Great discussion of the Arkansas jihadi by Robert Spencer today.
Violent jihad returned to America last week. In a story that got little notice amid the flood of features on the murder of abortionist George Tiller, an American Muslim named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad murdered Private William Long and gravely wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula outside the Army-Navy Career Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Deputy Prosecutor Scott Duncan said that Muhammad openly admitted that he “would have killed more soldiers had they been in the parking lot.”
Carlos Leon “Corey” Bledsoe changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad after he converted to Islam in 2004. He then went to Yemen hoping to study with a jihadist imam, apparently traveling to Yemen on a passport from another flashpoint of the global jihad, Somalia.
When he returned to the U.S. from Yemen, the Joint Terrorism Task Force began to investigate him. Muhammad apparently had plans for a jihad larger than one that involved simply shooting up a military recruiting center: on his computer were maps to Jewish organizations and a Baptist church, as well as to a child care center, a post office and other military recruiting centers.
Investigators are now looking into evidence that before Muhammad went to Yemen, he lived for awhile in Columbus, Ohio, where he apparently attended a mosque that has a noteworthy number of connections to Muslims behaving badly. Investigative journalist Patrick Poole identifies the mosque as Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab, where Somali immigrant Nuradin Abdi worshiped before he was sentenced to ten years in prison in November 2007 for plotting, along with two other members of Masjid Omar, to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio.
One was Abdulmalek Kenyatta, a.k.a. Christopher Paul — another worshiper and, says Poole, “longtime martial arts instructor” at the Masjid Omar — who pled guilty in 2008 to joining Al-Qaeda and plotting to blow up tourist resorts and military bases. Back in 2002, Kenyatta and Abdi discussed the shopping mall plot with a third member of Masjid Omar, Iyman Faris, who is now doing twenty years for his part in an Al-Qaeda plot to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with bombs…..
Great article, read the whole thing! It’s good to see that at least some major bloggers whose blogs are supposed to be about Islam and the Middle East are staying on task.
And a question comes to mind: how come churches and synagogues don’t have on-staff martial arts instructors?
Tags: Islamists, Jihad, Robert Spencer
