Abu Usamah is from New Jersey and preached at the Islamic Center of Peoria. Did anyone there agree with him? What are those who heard him doing now? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? No worries: his teachings there were "moderate."
A report by George Kindel for FoxNews, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
NEW YORK — A New Jersey-born Muslim cleric with links to a suspected Al Qaeda operative who surfaced at a college not far from the cleric's Peoria, Ill., mosque the day before the Sept. 11 attacks has found a new home.
The imam now is spewing his message of hate to a growing group of followers at a mosque in Birmingham, England.
His target: the United States, the United Kingdom, Christians and Jews.
Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, who preached at the Islamic Center of Peoria in 2001, is the subject of a British news documentary that revealed Monday how he regularly exhorts worshippers at the Green Lane Masjid, or mosque, in Birmingham to hate Westerners, whom he calls "pathological liars" and "kuffar," a derogatory term for non-Muslims.
Click here to view the British news documentary.Abu Usamah also calls for the public crucifixion of all "kuffar" and says they should be "left there to bleed to death for three days."
Crucifixion of those who cause fitnah, or trouble in the land, is in accord with Qur'an 5:33: "The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom."
Abu Usamah, who was born in New Jersey and is 42 or 43 years old, was the imam in Peoria when federal agents swooped down in December 2001 and arrested Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari student at Bradley University, on charges that he used false documents to open bank accounts and was in possession of a telephone credit card used to call a number in Dubai that federal agents said was linked to reputed Al Qaeda financier and Sept. 11 organizer Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
Sources tell FOX News that Abu Usamah is a mysterious character — no one, including federal agents and fellow imams, seems to know what his name was prior to his conversion to Islam.
But sources in Peoria say that though his public teachings there were moderate, he occasionally stepped over the line into anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he called President Bush a "pathological liar" and constantly argued to his followers that "Jews controlled the media."...
Abu Usamah, in the days immediately after Sept. 11, asked Peoria residents not to judge the Muslim community by the actions of the terrorists who carried out the attack and thanked the local Christian community for its support.
"More faiths, different groups reached out to us," he told the Peoria Journal Star newspaper a year after the attacks.
He went on to thank "those open-minded people who judge everyone individually."
The New Jersey-born imam, who claims to have studied a strict version of Islam at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, has since changed his tune.
"Lying is part of their religion," Abu Usamah is heard telling his followers in the special report produced by the British news show "Dispatches" on Channel 4.
"They do whatever they want to do. They are liars, they are terrorists themselves. They are lying, you can't believe them.
"They are pathological liars," he rants.
Ironic in light of, for example, Ibn Kathir's commentary on Qur'an 3:28: "...'unless you indeed fear a danger from them' meaning, except those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers. In this case, such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyyah] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"
He also is heard ticking off an enemies list that includes mainstream British culture.
"America, the U.K., Germany and France, they have come against the religion of Islam," he declares.
"Popular culture … if you're a person who gives yourself to that, your mind is going to be controlled by the so-called powers to be, who make these manmade laws."
The mosque's official Web site says its purpose is to counter Muslim stereotyping, but the Channel 4 report found there is a secret chat room area of the site that only mosque members know about, where At-Thahabi's lectures are broadcast.
It is in this chat room, the report says, that Abu Usamah preaches the creation of a "total Islamic state" that advocates harsh punishments for non-believers.
"Whoever changes his religion from Islam," he declares, "kill him, in the Islamic state."
This is a quote from Muhammad, who said: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him" (من بدل دينه فاقتلوه).
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