Weekly Terrorism Spotlight

Volume 1, Issue 1 (March 17)

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

Counter-terror expert warns of “fifth-column”

Counter-terror expert Dr. Peter Leitner warns of “fifth-column” movement for home-grown Islamic jihad in America [Part 1 of 3]

Dr. Peter M. Leitner, president of the Col. William R. Higgins Counter-Terrorism Research Center, in comments to Christian Action Network president Martin Mawyer said a “fifth-column” movement if Islamic jihad is growing in America.

Comments, some to be included in the Christian Action Network feature-length documentary, “Homegrown Jihad, the Terrorist Camps Around U.S.,” included great detail about terrorism plans Leitner observes among Islamist Muslims favoring jihad war.

“Essentially we have a fifth-column movement in the United States that is criminal in nature, criminal in background, and criminal in future intent,” Leitner said.

“With a religious mission that has been retro-fitted onto them, [it] essentially justifies any criminal activity they commit that is against the infidel, against the United States, against the infidel nation of people who are not Muslims.”

Leitner said the movement is a domestic enemy intent on destroying America’s Constitutional Republic, to replace it with an Islamic state loyal to a global “Caliphate” Islamic empire.

He said in the Islamic fundamentalist worldview, “somehow the rest of us are not fully human beings,” and “They give themselves a ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ card for any criminal act they commit against us.

“It is very dangerous, a very, very insidious organization here - throughout the United States,” he added.

“Anytime you have an organization that is subversive in nature that trains their people in the use of weapons and has a fundamentally seditious and hostile philosophy against the existing social order, it’s dangerous.”

Leitner spoke of an organization he observed, his work coinciding with a Christian Action Network probe into specific camps, or Islamist closed-communities, linked to international terrorism by FBI and intelligence community findings.

He named the Pakistan terrorist organization Jamaat al-Fuqra. “It is also known as the Muslims of America,” he said.

“It is an organization that has intentionally gone out and recruited African American felons into its ranks after they have converted them to Islam, to a particularly radical form of Islam,” he added.

“It is essentially a foreign-backed, foreign created organization.”

Leitner said the Muslim of America compounds, numbering as many as 35, are distinct from urban sleeper cell organizations, a stereotype that has grabbed headlines in recent years.

These are isolated compounds, an isolated community of people who are acting in the most seditious fashion,” he said.

“We are allowing the creation of pockets of armed groups who are not…blending into society at all; they are isolated intentionally. They exist for training, but training for what,” he added.

Leitner said in counter-terror circles of expertise, the strategy of isolated rural compounds becomes clear as one studies them closely.

The activities at the compounds are secretive, and contacts with the general communities in the rural neighborhoods, farming areas and rural homes, around them are kept to a slim-to-none level.

Infiltration of the compounds is difficult, whereas interaction in urban city areas is up; getting views by counter-terror experts inside is much easier. “When you have a closed community, it’s hard to penetrate,” he said.

“Probably the biggest benefit to the compound is shear and absolute intimidation of local authorities,” he added.

“If you are a small county police department, you don’t have much in the way of backup - you live in the community, you r children go to school in the community…It is much easier to intimidate.”