With these words this evening, Benedict XVI concluded Vatican commemorations of the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Paul VI audience hall. Organised by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, celebrations began with a study and reflection session which saw interventions by Vatican secretary of state Card. Tarcisio Bertone, the Director General of the World Labour Organisation, Juan Somavia, and the presence among others, of the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. At the end of the session a concert was given by the Brandenburghisches Staatsorchester from Frankfurt, under the direction of Spanish maestro Inma Shara, the first woman to direct a symphonic orchestra in the Vatican.

 “Sixty years ago –noted the Pope – on December 10th, the General Assembly of the United Nations, gathered in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which still today constitutes a high reference point for inter-cultural dialogue on the freedom and rights of humanity.  The dignity of each man and woman is only truly guaranteed when his or her fundamental rights are recognised, safeguarded and promoted. 

The Church has always that fundamental rights, above and beyond the diverse formulations and weight they may carry within various cultures, are a universal fact, because they are innate to the very nature of man.  Natural law, written by God within human conscience, – continued the Pope – is a common denominator between all men and all peoples; it is a universal guide that everyone can recognise and thanks to which people can understand each other.  

And so, human rights are ultimately founded in God the creator, who gave each one of us intelligence and freedom.  If we ignore this solid base, human rights will remain weak because devoid of a solid foundation”.

“The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Declaration – noted the Pope – is the perfect opportunity for us to verify to what measure the ideals, accepted by the vast majority of the community of Nations in 1948, are observed today in the various national legislations, more over, in the collective and individual conscience. 

Without doubt, we have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go: the right to life, freedom and security of hundreds of millions of our brothers and sisters are still under threat; the dignity and equality of each individual is not always respected, while in our very midst new barriers are being erected for reasons linked to race, religion, political opinion or other convictions.  This is why the common commitment to promote and better define human rights must never cease and efforts to guarantee their respect be intensified”.

During the commemorative congress, Cardinal Bertone in his observations on human rights, highlighted the value of religious freedom as a “fundamental right”;  “the object of this right, is not the intrinsic content of one determined religious faith, but immunity from all coercion,  a security zone capable of guaranteeing the inviolable space in which every believer and the community in which he expresses his beliefs are free to act, without outside pressures from persons, social groups or authorities, whomever they may be. 

It is an evident fact that religion has a direct influence on the internal life of States and the International Community.  Despite this, there are increasing indications of trends that seem to want to exclude religion and the rights connected to it from the possibility of concurring in the building of social order, even in full respect of that pluralism which distinguishes contemporary society”.

Religious freedom, continued the cardinal “risks being confused with freedom of worship, or of being interpreted as an element which belongs to the private sphere, thus being replaced by the indeterminate “right to tolerance”.  And this by ignoring that religious freedom as a fundamental right surpasses religious tolerance, which was solidly anchored to a relative vision of individualism without limits. 

Analogously, it is the current international outlook that allows this tendency to emerge that relegates religion to a cultural dimension or amalgamates it with traditional folklore and practices.  This vision is not far removed from syncretism and forgets that religion, and the rights and freedoms connected to it, is an indicator of the deepest aspirations that a person through his behaviour aims to reach”.

Police seized 14 people, one of whom was planning to carry out a suicide attack in Belgium, the source said. They had contacts at the “highest levels of al Qaeda,” the source said.

The police source said officers “had only 24 hours to act.”

The leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday. It is not clear that the heads of state and government themselves were the target of the planned attack.

The federal prosecutor’s office in Belgium identified one of the suspects as Malika El-Aroud, the widow of one of the men who assassinated a key opponent of the Taliban in Afghanistan two days before September 11, 2001.

El-Aroud’s late husband was one of two men who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, a leader of the Northern Alliance, in a suicide mission ordered by Osama Bin Laden.

Belgian police aimed to prevent El-Aroud, whom the police source called an “al-Qaeda living legend,” from moving to Afghanistan to play a role in the fight against the coalition forces there, the source said.

She is thought to be a recruiter for the anti-Western network, rather than a fighter, the source said.

El-Aroud described the “love” she and her late husband felt for Osama bin Laden in a 2006 interview with CNN.

