Yesterday I told you what a rotten job of reporting Newsweek did on its Somalis in Lewiston, ME story, they have done a little better job on the Somali missing men story. But, since we have been on this from the beginning, there isn’t a whole lot to report here. Newsweek appears to have interviewed all the usual actors (including our buddy Omar Jamal, smoking a hookah no doubt), except maybe one I’ll discuss below.
In “Recruited for Jihah?” I was interested to see that Newsweek was willing to sound a few alarm bells.
Since al-Shabab is on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, traveling to Somalia to train or fight with the group is illegal. But security officials involved in the investigation have a bigger concern—that a jihadist group able to enlist U.S. nationals to fight abroad might also be able to persuade Somali-Americans to act as sleeper agents here in the United States. Al-Shabab has no history of targeting the U.S.
Not so far, but they sure did threaten to disrupt the Obama inauguration this past week. But, of course, that makes NO SENSE because everyone knows that terrorism will now come to an end because we have a nice President.
As if to underscore the danger, early last week the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned in a bulletin for the first time that al-Shabab might try to carry out an attack in America—timed to disrupt the presidential inauguration. A government official, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive intelligence, tells NEWSWEEK the information came from an informant who notified security officials that people affiliated with al-Shabab might already be here. The tip-off proved to be a false alarm. Still, security officials view the bulletin and the disappearances in Minnesota as a warning that Somalia’s brew of lawlessness and radicalism might rebound on the United States. “You have to ask yourself, how long is it before one of these guys comes back here and blows himself up?” says a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who also wouldn’t be quoted on the record discussing intel.
Here is the only information in this article that I found new and interesting. It seems that one of the Minneapolis mosques under scrutiny (NOW under scrutiny) had a speaker in November who was a Somali fighter and he revved up the ‘worshipers.’
NEWSWEEK found a small number among those who have worshiped at Abubakar and a recently closed sub-branch known as Imam Shafii Mosque who believed the tone was sometimes extreme. Yusuf Shaba, who writes articles for the Warsan Times, a Somali-English newspaper in Minneapolis, says he and his teenage sons attended a lecture at Imam Shafii Mosque in November by a visiting speaker who had fought in Somalia. His presentation turned into a rant. “He talked about the need for jihad,” Shaba says. “He got very emotional.” Shaba has since kept his children away.
The Imam, who has been blocked from leaving the country because of the missing men issue, denies anyone ever spoke at the mosque about jihad in Somalia.
Imam Abdirahman tells NEWSWEEK that he recalls seeing some of the missing young men at the mosque. But none talked about returning to Somalia. “The youths did not consult their imam, just as they did not consult their elders,” he says. He denies that any fighters from Somalia (or other countries) lectured at the mosque….
I hope we are now keeping a better watch over mosques throughout America. There is no way that Yusaf Shaba, who reported the Somali fighter speaker, would reveal that if it weren’t true because in doing so he has put himself in danger. I suspect he knows that, but do the dhimmi Newsweek reporters?