FITZGERALD:AHMAD ABOUSAMRA…THE REST OF THE STORY
Fitzgerald: Ahmad Abousamra and the Rest of the Story
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/fitzgerald-ahmad-abousamra-and-the-rest-of-the-story.html
In order to keep listeners hooked, the radio broadcaster, the late Paul Harvey, would report some incident, one that perhaps had already been in the news, and then announce that he would be adding to it with these words: “And Now For The Rest Of The Story.”
While Tarek Mahenna is the main event in one of the latest Muslim terrorist news stories in this country, perhaps we can imitate Harvey’s device by offering The Rest Of The Story. That rest of the story concerns his childhood friend, that Massachusetts boy, Ahmad Abousamra, with whom, as a boy, he attended the same mosque in Sharon run by the Islamic Center of Boston.
A story on Tarek Mahenna, in the Boston Globe a little over a week ago, offers more details about Mahenna’s friend-since-childhood, Ahmad Abousamra:
Details emerge on plot suspects Two young men reportedly met at Sharon mosque By Shelley Murphy and Milton J. Valencia, Globe Staff | October 23, 2009
The man accused of plotting with a Sudbury friend to join a terrorist camp, launch an attack on shoppers at a mall, and kill American soldiers overseas grew up in Greater Boston and is the son of a prominent doctor and Muslim community leader.
Ahmad Abousamra was named Wednesday in an FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Boston as a conspirator with Tarek Mehanna, 27, of Sudbury, who was charged with providing support to terrorists. But federal officials released scant details about Abousamra when they announced Mehanna’s arrest. Abousamra has not been charged; he allegedly fled to Syria three years ago after being questioned by the FBI.
Yesterday, several people familiar with the case confirmed that Abousamra, 28, is the son of Dr. Abdul Abousamra, who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital for 21 years and was president of the Islamic Center of New England before moving to the Detroit area two years ago.
Ahmad Abousamra, who was raised in Stoughton and last lived in Mansfield, was a childhood friend of Mehanna’s, according to a person who knew the two men.
“They knew each other from when they were young,” said the person, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case. He said Mehanna and Abousamra first met while attending the Sharon mosque run by the Islamic Center of New England.
Officials from the Islamic Center did not return calls for comment yesterday….
Ahmad Abousamra attended Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood for three years, then spent his senior year at Stoughton High School, graduating in 1999, according to news clippings from the Patriot Ledger listing him as an honor student throughout high school. The newspaper also reported that Abousamra attended Northeastern University and was on the dean’s list.
The FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Boston paints a more sinister portrait of Abousamra. It alleges he tried to join a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, but was rejected by the Taliban because of a “lack of experience.”
Note that Dr. Abdul Abousamra, the father of Ahmad Abousamra, was no impoverished immigrant; he was, rather, a doctor who worked for 21 years at the Mass. General. Furthermore, he was one of the most prominent members of “the Muslim community” as the president of the Islamic Center of New England.
One would like to find out more from Ahmad Abousamra, that former friend and apparent co-plotter with Tarek Mahenna, about what it was in his upbringing, what it was in the lessons from Muslim teachers, and in the sermons of imams, at that mosque in Sharon, and what it was that he learned from his father while growing up, that MGH doctor and President of the Islamic Center of New England, that led to his trying to go to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. What was it that he, Ahmad Abousamra, thought Islam taught about Infidels? And was what he thought Islam taught ever corrected or changed by his father, or by his teachers? Did they ever set him straight, or did they, in fact, share that murderous hostility, but only wanted it expressed, for now, in ways that would allow him and his family and other Muslims to establish themselves in this country, to burrow deep within, but never giving up or modifying the views that naturally arise in those who take Islam deeply to heart?
By now most sensible people have been forced to recognize — some most unwillingly — that the most dangerous Muslims are the truest ones, those who grow up in an environment where Islam is taken most to heart, or who, as recent converts (Adult-Onset Islam), are particularly stern and even ferocious in their application of the texts and tenets of Islam, without any of the softening that time can occasionally provide to those born into it. It is only those Muslims who choose to ignore much of what Islam teaches about whom this cannot be said. Some ignore these teachings because they really don’t care for Islam, but others, most of them, I suspect, do so not because they find morally intolerable what Islam teaches about the duty to hate Infidels and to wage war on them if they do not submit to Islam (by agreeing to changes in their own societies, so that there are no remaining obstacles to the spread, and then the certain dominance, of Islam), but because at this point they realize Muslims are still not numerous enough to have their way. They realize it is a better strategy to deny, deceive, confuse the unwary Infidels, and not to endanger the position of Muslims in an American society where too many Infidels, from the Muslim point of view, are waking up, and finding out too much. America is proving less yielding, a harder target, than the countries of Western Europe. This means that other tactics must be employed.
Perhaps the police and FBI can do a detailed study of a dozen or so would-be Muslim terrorists, those who were raised in this country, to find out what it is, exactly, that they have been taught, or what has triggered the kind of plotting that went on with Tarek Mahenna and Ahmad Abousamra. I suspect it was nothing more than personal desarroi, confusion, dismay, that finds its natural outlet in putting blame on, wishing to avenge one’s own and the world’s ills (so often confused). Instead of gathering up material from the computers and closets of such people, that material should be studied, and studied by those willing to concede that ideologies matter, and that to call “Islam” only a religion is confusing and dangerous, and misses the point.
