The original puzzle piece showed up in a rare video I snagged called Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America (aired on PBS 1994). In the course of the program it showed a map of cells of the jihadist Al-Kifah recruitment network located in the US in the 1990’s. To my surprise a dot appeared in the middle of Iowa.
(my arrow)
While I could not find any real documents placing illegal activity relating Al-Kifah and Des Moines (or Ames), I did find some interesting information (stick with me; it gets interesting):
- In 1998 Ibrahim Dremali served as an academic advisor at Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale. There he attended rallies, along with a trained jihadi, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, where Israeli flags were burned and slogans, such as “With jihad we’ll claim our land, Zionist blood will wet the sand,” were shouted. On this occasion, Dremali advised the crowd “not to be sad for those who were martyred and to not be afraid to die for what they believe in” – a likely reference to suicide bombers.
- Skip to 2005. Dremali left his teaching position at Broward to become the Imam of the Des Moines Islamic Center presently located off Hickman Road. In 2009 he led protests against the publication of the infamous Danish cartoon depicting the image of Mohammed. He is quoted, “They are testing Muslims, trying to see what we will do, how we will react. It is an insult to the prophet, God, Muslims, Islam, the Quran and all humanity.” (Not too incendiary. Still, he is clearly a hot-head.)
- Skip to 2012. Dremali is no longer the Imam at the Center.
Another individual, a local convert to Islam attending the Des Moines mosque, is discovered to have been an FBI informant. Dr. Hamed Baig, the president of the Center said, “That is very surprising, very sad that somebody would come or the FBI or Homeland Security would send somebody here to pretend to be Muslim and try to find out what goes on here, I feel there is no need for that.”
- Studies from Center for Religious Freedom’s 2005 of material taught in mosques in Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, and New York and a study done by the Mapping Sharia Project (2008) showed that 75-80% of mosques in the US were preaching hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to impose Islamic rule. In 1999, a Sufi leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hishram Kabbani, testifying before a US State Department forum after visiting 114 mosques concluded that 80% if American mosques taught “extremist ideology”.
So the FBI is interested in the inner workings of the Des Moines mosque, and the mosque is outraged! One might ask: “Then why did you hire an anti-Semitic Jihadist to be your Imam if you didn’t want to deal with the FBI down the road?”
References:
1) Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America
PBS
2) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/911-a-prequel-next-attack-on-america-in-works-part-ii
3) Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In
Robert Spencer