North Carolina: Hamas-linked CAIR played role in getting legal charges brought against phone pranksters

On June 6, Spartanburg, South Carolina police arrested and charged two teenagers with threatening the Islamic Center of Charlotte; the teens said “I will blow you harder than 9/11.”

The public has heard only a snippet of the phone call. So we are primarily relying on the reactions of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, while they are brushing aside the Charlotte police.

CAIR’s National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell characterizes the call as a bomb threat:

“Calling a house of worship and threatening to blow it up is the very definition of a crime, under federal law and I assume under state law,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of CAIR. “Law enforcement should take that very seriously, whether it’s a mosque, a church or a synagogue, threatening to attack a place of worship is unacceptable, and it’s also illegal.”

A spokesperson with the Islamic Center confirms the caller left a voicemail apologizing to them describing the original call as “inappropriate.”

But is it really a bomb threat? Without context, this tiny snippet could be anything. We don’t even know whether it was said in reference to the mosque or to some individual.

The Mecklenburg-Charlotte Police said it was not a criminal act.

Considering the fact that there has been nothing reported about a plot or cache of explosives, we should be relieved that this was only a prank.

Unfortunately, however, that is not the way the game is played.

CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper also considers it a bomb threat, and says that it is common for the police to be negligent in this way.

 We often hear that that — “Oh, well the threat wasn’t severe enough, they didn’t name a time and place,” when they are going to come and burn down the mosque, or blow up the mosque. So that is a common response.

CAIR’s involvement

After watching him impugning the police on TV, I called Ibrahim Hooper to ask him if he or CAIR had any role in bringing charges in this case.

He said that he had no direct role, but the people at CAIR were liaising with local community leaders to have charges brought against the teens.

This is a recurring pattern of behavior for CAIR: like a predator, to attack the weak and defenseless, even children. Using hyper-exaggerated righteous indignation to bully children is right up CAIR’s alley.

As for the “local community leaders,” that could be CAIR itself. Mitchell announced on social media that CAIR is opening a chapter in North Carolina.

It is interesting to observe the image that CAIR is trying to convey in the North Carolina announcement: “CAIR is fighting for you.”

It is fighting against a company that is simply trying to run its business efficiently.

It is fighting to keep a university from using its property.

It is fighting with sheriffs, and naming the wrong person while making false allegations, all because of a shooting target depicting a dangerous man.

CAIR is a fighting organization.

But let’s take a walk down memory lane, and a look at the sort of thing CAIR will definitely not be fighting against in North Carolina:

• “POSSIBLE TERROR PLOT THWARTED,” by Sharon McBrayer, The News Herald, June 22, 2015.
• “NC man found guilty in plot to behead witnesses,” Associated Press, November 8, 2012.
• “Woman charged in beheading plot held without bond,” by Michael Biesecker, Associated Press, February 3, 2012.
• “Feds: Charlotte man charged with conspiring to help ISIL,” WBTV, August 4, 2016.
• Remember the jihad family of Daniel Patrick Boyd? He was from North Carolina.
• KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED went to school in North Carolina and “found Chowan attractive because of North Carolina’s politically active Muslim community, numbering as many as fourteen thousand across the state.” — ISLAMIC RADICALIZATION IN NORTH CAROLINA, UNITED STATES THE ISLAMIC RADICALIZATION INDEX (IRI) (p.27)
• In June 2002, brothers Mohamad and Chawki Hammoud and nine other men were arrested by U.S. federal authorities and charged with, among other charges, “funding the activities of Hezbollah from the proceeds of an interstate cigarette smuggling ring” (p.8)

And, finally, here is CAIR going after a teacher again, a kindergarten teacher no less.

Another one of the assets or “community leaders” that CAIR could turn to in North Carolina is the Islamic Center of Charlotte spokesman, Jibril Hough.

Jibril Hough is the spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte.

He thinks the police should make their presence known to show how serious a matter this is.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department needs to follow up by at least visiting the caller’s address to show, just by an officer’s presence, how seriously the department treats such calls. And the department should help ensure the caller receives counseling, he said.

Maybe when he said this he was thinking of his previous experience with Samir Khan.

Jibril Hough and Samir Khan

Samir Khan, who would go on to create the slick coffee table magazine “Inspire” for al Qaeda, used to worship at the Islamic Center of Charlotte. In fact, his father is a lecturer there. “An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers,” by Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet, New York Times, October 15, 2007:

He was spreading the message of Osama Bin Laden in a blog he wrote in his parent’s house. Until the New York Times outed Khan as the website’s founder in 2007, the people who prayed alongside him at the Islamic Center of Charlotte had no idea what he was up to. “He was kind of a loner,” says Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the Islamic Center. “He didn’t really have many associates or friends, so when you would see him from time to time, he would come pray and then he would leave.”

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

As Robert Spencer has said:

If Muslims can’t spot the bad actors among them, how are we supposed to?

The answer is to take the job of doing so more seriously than Muslims do.

When the Times broke the story about Khan’s blog, Jibril Hough limped into action.

Hough and Khan’s father sat him down and gave him a talking-to.

Hough also told the Observer that Muslim community leaders, including Khan’s father, met with Samir Khan in late 2007 and early 2008 in an unsuccessful effort to steer him away from supporting terrorism.

But they didn’t stop him. There was no police involvement to show how serious support for murder, treason, al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden is.

About a year later, Samir Khan was in Yemen with the “Jihadi Rock Star” Anwar al-Awlaki, who inspired the Fort Hood jihad murderer and ministered to two of the 9/11 hijackers.

The adventure all came to an end when Samir Khan became collateral damage in the drone strike killing of Awlaki.

Our counseling didn’t look like it made that great of an impact, Hough said.

Of course, Jibril blames America for Samir Khan’s death.

Hough says the [drone strike] policy puts the government as judge, jury, and executioner. “So many other Americans are not seeing it for the danger that it is because it happens to someone who doesn’t look like them or believe like them,” Hough said.

‘Twas racism that killed the jihadi.

But just imagine if Jibril Hough had treated Samir Khan’s infatuation with dangerous cult leaders as seriously as he did a phone prank. Samir Khan might still be alive. He might be in jail, but at least he would be alive.

Muslim leaders in America, who are a sensitive group in general, have an additional reason for why a phone prank would shock them. This past May, there may have been six or more mosques/centers vandalized or set on fire. All of the perpetrators appear to have some form of mental illness. As if there were some kind of social contagion among the mentally ill that is causing them to attack mosques.

Nobody likes getting a prank phone call; we get that.

What is harder to understand is why Jibril Hough, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, Ibrahim Hooper, and CAIR in general, do not take deadly jihad as seriously as they do a prank phone call.