New English Review

Warning! Terrorists Ahead! by Jerry Gordon (June 2011)

Erick Stakelbeck is truly unique. He is the only on-air TV journalist who has a full-time “beat” on Islamic counterterrorism for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Stakelbeck has just published The Terrorist Next Door, a riveting first person account that is neither politically correct nor morally equivocating. The Terrorist Next Door is a highly readable background dossier that should be on the desks of every member of Congress.

A product of the tough streets of his native Philadelphia, Stakelbeck doesn’t mince words when it comes to depicting the threat of Islamization in America. Moreover, he synchs up the connection between so-called homegrown jihadi terrorists and the Qur’anic jihad doctrine conveyed by Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist clerics and al Qaeda Sheiks. This jihad doctrine is distributed via the internet, satellite TV and is available for purchase in DVD’s and audio tape racks in halal stores as close as ten miles from the US Capitol building in Northern Virginia’s “Wahhabi Alley.”

The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You About the Islamist Threat
by Erick Stakelbeck
Regnery, 2011

He has telling portraits of domestic jihadis – both natural born and converts – devotees of both domestic and foreign Islamic clerics who incite Islamic doctrinal hatred and violence towards Jews, Christians and other “kafirs”- unbelievers. Their objective is to supplant Judeo Christian values reflected in our Constitution with Shariah law and a global totalitarian Caliphate. A Caliphate that would deprive all women, unbelievers and apostates of their human rights subjecting them to corporeal punishment and death at the whim of fatwa wielding clerics.

Stakelbeck covers the disturbing rise of “virtual Sharia,” that is, self-governing Muslim communities in the UK. He draws close parallels with its US equivalent, Dearborn, Michigan, which boasts the largest mosque in America (a third of the city’s 100,000 population is composed predominately of Shia Muslims, many originally from Lebanon), with imams who support Hezbollah, Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran – all within the shadow of the World Wide Headquarters of Ford Motor Corporation. He dares to trespass on a paramilitary training compound in Red House Virginia, one of more than two dozen Jamaat ul-Fuqra terrorist facilities located throughout the US under the control of shadowy Pakistani jihadist Sheikh Muburak Gilani. He addresses the risible threat of a nuclear Iran’s growing influence in the Western hemisphere and the failure of the Obama Administration to engage the Iranian Islamic Republic, shunting aside support for regime change and leaving our special ally, the Jewish State of Israel, to seek its own means of combating this existential threat.

Stakelbeck has compiled hundreds of hours of video reports and interviews as the basis for this well annotated compact volume since he became the lead counterterrorism analyst for CBN in 2005. Doubtless, there will be a sequel to this gripping first book with more stunning revelations. It is a never ending saga and the intrepid Stakelbeck will be there to cover every twist and turn in sharply etched portrayals of this Islamic threat that has witnessed infiltration by Muslim Brotherhood adherents into the highest echelons of our government.

When we interviewed Stakelbeck for the New English Review, we noted his origins and the effect that 9/11 had on changing his career.

Stakelbeck is one of the few who, by dint of education and experience, knows the threat of Islamization in America and Israel. He didn’t start out his journalistic career after graduating college in the late 1990’s with that in mind. Prior to the watershed 9/11 date, Stakelbeck, a former high school and college basketball player, was bent on a sports writing career and ended up covering the NBA for a publication in New York.

After 9/11 he set out to learn more about radical Islam through in-depth research and eventually ploughing through Qur’anic doctrine. His family background (his late father was a U.S. Airborne veteran) and longtime interest in foreign affairs and the Middle East was a motivating factor. Through David Horowitz, he first realized his dream of writing on Islamic terrorism at FrontPageMagazine. Subsequently, he joined Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and authored opinion pieces for a wide array of publications: The Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, Washington Times and National Review Online among them. He also began appearing on Fox News, CNN and other television networks as a terrorism analyst. Eventually offered the chance to go on-air and report on terrorism and national security for CBN full time, he jumped at the chance.  (READ MORE)