The gospel of Tarek Mehanna

Charles Jacobs and Hillel Stavis

July 7, 2011

Last week, the Obama Administration decided to open talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political influence over Egypt is growing. The White House initiative will be framed as simply pragmatic - one has to talk to all the parties involved. It will be approved by most Western elites, whose endless hope that "dialogue and engagement" can solve all human problems will outweigh any qualms, such as the Brotherhood's goal of wiping out Israel and, according to its international spiritual leader Yusef al Qaradawi, all the Earth's Jews. Dialogue uber alles.

It will be fascinating to see how Boston's Jewish leaders - given their own short-lived dialogue with the Brotherhood front group here - react to Obama's parleys with Egyptian Islamo-nazis. It was the Jew-hating Qaradawi himself, after all, who personally raised funds in the Hub for the controversial Roxbury mega mosque, and was for eight years one of its trustees. It's a touchy subject on High Street. Ever since the "great mosque lawsuit/dialogue battle" - in which the Jewish Community Relations Council silently disengaged from its tete-atetes with the radical Muslims who run the mosque, Islamic fundamentalism in Boston's own neighborhoods has become a taboo subject in the halls of Jewish leadership.

Unable to reconcile its politically correct fantasies with its responsibility to promote the welfare of the Jewish community, the JCRC has been reluctant to inform the Jewish community about the radical nature of the Roxbury mosque - paralyzed by Islamophobia-phobia and "don't frighten the Jews."

So it's not surprising that Newtonite Margo Einstein despaired of getting much help from High Street when she learned that Grace Episcopal Church in her home town was hosting a program last week to support Tarek Mehanna, a Muslim man with connections to the Roxbury mosque who is in jail, accused of plotting to murder New Englanders - Mumbai style - in North Attleboro's Emerald Square Mall.

The evening featured presentations by Thomas Cincotta of the National Lawyers Guild; Israelbasher Nancy Murray of the ACLU; and Laila Murad, a leader of the Free Tarek Committee - the alarmingly large Tarek Mehanna support group based online and among the Roxbury mosque congregants.

The Mehanna support group has a Web site; more than 4,000 members on Facebook who post Islamic anti-Semitic passages on a message board moderated by Murad; and a thriving YouTube channel, where members post slogans such as "Close Guantanamo, Re-Open Auschwitz" and "Islam Will Dominate the World."
Knowing all this - from an Americans for Peace and Tolerance video - Einstein thought someone should attend the program to voice objections to anti-Semites once again being defended from church pulpits. She called two other octogenarian friends - Helga Lustig and Bob Abrams, a former assistant attorney general of Massachusetts - and the three blessed senior activists sallied forth to the church to protest.

Billed as a discussion of "Islamophobia: Manufacturing the Muslim Menace," the panel spent the evening portraying all Muslims as targets of totalitarian persecution. Wild equivalencies were drawn with the Civil Rights movement and the mistreatment of Native Americans. In the eyes of the panel, the thousands of innocents murdered by jihadists around the world paled before the "New Mc- Carthyism" of the US government.

According to Nancy Murray (who along with 40 others gatecrashed Combined Jewish Philanthropies' Israel Day at Gillette Stadium a few years back - and was ejected by police), the FBI was deliberately hatching terror plots to entrap Muslims. This, a new Red Scare, threatens to destroy American democracy.

Bob Abrams asked, "If Islamophobia is as rampant as you claim, how do you explain the FBI's recent finding that if you're Jewish in this country, you're nine times more likely to be the victim of a religious hate crime than if you're Muslim?" Cincotta of the Lawyers Guild fumbled for an answer, then affirmed the need to combat anti- Semitism generally. But don't hold your breath. The presentation then turned to our own homegrown terrorist suspect, Tarek Mehanna, who is accused of telling an FBI informant in 2009 that he wanted to shoot random people in a shopping mall in his pursuit of jihad.

Murad told the audience that Mehanna was a sweet and gentle man who wouldn't harm a fly and was targeted simply for being a Muslim. Meanwhile, Mehanna's indictment documents reveal that he and his co-conspirators considered themselves "the American branch of Al Qaeda in Iraq"; that they translated Arabic communiqués from Iraqi arch-terrorist Musab al Zarqawi into English, disseminating them to American Muslims; and that they flew to and attempted to join terrorist camps in Yemen and Pakistan.

According to the indictment, Mehanna and his co-conspirators shared videos of jihadi attacks on American soldiers "and took real pleasure in the deaths of American servicemen, seem[ing] to delight in the most horrific atrocities." The indictment describes how Mehanna sent a friend a video of Iraqi terrorists cutting open an American soldier's chest, pouring gasoline into the open ribcage and setting it on fire. Mehanna jokingly called this "Texas BBQ," told his friend that he "wants more" and stated that this "is the way to go."

Yet none of this mattered to the authorities at Grace Episcopal who allowed these awful people to defend this man from its pulpit and to pass out flyers in its sanctuary urging folks to send money for his defense. Will the congregation of this Newton church hold their rector, Reverend Miriam C. Gelfer, accountable for this despicable theater of the absurd in what is supposed to be a house of worship? Oh, and will Boston's Jewish establishment break its silence on the realities of radical Islam in New England - or will they continue to be "pragmatic"? Mehanna's trial is coming up. Stay tuned.