“Most Muslims love Osama. It was he who helped the oppressed. It was he who stood up against the biggest enemy in the world, the United States. We love him for that,” she told CNN then.

Gazing into CNN’s cameras she said, “It’s the pinnacle in Islam to be the widow of a martyr. For a woman it’s extraordinary.”

“Most of those arrested” Thursday had Belgian passports, the police source said. All 14 are of Moroccan descent.

Three of the suspects had traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to participate in fighting or training camps, and were in contact with an unnamed suspect who had direct links to important al Qaeda figures, police said.

Two of those three returned to Belgium several months ago and started surveillance operations, and the third returned to Belgium a week ago, police said. Intelligence showed that third person was ready to carry out a suicide attack, police said.

Information showed the suspect who was to carry out the attack had received the green light to execute the operation, police said. Investigators noted the suspect had said goodbye to his family “because he wanted to go to paradise with a clear conscience,” police said.

Authorities also found a video meant for the suspect’s family, which police said was probably a farewell tape. They did not find any explosives, the police said in a statement.

The 14 suspects were arrested after police carried out 16 search warrants in Brussels and one in the western Belgian city of Liege. During those searches, police seized computer equipment and documents and the 14 people, including the three who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and 11 others suspected of having given them logistical and material support.

Police said their investigation has been under way intensively since the end of 2007.

The year 2008 witnessed no less than 20 incidents of sectarian violence. In one case only was a man convicted: Khamees Eid of Dafash, Minya, who was accused of murdering the Copt Milad Farag Ibrahim, was handed a suspended sentence of one year in prison despite the fact that he had admitted his crime.

Horrendous list

The villages of Bemha in Ayaat, Giza; Gabal al-Teir in Minya; Bushra and Dashasha in Beni Sweif; al-Rouda in Tamiya, Fayum; as well as the district of Ain-Shams in Cairo were among the places where—between May 2007 and May 2008—Copt’s homes, property, lands, and businesses were attacked, plundered and torched in the wake of rumours that Copts had been attempting to build a church, social services building or, in one case, a cemetery. No criminal was indicted, let alone caught in the first place, nor was any Copt compensated by the State or the community for his losses.

The town of Esna in Upper Egypt, the villages of Dafash and Tayyiba in Minya, al-Nazla and Tamiya in Fayum were also scenes of savage violence in 2008 against Copts, their churches, homes, lands and businesses as the outcome of individual fights or arguments that involved Muslims and Copts.

One case especially stands out, that of the village of Nazla, Fayum, which saw a two-day spate of violence against its Coptic population in June 2008 when the Muslim convert wife of a Muslim man fled her home with her baby boy and it was rumoured she wished to revert to her original Christianity especially that her husband had taken another wife and was abominably maltreating his first [convert] wife.

The wife was brought back by the police two days later, but the Coptic villagers, their church and property had been ravaged. In what is almost an unprecedented incident, the Coptic victims were last week handed cash sums by the government in compensation for their losses.

As for the by-now notorious attack against Abu-Fana monastery in May 2008, during which the monastery and its land were attacked and torched, the monks assaulted and four of them abducted and savagely tortured in order to deny their Christian faith, then thrown in the desert at dawn the following morning, a culprit has yet to be caught.

Ironically, two Coptic contractors who were not present at the site of the attack have ever since been detained despite proof of their innocence and a prosecution order of their release. They are being used to pressure the monks to go back on their testimony regarding the attack.

No rule of law

Kamal Zakher, a lawyer and political analyst, told Watani that sectarian incidents ought to be termed ‘criminal’ incidents instead, since they involve obvious crimes that are punishable by law. The common practice of terming attacks against Copts as ‘sectarian’ incidents or disputes is misleading, he says, since it gives the impression of some sort of confrontation between two more or less equal disputing parties, whereas the truth is that the attack is usually one-sided.

Defenceless Copts are more often than not the victims of violent attacks by the predominantly stronger Muslims who usually far outnumber the Copts. And once matters calm down, the police hardly ever catch the culprits who incited or carried out the criminal act, a practice which defies any rule of law. 

