The Wages of Outreach…

The New York Post’s Paul Sperry  reported Sunday that the media director of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) maybe a former Boston resident named Ahmad Abousamra. Abousamra was an attendee at the same infamous Boston-area mosque that played host to Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  Not only that but Abousamra’s father, was a board member at the mosque, according to Sperry.

The Islamic Society of Boston, founded by self-identified Muslim Brother and convicted Al Qaeda financier Abdulrahman Alamoudi featured Muslim Brotherhood chief jurist Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, famous for authorizing the use of Hamas suicide bombings and the killing of American civilians in Iraq, as a trustee. Other terrorist alum from ISB include Tarek Mehenna, a long time friend of Abousamra, and “Lady Al Qaeda” Aafia Siddiqui, whose release ISIS demanded as part of their negotiations over the fate of executed American journalist James Foley.

The ISB mosque was the same one that U.S. Representative from Texas Louie Gohmert questioned then FBI director Robert Mueller over in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, which led Mueller to admit that while he was unaware that the elder Tsarnaev attended the mosque, the FBI had done “outreach” there.

This preference for outreach to, rather than investigation of,  groups (and mosques) associated with the Muslim Brotherhood will only worsen if efforts to hamper U.S. government’s use of informants in and around mosques are successful. This campaign, called the Safe Spaces Initiative, is led by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, but has received assistance from a wide variety of Islamic and left-wing organizations, including Human Right’s Watch (HRW). HRW recently launched a major campaign to prohibit the use of informants in tandem to the MPAC effort. The HRW’s poster boy for that campaign was convicted terrorist James Cromitie, who was the center of a terrorist plot given a recent whitewashing by the HBO documentary “The Newburgh Sting.” As CSP has documented elsewhere, Cromitie was a man committed to the doctrine of shariah, who desired to engage in jihad. The fact that defense allegations of entrapment were demolished by a court has not stopped HRW from attempting to re-characterize the case as one of FBI malfeasance. Like the false allegations of illegal surveillance of Muslim suspects, these campaigns seek to use public opinion to force law enforcement and national security officials from engaging in the necessary, and legally authorized, work of protecting the country.

How many Abousamaras, Mehennas, Tsarnaevs, and Siddiquis are out there, who will not be uncovered until it is to late because the hands of law enforcement have been tied to a failed strategy of outreach?