The FBI arrested Saudi “student” Khalid Aldawsari before he had the chance to plant bombs at “nice targets” in the United States last week, but at least one major media outlet and the Muslim community in Lubbock, Texas, seem more worried about the “backlash” that will adversely affect Muslims than they are about the potential damage Aldawsari could have done.
The FBI nailed Aldawsari last week before he made bombs from picric acid and used them to target, as he had planned, nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and even the residence of former President George W. Bush in Dallas.
Aldawsari was a chemical engineering student at South Plains College in Lubbock.
The FBI affidavit documents in vivid detail his attempt to obtain phenol, which he could turn into picric acid, an explosive. The biological supply company and the trucking firm that handled the phenol transaction both reported him to the FBI, which arrested Aldawsari on February 23.
Aldawsari’s writings reveal that he obtained his student visa and scholarship money solely to wage jihad inside the borders of the United States.
Fear Of “Backlash”
After the obligatory condemnation of Aldawsari and terror, the Morris News Service delivered a long disquisition from the Muslims of Lubbock about their fears of a “backlash.” This is a quotidian meme Islamic propagandists use to create guilt among those who rightly suspect Muslims might be terrorists.
“Lubbock Muslim Community Braces For Backlash,” ran the headline over the news service’s story about Aldawsari and the effect his arrest would have on Muslims.
The paper sought a quote from Samer Altabaa, imam at Lubbock’s Islamic Center of the South Plains, who said, “No one in the Saudi community seemed to know Aldawsari, who identified himself as Muslim on his Facebook page.”
If the charges against Aldawsari are true, Altabaa said, the suspect’s absence from the local Muslim community is no surprise.
The suspect would “want to stay away from everyone if he is really planning for something bad,” Altabaa said.
“We like to give [a] plain message to everyone that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is a religion against terrorism or terrorists or any person who wants to terrify any human being,” Altabaa said.
Then the paper permitted to Altabaa to lie about Muslim terrorists and how they practice, or don’t practice their religion: “These terrorist people, they never come to a mosque because they don’t belong there,” Altabaa said.
Having given area Muslims the opportunity to pronounce themselves shocked, the paper peddled the usual warning of coming ostracism and other social hardships for Muslims:
The Muslim community is bracing itself for possible retaliation. The Islamic Student Center has been vandalized multiple times, and Altabaa said Lubbock police have agreed to provide security in the coming days for the Islamic Center and the Islamic Student Center.
Altabaa said that retaliatory acts are often committed by people who do not know about Islam.
“We faced this before. We are afraid because there are some people that are ignorant or that don’t have enough information about Islam.”
Altabaa added, “They don’t know that [Aldawsari] is an alien to Islam … He is the enemy of humanity, not only the religion.”
The paper then permitted Muslim professor M.A.K. Lodhi to explain that Muslims are not a threat to the United States:
Lodhi, a professor of physics at Texas Tech [University in Lubbock], said that many Muslims have become accustomed to occasional acts of aggression directed toward them. Once, he said, an elderly man confronted him at the Islamic Student Center saying, “You Muslims should not be around here. You should go away.”
“I try to explain that there is no threat, that Muslims are just as good as citizens in this country, as anybody could be,” Lodhi said.
We’ve Heard It All Before
The news media and even the government delivers this kind of message after every terrorist attack in which Muslims are involved.
As The New American reported in early February in its dispatch on the Senate report about the Fort Hood rampage, “Just after the shooting, the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey Jr., said his chief concern was not that more Muslims in the Army might be contemplating similar attacks, but that Hasan’s crime might “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”
This is what Casey told George Stephanopoulos on the ABC news program “This Week”:
And what happened at Ford Hood was a tragedy. But I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here. … We have a very diverse Army and a very diverse society and that gives us all strength.
Indeed, the Defense Department’s initial report on the Ford Hood massacre, released in January 2010, never mentioned Hasan’s name or that Islam motivated him, such was the Army’s concern about “backlash,“ “diversity,” and protecting Muslims from censure and suspicion. Clearly, that was no accident, and even a liberal publication such as Time magazine devoted a story to what it called the DoD’s “lack of curiosity.”
[A]s Congress opens two days of hearings on Wednesday into the Pentagon probe of the Nov. 5 attack that left 13 dead, lawmakers want explanations for that omission.
John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission and Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, says a reluctance to cause offense by citing Hasan’s view of his Muslim faith and the U.S. military’s activities in Muslim countries as a possible trigger for his alleged rampage reflects a problem that has gotten worse in the 40 years that Lehman has spent in and around the U.S. military. The Pentagon report’s silence on Islamic extremism “shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become,” he told TIME on Tuesday. “It’s definitely getting worse, and is now so ingrained that people no longer smirk when it happens.”
A week after 19 immigrants attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Times unbosomed its magisterial opinion that the United States must not forsake its commitment to “open doors.”
Sept. 11 must not become a tombstone to the nation’s proud tradition of openness to foreign visitors. The terrorist attack exposed frightening weaknesses in immigration practices, as it did with airport security and intelligence-gathering. …
Congress and officials charged with homeland security will have to explore ways of enhancing the screening of visa applicants, border vigilance and the monitoring of foreigners already in the United States. But to go further and suggest that the attack calls for a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants and foreign visitors would be irrational and counterproductive.
Helping Muslims Peddle Lies
The media also permit Muslims to lie about the nature of terrorists and the crimes they commit. Morris News Service asked Altabaa “about the Quran’s stance on violent and terrorist acts. Altabaa responded, ‘The Quran always calls all Muslims to commit to peace, to live with peace, especially with non-Muslims.’”
Wrote Robert Spencer at JihadWatch.com, “[e]xcept for the passages in which it is telling Muslims to kill non-Muslims. A sampling:”
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them [captive], and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. –– 9:5
And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. — 2:191
Spencer cited several other passage to make his point.
Morris News Service also uncritically accepted Altabaa’s claim that terrorists do not attend mosques. “These terrorist people,” Altabaa said, “they never come to a mosque because they don’t belong there.” That statement is also patently false. As, again,The New American recalled in its coverage of the Senate’s report on Ford Hood: Hasan attended the same mosque in Falls Church, Va. — the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center — as two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour. The imam at the mosque at the time was Anwar al Awlaki, and authorities say Hasan exchanged emails with the terrorist imam.
As for Aldawsari, the FBI raid on his apartment turned up a handwritten journal that said “it is time for Jihad. I put my trust in God for he is the best Master and Authority.”
At his blog, FromFarAway90, he asked Allah to “grant me [martyrdom] for Your sake and make jihad easy for me only in Your path.”
Whether Aldawsari attended the Lubbock mosque — Islam, his religion, inspired his terrorist plot.
Related article: Saudi “Student” Arrested in Bomb Plot Obtained Visa for Jihad
Photo: Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, 20, is shown in this undated photo made available by the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office, Feb. 24, 2011: AP Images
