Monday, May 2, marks the nationwide release of my book, The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You About the Islamist Threat.
With news of Osama bin Laden's death, the release of the book could not be more timely.
I have interviewed current and former associates of bin Laden, who gave me firsthand insights into the terror kingpin that I share in the book.
May 2--launch day--begins with an appearance on "The 700 Club" with Pat Robertson and wraps up with a segment on the Sean Hannity show on Fox News. I'll also be on Sean's nationally syndicated radio show on May 2.
I'll be doing a bunch of promotion for the book on TV and radio all week--check my Facebook and Twitter accounts for regular updates.
In the meantime, I wanted to share an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book (titled "Mega-Mosque Nation"), recounting my shocking conversation with a radical imam who's based just a few miles from the White House.
Here it is:
Speaking of incitement, it doesn’t get much more blatant than what went down in Washington, D.C., over Labor Day weekend 2010. That was when an annual Islamo/leftist freak show known as the “al-Quds Day” rally came to town, featuring a rogue’s gallery of Jew-hating conspiracy theorists protesting Israel’s claim to the city of Jerusalem. Leading the pack was Abolfazl Bahram Nahidian, imam of the Manassas mosque in northern Virginia, which is located near the site of the legendary Battle of Bull Run.
That may sound like an odd fit on the surface, but Nahidian quickly showed at the al-Quds event that when it came to “bull,” he had few peers. At the rally, Nahidian claimed the 9/11 attacks were “not done by Muslims. It is done by the plot of the Zionists in order to justify, to occupy, the land of the Muslims such as Afghanistan, such as Iraq, such as Pakistan, now moving on to the rest of the areas. [The Zionists] plot and they scheme and no doubt God is plotting and scheming against them too!”
When I called Nahidian to ask him about these comments, he was unrepentant, insisting the 9/11 attacks were carried out in a joint operation by the CIA, British intelligence, and the Israeli Mossad as a pretext to “plunder the wealth and the oil of the Middle East.” For good measure, he added that America “created al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” and that the notion that Muslim nations would ever accept Israel as a neighbor was “impossible.”
I couldn’t help but marvel at how closely Nahidian’s comments mirrored the rhetoric of the hard Left. I was also struck by the thought that Imam Nahidian is not just a member of the Manassas mosque—he runs the joint. If he is that outspoken in public about his hatred for America and for Jews, one can only imagine what he tells his congregation behind closed doors.
One thing we know for certain has gone on behind closed doors in U.S. mosques is terror fundraising. In June 2009, a local counter-jihad activist went undercover to videotape an event held at the Masjid al-Rahman mosque in Orlando that would benefit British parliamentarian George Galloway’s anti-Israel group, Viva Palestina.
Galloway, a radical leftist and longtime Islamist collaborator, raised $55,000 at the Orlando mosque and $1 million worth of aid overall during his American tour, supposedly to benefit needy Palestinians in Gaza. Galloway was later shown on al-Jazeera TV presenting the funds he garnered in the United States directly to Hamas leaders at a ceremony in Gaza—in open violation of U.S. sanctions.
These are not isolated incidents, as U.S. federal agents will tell you off the record. I am not saying all mosques are havens for jihadi sympathizers or terrorist fundraising and plotting. But given that enough of them have hosted such activities over the years, and that their rapid construction in the West represents a strategic display of Islamic dominance, Americans have good reason to be alarmed. Yes, Muslims have the right to build mosques in America, so long as those mosques are transparent about their funding sources and do not promote a violent anti-Western, pro-jihadist worldview.
Local residents who are seeing multi-million-dollar mega-mosques erected in their communities also have every right not only to demand answers about funding sources and the ideology of the mosques’ leaders (Do they recognize Israel’s right to exist? Place the U.S. constitution above Islamic sharia law? Disavow Islamic supremacist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah?), but to protest their construction for reasons of national security.
There are many more stunning revelations in the book, culled from my years of on-the-ground reporting on the global jihad.
Be sure to stay tuned for another exclusive book excerpt on May 3 from The Terrorist Next Door.