On July 20, 2002, the Seattle PI informed readers that James Ujaama and his brother, Mustafa Ujaama, “…were prepared to challenge criminal charges- if any are ever brought against them- that suggest they associated with terrorists.”
“My brother and I are not terrorists, and we should not have been charged in the media and harassed,” Mr. Ujaama told the PI. He alleged that the FBI was unfairly destroying his reputation along with the legitimate business activities in which he was engaged.
All this, according to Mr. Ujaama was a result of his previous involvement with a Central District mosque, Dar-us-Salaam.
People in Seattle, including civic leaders like Ron Sims and Ujaama’s friends in Seattle’s Central District neighborhood could hardly believe their ears. King County Councilman Larry Gossett told the media that their mother, Peggy Thompson, worked at a social services agency and got them involved in the community. The Rev. Robert Jeffrey of New Hope Baptist Church said James’ brother attended his church before converting to Islam and has long worked to eradicate drugs and street violence.
According to Rev. Jeffrey, James was “a very principled person.”
“They’ve been busy for a long time — visiting elected officials, trying to raise money for the Central Area Youth Association, being proponents of the need to improve employment conditions,” said King County Executive Ron Sims. “Terrorists? I don’t think so.”
James Ujaama, who is African American, made a public statement warning other minority members to be wary of overzealous law enforcement.
“This is surely a runaway government administration that I strongly believe knew about the events of September 11 prior to the attack on New York, and refused to intervene in lieu of economic and political gains,” he wrote in a seven-page statement. “I also do not believe that Zacarias Moussaoui had anything to do with those events, and that he and many others are being railroaded in an attempt to cover up the truth.”
Fast forward to May 1, 2009, when the Seattle Times reported that a conspiracy trial in Manhattan promised to emerge as a ”dark tale” of jihad training.
See In conspiracy trial, dark tale emerges of jihad training.
James Ujaama, now a government witness, testified in New York City about his efforts in 1999 to create a terrorist training camp in rural Oregon. A Swedish jihadist who once bragged he had been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden was to be an instructor of future “jihad warriors” that would be trained in weapons, horsemanship and Quran at the camp.
Mr. Ujaama took the witness stand to testify against Oussama Kassir. Other Seattlites testified that they met Kassir and Harroon Aswat inBly, Oregon (the property where the camp was to be operated) or at the Masjid Dar-us-Salaam Central Area mosque..
Yes, indeed, the testimony was certainly darker than previously acknowledged by authorities in Seattle:
Nathan Bishop, now 29 and living in Bahrain, was a member of the Masjid Dar-us-Salaam mosque in 1999, when he went by the name Abu Sufian. He said he attended a meeting at the Central Area apartment of another member in late 1999, where Kassir, flanked by Aswat, said he had come to the U.S. “to plan attacks [and] … destroy.”
Kassir, the Swedish jihad instructor not only threatened that Americans would be killed (“human bones are the best shrapnel”), but showed the students of jihad how to field-strip an AK-47 automatic rifle, according to the Times article.
Ujaama told the court that he was converted to Islam in the late 1980s and soon followed more and more radical Islamic preachers.
Abu Hamza, apparently the first and least violent preacher under which Ujaama sat, “is serving a seven-year sentence in Britain for inciting his followers to kill nonbelievers and has been indicted in the U.S. on 11 charges related to the planned development of the Bly site and for sending cash and volunteers to support al-Qaida and the Taliban, ” according to the Seattle Times article.
Ujaama sent a fax from Kinko’s in Tukwila, Washington to a mosque in London promising firearms training and lessons in hand-to-hand combat, horse riding and archery, as well as Quran study sessions. The featured attraction would be a visit from Abu Hamza who would come to Bly personally.
In a 2006 New York Sun article entitled Seattle Rampage Is a Case of ‘Sudden Jihad Syndrome’, Daniel Pipes shows how Seattle’s liberal environment fosters Islamic extremism in ways that belie the Emerald City’s cheery image.