This absence of the rule of law, Mr Zakher says, threatens society at large, and is probably the reason behind the fact that victims frequently refrain from demanding their rights and succumb to traditional unofficial “reconciliation sessions”—which have their origins in rural or tribal community practices—in which they permanently lose their rights. All this goes utterly against the Constitution and the modern civil society.

It is absolutely disturbing, Zakher remarks, that mainstream Muslims have come to believe they ought to take the law in their own hands to ban what they see as detrimental to Islam. This prerogative used to be the turf of extremist Islamists until the 1990s; it has now gained wide public participation. In this context it might be worth noting that the majority of attacks against Copts are incited through mosque microphones through which fiery messages are relayed to Muslims to “defend Islam”.

It does not help at all, Mr Zakher says, that most officials are today phobic about implementing the law to the disregard of religious prejudice. This religious radicalism has, over the past 40 years, infiltrated the executive, legislative, and—worse—the judicial authorities.

The law is rendered impotent, Mr Zakher says, which goes absolutely against the principles of the civil State.     

State injustice

From a strictly human rights perspective, the non-implementation of justice encourages crime, Hafez Abu-Saeda, head of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) says. In the case of crimes against religious minorities, the fact that criminals are never brought to justice sends the message that no punishment awaits offenders.

It is not surprising then, he explains, that sectarian violence against religious minorities and derision of their religions thrive. But this is very dangerous practice, Mr Abu-Saeda says, since it threatens social peace and citizenship rights, and promotes outright discrimination. The law is put aside, he says, and an unholy alliance is secured between State officials and the perpetrators of sectarian attacks.

Such a status works to the detriment of the country since it relays the sense that the State is unjust; it sides with a portion of the populace against another. The double-faced rhetoric and glittering slogans propagated in reconciliation sessions can never create peace while attacks continue to be waged against defenceless victims and no law is implemented or any decisive measure is taken to stop such crimes.

Fanatic climate

Amr al-Shobky, expert at the al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said the absence of real democracy in Egypt is behind the absent justice. The Coptic file, he said, is the subject of bargaining between the security apparatus, the Church and the Azhar, which has worked to foster a fanatic climate in Egypt.

A civil State, Baha’i activist Basma Moussa asserts, depends on the partnership between all sectors of society. The problem is not merely the absent justice, but the defective thoughts that prevail in people’s minds. Punishing one person does not mean that fanaticism will be eradicated, she says. Dr Moussa believes in the importance of opening a new dialogue to achieve better awareness.

William Wissa, who is an Egyptian writer and journalist resident in France, and author of the book al-Kosheh … The Absent Truth believes that the State apparatuses are the main culprit behind the absent justice.

“This is what happened in Kosheh in 1999,” he says. “When the police discovered two Copts were murdered, they headed to the church and shamelessly asked the priest to nominate a person in his parish to be charged with the murder.

When the priest refused, the police detained a number of Copts and subjected them to torture to force a confession, so that no Muslim would be charged with the murder and the crime would not take on a sectarian colour. The crime was fabricated against a young Copt named Shaiboub William and when 15 Copts presented complaints against four officers for torturing them in the police station, no action whatsoever was taken. One year later sectarian violence again erupted in Kosheh; 21 Copts were murdered but no culprit was indicted.

Comprehensive outlook

The fact that attacks against Copts are committed within the collective collaboration of the mob makes it difficult to determine the identity of the criminals or find incriminating evidence against them, Sameh Fawzy, journalist and political researcher says.

Even if the Coptic victims are able to identify the criminals, the latter easily manipulate the testimonies and alibis since the entire mob backs them. This took place in the notorious al-Kosheh sectarian violence on the eve of 2000, in which 21 Copts were killed. Some 100 suspects were brought to trial but none was indicted since the judge said he was not comfortable with the authenticity of the testimonies or evidence, and could thus condemn no-one.

The entire Coptic community went into shock and heartbreak—no justice was exacted and, more important, the green light was given for more sectarian crimes.

The common practice in rural or tribal communities of bringing the sides of a conflict together to attain reconciliation and social peace, Mr Fawzy says, assumes in the first place that both sides are in a way offenders as well as victims. Even though this is not true in case of sectarian crimes, local and security officials insist on resorting to it, which raises the ire of Copts and increases their victimisation.