The authorities should look more closely at the larger context: the fathers, the families, the mosques of Tarek Mahenna and Ahmad Abousamra. Abdul Abousamra left the MGH, after 21 years, to hurriedly move to Detroit two years ago. But he can be found, he can be talked to. Unfortunately, his son Ahmad Abousamra cannot. For three years ago, you see, his son, the childhood friend of Tarek Mahenna, who attended the same mosque connected to the Islamic Center of Boston, who had once tried to join a terrorist-training camp in Pakistan, fled to Syria. He is, as soon-to-be-indicted white collar criminals like to say, “traveling and unavailable for comment.”
Oh, and don’t fail to note, in the Boston Globe excerpt above, that piquant detail about Ahmad Abousamra attending the Xaverian Brothers High School in Stoughton. He was even an honor student, in a school run by Catholic religious.
Apparently, the exposure to, and the benefit he received from, being taught by the Xaverian Brothers (after all, he might have gone to the local public school), had no effect on his deep hostility to Christians and Christianity. In the same way there is that MIT graduate student, Aafia Siddiqui, who arrived in America at the age of 18, and whose deep and abiding interest in Islam was expressed in a number of ways – see here — until it finally reached its apotheosis in her being directly implicated in activities connected to Al Qaeda. Just before the FBI could get her, Aafia Siddiqui got wind of things, and fled with her three children to Afghanistan, where she evaded detection until a year or two ago, when she was found and brought back to the United States. She had been an undergraduate at MIT, and then a graduate student in neuroscience at Brandeis University. Does anyone doubt that with such a background, the administration and faculty at Brandeis would have fallen all over themselves showing her every kindness, offering her every variety of financial and other support? For this has become quite fashionable these days. Possibly it is higher education’s expression of a touching, entirely misplaced effort to win over, to curry favor with, Muslim students who will be happy to pocket whatever they can, but this will not sway all but a handful to ignore the texts and tenets of Islam. Any aid from Infidels is regarded as what is due, and does not – see Iraq, see Afghanistan, Pakistan, see Egypt, see Jordan, see the “Palestinians” – result in a change of attitude toward Infidels, but merely may result in a temporary smile designed to extract still more aid.
Similarly, Ahmad Abousamra may have smiled at his classmates and the priests and the brothers at the Xaverian Brothers High School, just as Aafia Siddiqui, dourly sinister as she appears in photographs, may even have smiled at her Jewish professors and classmates at Brandeis. In both cases, Muslims are instructed that, when they live among Infidels who are too powerful, they may offer them an outward affability as long as they retain hatred in their heart.
In an article two years ago at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer quoted the Islamic textual authorities relied on by an imam from Peoria, Illinois, Abu Usamah, as he denounced Infidels from the safety of Great Britain:
[See] Ibn Kathir’s commentary on Qur’an 3:28: “…’unless you indeed fear a danger from them’ meaning, except those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers. In this case, such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda’ said, ‘We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.’ Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, ‘The Tuqyah [taqiyyah] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'”
Al-Hasan said: ‘The Tuqyah [Taqiyyah] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection’ ‘War is deception,’ said Muhammad.”
So here were two young Muslims raised in Massachusetts who met at a mosque in Sharon, associated with the Islamic Center of Boston, two boys who both grew up not a half-hour’s drive from the Concord Bridge (“Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled”) and the Battle Green at Lexington. They were just as American, I hear some Muslims and their apologists insisting, just as American as you or as I, as if hatred for the principles of the Constitution, and for all of the legal and political institutions of this country, that flatly contradict both the letter and spirit of the Shari’a, did not prevent one from being, in any sense that matters, an American. (An American should not be confused with those who have merely managed to obtain, hook or so often by crook, American citizenship.) But why should these two young Muslims not follow the authority quoted in the commentary of Ibn Kathir, above? Why would two young Muslims not wish to emulate that ultimate source for religiously-sanctioned deception, Muhammad himself, Muhammad the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), Muhammad the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil)?
Smile at the Infidels when you deem it prudent or politic, show up for those Interfaith-Healing Meetings, address, in your mosques, those Jews and Christians who come to “find out the truth about Islam” by listening to the Muslim spokesmen, such people as the former President of the Islamic Society of New England, Abdul Abousamra, father of Ahmad Abousamra. A great many Muslims all over North America and Western Europe are surely past masters at deception. It comes naturally. Just read the descriptions of what, when they were still taken to be Believers, or even afterwards, such apostates from Islam as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, heard about Infidels from the Muslims who were Believers. What Ayaan Hirsi Ali heard from the Muslims fiddling the Dutch in every way, or what Ibn Warraq heard – still hears – when he enters a mosque and talks to people who take him to be a fellow Muslim, what Wafa Sultan heard from seemingly well-educated Muslims (one Oxford-educated woman, exasperated with Wafa Sultan, finally declared that she, Wafa Sultan, should be killed).
It makes sense to learn both from experience – from all the Muslims who are being picked up here and there, and everywhere, and from books, books by authorities, Muslim and non-Muslim, on what Islam inculcates – see Ibn Kathir’s Commentaries – and books, or rather testimonies, by those apostates. Why are we expected to continue to ignore the evidence of our senses, and to pretend that Islam is simply one more religion, and not a Total Belief-System, one unambiguously based on a division of the world between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, and on the requirement of permanent hostility between the two camps, until such time as all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, are removed, and Islam does dominate, and Muslims do rule, everywhere?
Comments are closed.
