans,” said CAIR official Corey Saylor.

Both the Muslim group and the Democratic party called on Giuliani to drop King from the campaign.

UPDATE at 9/20/07 8:41:57 pm:

Daily Kos front page writer ‘DHinMI’ aligns with CAIR: Daily Kos: Peter King, Bigoted Jackass.