There is no excuse for excluding the law, Mr Fawzy insists. Egypt is reportedly a civil State with institutions the responsibility of which is to execute the law. No one should be allowed to take the law into his own hands. The positive participation of Copts in public and political life cannot be underscored enough if this principle is to be upheld.

Yet sectarian problems which, predictably, defy simplified solutions, should be tackled comprehensively starting with education at schools and a fair media outlook.

Those reconciliation sessions

Gamal Messaied, a lawyer from Mallawi, Minya, who is defending the offenders in the Abu-Fana attack claims that security officials always attempt to calm matters following sectarian attacks for fear of the incident being used to tarnish Egypt’s international image. He alleges that expatriate Copts fan the flames of sectarianism in Egypt, and insists that reconciliation sessions play a vital role, especially in Upper Egypt and rural areas, in putting an end to conflicts, away from the courts.  

The progressive Islamic intellectual Gamal al-Banna told Watani he believes that sectarian attacks ought to be criminalised, and the criminals should be brought to justice. Reconciliation sessions, he insists, can never put an end to the violence. “This is an erroneous security policy based on the absence of law,” he noted.

But General Fouad Allam, former deputy of the State Security, begs to disagree. There is nothing wrong with the concept of reconciliation sessions, he claims, they are vital in containing collective anger and attaining social peace. They have been successfully conducted for centuries in rural Egypt since they are particularly suited to the Egyptian temperament. The problem is that the manner in which they are held today is a farce and thus achieves nothing. They are merely played up for formal pacification, he says.

Proper reconciliation sessions, General Allam says, ought to be revived, with all the village elders taking part, as well as representatives from the religious institutions and the victims and offenders. Justice should be meted fairly and agreements should be respected.

Reconciliation sessions, General Allam—who has a wide and respected experience in dealing with rural and tribal communities—says, can go a long way towards attaining peace and justice where no incriminating evidence exists to indict particular criminals.

UK: Islamic Group Plasters Church, Surrounding Streets With “Jesus was a Muslim” Stickers one day before Christmas.
 
 
 
ISLAMIC extremists have been condemned after plastering Burton streets with stickers bearing the slogan ‘Jesus was a Muslim’ – one day before Christmas.

The stickers appeared on the morning of Christmas Eve on lampposts in the Horninglow and Shobnall areas of town, and outside religious buildings including St Chad’s Church, in Hunter Street.

The stickers – believed to originate from fundamentalist Muslim group Islam For The UK, as they included the group’s website address – provoked an angry response from people living nearby.

“I think it’s disgusting that someone would do this the day before Christmas, when we are supposed to be spreading racial harmony,” one resident, who asked not to be named, told The Mail. “It’s a real slap in the face for Christians.”

Another resident said: “Apart from anything else, they have made a right mess of the streets – the stickers are not easy to peel off.”

Julia Elliot, churchwarden of St Chad’s Church, said she found the stickers ‘very hurtful and very offensive’, while Ron Clarke, East Staffordshire Borough Council member for the Eton Park ward where the church is located, condemned the extremists responsible.

“I think it’s very disappointing that we’ve got this small element making things difficult, as opposed to everyone else trying to integrate, harmonise and work together,” he said.

“The fact that there are so many of these stickers shows it is a premeditated effort by this group, who are obviously out to create disharmony.

“I hope the people who have done this are caught and dealt with by the appropriate authority.”

On its website, Islam For The UK calls for Islamic Shari’ah law to be implemented in Britain, and condemns those Muslims who take part in Christmas celebrations.

Under the heading ‘Christmas – The pathway to hellfire’, an article on the website says observance of Christmas by Muslims will ‘lead to hellfire – a punishment which is 70 times hotter than the fires of this world’.

It claims any celebration of Christmas is prohibited, including sending Christmas cards, attending festive events or wishing someone ‘Merry Christmas’.

Chief Superintendent Mick Harrison, commander of Staffordshire Police’s Trent Valley division, told The Mail: “Police are aware that a large number of stickers have been placed on buildings and street furniture in the Horninglow area.

“Action is being taken to have these stickers removed and we are carrying out an investigation. We would appeal for help and information from the community.

