Tennessee State Rep. Judd Matheny on Jihad in America

Following the tragic events in Chattanooga, Secure Freedom Radio was lucky enough to get ahold of a Tennessee representative whose first hand experiences truly show the gravity of the threat we face today. Islamic Jihad in the United States is real and it could be coming to a town near you.

Click here for the audio version.

FG: We’re back, joined, I’m very pleased to say the first time, by a man I have been admiring greatly from afar. He is a state representative in Tennessee by the name of Judd Matheny. He has been representing the people of Tullahoma, Tennessee, the 47^th district in his state, for some years now, capping off years of service in a variety of other capacities, notably as an eight-year veteran of the United States Army and Tennessee Army National Guard. Also as an eight-year veteran of state and local law enforcement. Perhaps his most significant public service, however, is that he is rendering right now in the state legislature of Tennessee, notably in connection with leadership on a host of statutes that have really tried to address what is now being described by no less a source than Politico as Tennessee being the capital of American jihad. Representative Matheny, thank you so much for joining us and for all you have been doing for our country and for your state. It’s great to have you with us.     

JM: It’s my honor, Frank, and thank you for your service to our nation also. And thank you for the resources you make available to help us fight.

FG: We’re privileged to be able to give you a hand and especially to give you a very warm round of applause. Let me start with this proposition that Politico is describing your state as the capital of American jihad. We’ve had, of course, the recent episode in Chattanooga, but that’s not the only problem that you’ve been confronting in Tennessee, and I’d like you to sort of give us a 30,000-foot level view of what’s been happening there and why.

JM: Absolutely, sir. Since 2009, we’ve had a pretty serious issue with mosques beginning to radicalize young men in Tennessee, and I can even go back to 2007. There are some confidential briefings now that I can make some details public that I was given by the FBI that al-Shabaab was operating within the borders of Tennessee. In 2009, Carlos Bledsoe, a young, up-and-coming Memphis native, was radicalized in a mosque in Nashville, and a short time later bombed a Jewish rabbi’s house in Nashville and then murdered a U.S. Army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little did we know six years later we would see the exact same thing in Chattanooga with five dead. However, some of us in the Tennessee General Assembly heard the call and saw the alarms, knew from our military service, knew from our law enforcement backgrounds, knew from our relationships with security professionals, that this was a real issue, not a lone wolf attack, that there was a very dedicated and intricate network of financing and material support almost like an underground railroad, if you will, to support these organizations that ran through the mosques, through various business dealings, through immigration/migration services. So we began to think of ways we could put roadblocks into stopping future jihadist attacks, and one of those was to go after the networks of financial aspects of those networks. We passed the Material Support for Designated Entities Law in Tennessee, which is still probably today the strongest law on the books on the state level that allows any local prosecutor to go after a designated terrorist entity as designated by the U.S. State Department list, like Hamas, for instance, would be one, or Hezbollah, or ISIS, or al-Qaeda. And a local prosecutor can actually, if they get information that someone’s knowingly supporting a group like that, they can go after them. That is a reactive tool when something happens we back track, so we’ve paid the price again in Chattanooga with an almost exactly similar case. We have a young man who by all accounts was a fantastic student, graduate of a Tennessee school, went overseas, came back, and committed a much more atrocious act. Very well planned things like this don’t occur out of the blue. What did he do for us? He proved that Carlos Bledsoe was not a lone wolf attack. He proved [inaudible] repetitive series of attacks. Frank, it’s not unlike ISIS or al-Qaeda or Jordan or Syria or some other country firing an artillery round directly to our country and hitting us in downtown Chattanooga what happened last week.

FG: Let me ask you, Representative Judd Matheny is our guest from the state of Tennessee, and you are as I indicated and you’ve now just described, championing some model legislation, really, not just important in your own state with all of the problems you’ve described but one that could be employed elsewhere to good effect as well, and I hope will be using the Tennessee example as a building block. But let me drill down on something that you alluded to early on, that these individuals are being radicalized in Tennessee mosques. They’re further, I guess, in intensifying their commitment to jihad, and their skill set in executing attacks, pursuant to it, through travel overseas, apparently, but this is not a lone wolf thing. This is something that is being incubated, it sounds like Representative, in the mosques in your state. Is there anything that can be done, as a guy with a law enforcement background particularly, is there anything that should be done in terms of surveillance of these mosques to try and prevent this kind of thing from happening proactively?

JM: Yes. All it takes, in my opinion, is a shift in the resources that are available now. I’m a former law enforcement officer, and I know what I’m capable of as far as surveillance and reconnaissance, and it has been 25 years since I’ve been on the street or a criminal investigator for the state of Tennessee. And I knew what equipment and what capabilities I had then, and they were decent. I was quite effective. Today it’s incredible, the technology that’s out there and one officer can use. License plate riggers and cameras and GPS satellite imagery. But we spend so much time misappropriating those resources to problems other than radical Islam because we refuse to see radical Islam as the problem. I’ve received three different security briefings in the state of Tennessee from security officials, and every time white supremacists operating in Tennessee have had a much higher focus from our security agents than have Islamic jihadists. However, we have had no mass murders committed or no murders that I’m aware of that have been committed in the name of politics by any white supremacist. However, we’ve had five times, ten times that many committed by Islamic jihadists, so there’s a political correctness here and a misallocation of resources. We have to begin to somewhat, I don’t want to say profile, but almost profile 18 year old to 26 year old Middle Eastern males that rise to a certain level of suspicion within certain levels of Islamic communities because these people are being picked as candidates for terror operatives, sent over for final training as soldiers and sent over here to fight and die.

FG: But Representative Matheny, it seems to me, if I may, just that one other piece to this is, you have to recognize that the guys who are bringing them to a state of readiness to die or certainly at least kill in the name of jihad and furtherance of the sharia agenda are the imams in these mosques. It’s the pedagogy of these madrassas, it’s the books and other videos and so on that are in their bookstores and the like, and that seems to me to be something that has to be addressed as well. In part, let me turn finally to another thing you sort of alluded to but ask you to address how this may be contributing to the problem in your state of Tennessee, namely refugee resettlement programs. You have in the state of Tennessee essentially turned the whole project over to a contractor of resettling these people, but talk a little bit about what contribution you think these refugee resettlement programs are making to the problems that you’ve been describing so well.

JM: In 2008, our governor, our then-governor, executively turned over Tennessee’s authority of the refugee resettlement program to private contactors who had been with the State Department and mostly that is catholic charities who have handled the refugee resettlement program. Since then, the program has been steadily abused, used as what I consider to be a profit center, by many to be a profit center. We’ve seen an expansion of refugee resettlement activities, and a compression of normal charitable activities coming out of the catholic charities. What we see are thousands of Muslim mostly refugees coming in almost on an annual basis from countries that we have known terrorists operate out of. There are known intelligence reports; there are known rings of infiltrators coming in through refugee channels of ISIS individuals. Most of them are migrating through Europe and into London and eventually sometime will make their way here.

FG: It’s clearly a problem. I hate to interrupt you, sir; we are hard out of time. Let me just say, the fact that you’re focused on the problem and you’re trying to address it as you have several of the other contributing causes to the jihadism in your state is deeply appreciated as is your long service to our country in other capacities. Keep it up, Representative Judd Matheny of Tennessee. God bless you sir, and it has ben a privilege to talk to. We’ll talk again I hope soon.