<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Dearborn Shoot-Out Opens a Window into Homegrown Terror<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> 
By Robert Knight
Luqman Ameen Abdullah, who was the Imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, died in a shoot-out on Oct. 28 after firing on FBI agents during a raid in Dearborn, Michigan. Another seven Muslims were apprehended, and various weapons seized.

"We're not any fake terrorists; we're the real terrorists," Abdullah (aka Christopher Thomas) once bragged to an undercover informant, according to an FBI affidavit.

Abdullah, 53, was a disciple of none other than H. Rap Brown.  If you ever wondered what had become of the '60s Black Panther leader-well, he converted to Islam while in prison in the 1970s. And he apparently has not changed his mind about what he'd like to do to America.

Famous for saying, "Violence is necessary. It's as American as cherry pie," he goes by the moniker Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin and runs a Sunni group called Ummah ("community"). The Black Muslim organization's goal is to establish an Islamic regime with Sharia law within the United States.  Brown is doing this from his prison cell at the ADX Florence supermax federal prison in Colorado, where he's serving a state-imposed sentence for shooting two black police officers, one of whom died, in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2000. 

In the FBI raid, agents targeted a Dearborn warehouse and two Detroit homes, after a two-year investigation of the Ummah offshoot. A total of 11 Muslims (three were still at large) were charged with various conspiracy felonies involving stolen goods and firearms.  Speaking of conspiracies, Abdullah is on tape saying that the FBI was behind Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The 43-page criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court by the U.S. Attorney's Office, which contains eyewitness accounts, says that boys as young as 7 were beaten "severely" (p. 24), and that Abdullah encouraged his followers to "pick up guns and do something" (p. 3). He also said, "If they are coming to get me, I'll just strap a bomb on and blow up everybody" (p. 10). He also said that while watching a TV show featuring a nuclear bomb that he would like to acquire a "little bomb" and target Washington, D.C. (page 18).

Well, that kind of talk, except for the fact that Washington is about 60 percent African-American,  should make a proud man out of Al-Brown, who once said, "We must wage guerrilla warfare on the honky white man" and, "If America doesn't come around, then black people are going to burn it down." The latter threat was made in Cambridge, Maryland, where fiery riots erupted shortly thereafter in July, 1967, fulfilling his prophecy.

Back in Michigan, Dawud Walid, who heads the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said of Abdullah, "I know him as a respected man in the Muslim community," according to the Detroit Free Press.  Walid wants to keep Abdullah's Muslim identity out of this incident. He argued in a radio interview that any emphasis on Abdullah's Muslim faith could lead to Islamophobia and attacks on Muslims, according to an Investigative Project on Terrorism report. The Michigan CAIR's Website on Oct. 29 made no mention of the raids, and its top press release was about the Roseville Community Schools apologizing for sending out a permission slip for pupils to attend an off-campus Bible study. No parents had complained to the schools, but CAIR had adopted the ACLU's bullying tactic of accusing school officials of violating the First Amendment.
CAIR, the most prominent Muslim public relations group in America, has denounced terrorism, but has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a prominent terrorist funding case.  On the same day as the Michigan raids, CAIR put out an unrelated editorial, "Islamophobia Machine Targets American Muslims," which denounces Frank Gaffney, Geert Wilders, and other prominent critics of radical Islam. CAIR also assisted in the effort to have Christian convert Rifqa Bary, 17, sent Oct. 27 from Florida back to Ohio, where her Muslim parents are trying to regain custody. Rifqa fears an "honor killing" because she is an apostate, and although a deal was cut keeping her in foster care until she turns 18, her parents have since fired the attorney and are seeking to break the deal and bring her home. A custody hearing is slated on Nov. 16 in Franklin County Juvenile Court. The Oct. 28 FBI raids came on the heels of the Oct. 19 indictment of a Colorado Imam, Ahmad Wais Afzali, for allegedly lying to federal agents about an alleged terror plot to bomb targets in New York City. Najibullah Zazi, of Aurora, Colorado, and his father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, were arrested in September in Denver in connection with the alleged plot.

The Dearborn shoot-out is especially jarring, because 30 percent of the city's population of 98,000 is Muslim, and where many billboards, street signs, and storefront signs are in
Arabic. At a local high school, where 80 percent of the students are Muslim, the principal allegedly punched a boy who had converted to Christianity and "disgraced his family."

Coral Ridge Ministries recently sent cameras into Dearborn, capturing footage that's part of the video, Radical Islam on the March.  Faisal Malick, an ex-Muslim featured in the documentary, says that militancy is increasing among Muslims who "believe the whole world should submit to Islam. When they come into the United States of America, they want to see Sharia law implemented, they want to dominate every place of influence-in education and technology and law, in government, in finances."

Referring to Christians and Jews, Abdullah said in a taped conversation, "We have to cut the ties to them … you cannot please them until you follow their religion. Obama is a Kafir [infidel]. McCain, all the rest of them … you cannot make a good Kafir, bad Kafir…The promise of Allah and Islam said, '… the worst Muslim is better than the best Kafir.'"

Since "Kafirs" are still in power, that means that Abdullah's followers need not worry about legalities.  Or, as H. Rap Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin Brown once said, "We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws."

Yes, you are. It's why you're behind bars right now.

Robert Knight is Senior Writer/Correspondent for Coral Ridge Ministries, a Senior Fellow for the American Civil Rights Union, and the author of Fighting for America's Soul (Coral Ridge.org, 2009).