Recent arrests of Muslim converts raise troubling questions (part one)

The shooting of two Army recruiters this week by U.S. born Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad highlights the persistent threat posed by radical Islam at home.

And of course, four men were arrested in May, accused of plotting to blow two New York synagogues. Once again, three of the plotters were converts to Islam. (See my previous report on so-called "prison Islam" conversions.)

To get an up-to-date overview of the broader problem, I recently interviewed Frank Salvato of the Basics Project.

According to their mission statement:

Basics Project is a non-profit, non-partisan 501(C)(3) research and educational initiative whose mission is to re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country, specifically the threats of aggressive Islamofascism and the American Fifth Column.

Salvato’s views are sobering, to say the least.

“We are definitely losing ground against fundamentalist Islam here on American soil,” said Salvato in an exclusive interview.

“While the media will point to successes in garnering convictions against terror cells like the Liberty City group or the Lackawanna group or the group in Bly, Oregon, the Holy Land Foundation, CAIR and others, what we are blind to is the incremental encroachment of the Islamic culture into the fiber of Americanism.”

The Basics Project has produced a video about what Salvato calls the “American Fifth Column, the neo-Marxists determined to undermine Americanism at all cost.”

The term “fifth column” refers to a group working to undermine their own nation. Frank Salvato explains that, “in America, the term refers to American citizens who are ideologically aligned with anti-American organizations, sentiments, principles and values, who work individually or in concert with various organized movements in an effort to undermine American interests, counter official American policy, erode American confidence at home and abroad, or in any way aid and abet America’s enemies, while publicly proclaiming all of it to be an act of patriotism.”

Those who make up the American Fifth Column often describe themselves using noble sounding terms like “conscientious objector”, and are fond of using expressions such as “Dissent is patriotic.”

These academic, political and media elites are “complicit in fundamentalist Islam’s advance on American society and government.”

As for violent jihadis on US soil,” says Salvato, “the notion that we have been kept safe since the attacks of September 11, 2001, only applies to violent and spectacular attacks. That jihadis exist on American soil has been established by almost every honest individual and organization that studies the issue.”

Of course, the spread of radical Islam tends to take much subtler forms. Salvato says:

Almost on a daily basis, we read and hear stories about how fundamentalist Islamists demand special treatment in our society. From their demands that government construct and install foot baths and prayer rooms in public places like airports and governmental buildings – at taxpayer expense – to one women in Florida insisting that she be allowed to wear her abayya in a drivers license photo, Muslim cab drivers refusing to accommodate fares who possess liquor and Muslim store clerks refusing to handle pork products and liquor, Islamists have manipulated governmental bodies into acquiescing to the intricacies of their religion, even at the marginalization of other religions and in the face of the separation of Church and State.

That taxpayer dollars help facilitate this “cultural surrender” is what Salvato calls “the bitter irony.”

(Part Two of our interview with Frank Salvato of the Basics Project will appear tomorrow.)