“At about 4 p.m. on July 28, on the eve of the Jewish sabbath, a Muslim terrorist of Pakistani origins named Naveed Afzal Haq forced a 14-year-old girl to get him into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building by holding a gun to her back. He then pulled out the two large-caliber semi-automatic pistols he had just purchased and went on a murderous rampage. Mr. Haq killed one woman, Pam Waechter, 58, an assistant director at the federation, and injured five others, one of whom was 17 weeks pregnant.”
“I want these Jews to get out. … I’m upset at your foreign policy. These are Jews. I’m tired of getting pushed around, and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East. … I’m an American too but I just want our people out of Iraq,” Haq announced.
When the authorities are unable to find direct affiliation with Al Qaeda or some other group, the lone wolf terrorist is deemed to be not a terrorist.
Pipes had previously visited the building where the attack occurred and warned the Jewish Federation that it could be targeted by jihad. Mr. Haq’s father worked at the Hanford nuclear site. Naveed once won a $250 award for finishing second in an essay contest sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and graduated with honors in biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, earning a second degree, in electrical engineering, from Washington State University.
“ Mr. Haq’s actions are a clear instance of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” whereby normal-appearing Muslims unpredictably become violent. His attack confirms my oft-repeated call for special scrutiny of Muslims. Because the identity of the next homicidal jihadi cannot be anticipated, Muslims generally need to come under heightened observation. I regret writing this as much as you dislike reading it, but it needs to be said and operated upon.”
According to Jeff Jacoby in the P-I Online (see the P-I online- columnist Jeff Jacoby’s spot-on commentary arguing Haq represents another deadly and disturbing case of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome”), “jihadist murder is a global threat and some of the most malevolent figures in the Islamic world — Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, to name just two — openly incite violence against Americans and Jews, the attack in Seattle should have been a huge story everywhere. Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq — one-fourth the number dealing with actor Mel Gibson’s drunken (and anti-Semitic) outburst. Why the disparity?”
Mohammed Taheri-azar, rammed a car into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina. He wanted to “avenge the death of Muslims around the world.”
See video of Mohammed Taheri-azar’s ranting in courtroom.
Michael Julius Ford opened fire in a Denver warehouse, killing one person and injuring five. “I don’t know what happened to him yesterday,” his sister Khali told the press. “He told me that Allah was going to make a choice and it was going to be good and told me people at his job was making fun of his religion.”
Hasan Akbar, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division, attacked his fellow soldiers at an American command center in Kuwait with grenades and rifle fire, killing one and wounding 15; Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet, killed two people when he shot up the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport in 2002; Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, was carrying a note denouncing “Zionists” and others who “must be annihilated & exterminated” when he opened fire on the observation deck of the Empire State building. And a lone shooter (who was actually affiliated with an organized terrorist group) shot and killed drivers outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in the early Nineties. “Lone Wolf” terrorists are routinely downplayed by the media.
The prevailing “liberal” climate in Seattle and most of the “Left Coast” is not just dripping wet but rife with left-wing ideology that makes common cause and often camouflages political extremism that dovetails with Islamicist political and religious dogma.
Another Left Coast horror story occurred in the early Seventies when an elite group within the San Francisco Black Muslim organization randomly executed, dismembered and beheaded white people, allegedly to be initiated as members of a secret Islamic cadre within the larger Black Muslim organization:
“During a six-month period between 1973 and 1974, the group killed 14 people and wounded seven others solely because they were white, but the Zebra murders seemed to fade from the collective memory. Today, most San Franciscans have never heard of them.”
The prevailing “liberal” climate in San Francisco required that all the City’s leaders come out in support of the Nation of Islam and declare that the killings had nothing to do with the Black Muslims who operate a network of businesses there… the fact that the serial killings were conducted from a Black Muslim storefront, using a van registered to one of those businesses and all the other evidence notwithstanding! Amazingly, outside of and even within San Francisco, most people are without any knowledge of the Zebra killings. That is our enlightened media at work, making sure that the only bad news we get is about our own government’s much more serious instances of serial brutality.
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