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Issues & Insights
Visa And A Prayer
Published on Monday, August 15, 2005
War On Terror: A bruised and betrayed Britain vows to kick out foreign Muslim clerics who inspire violence and hatred while blocking entry of radical imams. But America keeps ushering them in by the hundreds.
Are we really that stupid? Yes. Since 9-11, the multiculturalists at the State Department have admitted more than 1,000 religious workers from Muslim nations, including terror hotbeds like Pakistan. In fact, they've granted religious-worker visas to 113 imams from that country alone, immigration records show.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad continues to treat these visa applicants as if they were as harmless as Buddhist monks or Catholic nuns. But they have unwittingly let in 113 potential recruiters for suicide bombers like the Pakistani Britons who were inspired to attack London while sitting at the feet of radical imams from the Finsbury Park Mosque.
If you think that couldn't happen here, think again.
One of those 113 Pakistani imams who entered the U.S. after 9-11 planned to set up a madrassa in sleepy little Lodi, Calif., where al-Qaida recruits could be trained to kill Americans, the FBI says. Shabbir Ahmed, now in custody, got his R-1 religious-worker visa in 2002 even though just months earlier he rallied crowds in Islamabad within earshot of the U.S. Embassy to join Osama bin Laden's holy war against America. His three-year visa was uncontested.
Other imams in America recently have been caught raising money for jihad, soliciting violent treason and even buying shoulder-fired missiles. Clearly, many imams are not men of peace.
London, for its part, is wisely drawing up a list of foreign imams "not suitable to preach who will be excluded from Britain." Washington should draw up its own blacklist, while doing more to monitor foreign clerics already in the country who may be using mosques as centers for fomenting jihad against their ever-gracious (and ever-tolerant) host.
The R-1 visa program is the perfect cover for those who want to come to America to raise the banner of jihad and plot terrorism. And militant Muslims know it. Last fall, a Brooklyn imam who admires bin Laden sponsored more than 200 applications for Pakistani imams for his radical mosque.
And take Omar Abdul-Rahman, the Egyptian blind sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was in New York on an R-1 visa.
Egypt is the headquarters of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, which gave rise to al-Qaida. Yet since 9-11, the U.S. has played host to a whopping 270 additional imams from that country.
Many are still here, still preaching at mosques and schools. Washington would be well-advised to check them and others for visa violations as a priority matter. Those in violation of their visas should be rounded up and swiftly deported.
Immigration experts note that it is very easy for Muslims clerics visiting from abroad to convert R-1 visas to green cards, and green cards to full-blown citizenship. Many also have children while in America who automatically become citizens. So the danger of radical infiltrators establishing a large and permanent infrastructure of support for jihad in America is very real.
In fact, one may already be in place. The 9-11 hijackers got aid and comfort from seven mosques coast to coast, and some were privately ministered to by a radical cleric from Yemen who studied here on surprise a State Department grant (your tax dollars at work).
Mugged by its own bloody reality on 7-7, all-enduring Britain finally got tough on its militant Muslim clergy. Will America have to be mugged again to crack down on its own preachers of anti-Western hate?