“Although we are extremely disappointed this has happened, we are confident local residents will support our view that having and showing respect for other people and their beliefs is at the very heart of a strong community, and that incidents such as this will not deflect from the excellent relationship people have developed over very many years.”

Anyone with information is asked to telephone Burton police on 0300 1234455 or Crimestoppers anonymously 0800 555111.

Representatives of Burton’s Princess Street Mosque declined to comment on the matter when contacted by The Mail.

Mapping Shariah in America: Knowing the Enemy seeks by the end of next year to document in arigorous, scientific fashion the controversial premise that the more a mosque or community of Muslims adheres to Shariah, or Islamic law, the greater its threat to U.S. national security.

“That’s exactly, that’s what the data are showing,” Gaubatz told WND, who has charted about 100 of the estimated 2,300 mosques his team has identified across the country. “The more adherent you are to Shariah, the more likely you are going to find the material to back that up at the mosque.”

For the observant Muslim, Islamic law is an all-encompassing system that dictates every aspect of life, from food and clothing to the duty to participate in making the religion dominant over the entire world.

At the Islamic Center of South Jersey in Palmyra, where three of the Muslims in the Fort Dix case regularly worshipped and a fourth prayed a few times, Gaubatz found a strict, Shariah-adherent leadership that eagerly distributed jihadist materials supportive of seminal Shariah proponents such as Sayid Abul Maududi, the founder of the radical Pakistani party Jamaat-e-Islami, and Syed Qutb, whose ideas shaped al-Qaida

“What is being overlooked in the Fort Dix case is where the suspects worshipped,” he said. “Were they Shariah adherent? Who is the imam, what materials were at the mosque? They came up with the idea to attack Fort Dix for some reason. How and why?”

Using a sophisticated matrix developed by Gaubatz and his colleagues, including a former jihadist, the Jersey mosque was ranked an 8, with 10 being the greatest threat and 1 the lowest.

In the study, Gaubatz and his team – which includes people of different faiths and nationalities, including Muslims – employ 62 different factors to assess a mosque’s compliance to Shariah.

“We don’t rely on talking to anyone about anything, because if we did, you’re going to get some people giving you half-answers and some not answering at all,” he said.

The focus is on the observed facts, he said, such as how many of the women wear a hijab, how many wear Western-style clothing and the type of threads in an imam’s garment.

The team recognizes the distinctions between the Shiite branch of Islam and the four primary schools of thought within the Sunni branch. But Gaubatz says those factors are not scored in the study. The premise is that all streams and sects of Islam recognize a form of Shariah. His primary concern, for the purpose of assessing the threat to the U.S., is the mosque’s degree of adherence.

Of interest to most Americans, of course, is the threat of violent jihad. But Gaubatz notes there are two other forms of jihad at work in the U.S. to advance Islam, the pen and the tongue.

“We focus too much on why we haven’t had an attack since 2001 in the United States, because the pen and the tongue right now are winning here,” Gaubatz said. “Why would you go for number three, the physical jihad, if you’re already achieving goals one and two?

Strict adherence

The significance of the Mapping Shariah project is underscored in the conflicting message to the public by a trustee at the Islamic Center of South Jersey, Ismail Badat, who insisted Muslims in the U.S. promote only peace.

Badat said the purpose of the emergency town hall meeting in the wake of the Fort Dix charges in May 2007 was “to clarify for our American friends and neighbors the fundamental beliefs, teachings and practices of Islam, and to make it clear that Muslims here, who are also Americans, do not in any way sanction the forms of violent and offensive behavior which have recently attained prominence in the media.”

But Gaubatz found evidence to the contrary not only at the New Jersey mosque but at mosques related to other high-profile cases.

He personally conducted the mapping of the mosque tied to the Muslim who went on a shooting rampage at Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square mall last year, and he found it ranked high on his scale.

In Blacksburg, Va., Gaubatz met the imam who was asked to pray at the nationally televised service for slain students at Virginia Tech last year and discovered he leads a Shariah-compliant mosque that backs the genocidal Islamist regime in Sudan.

The imam clearly did not like Virginia Tech, Gaubatz said, and handed him material by Maududi and the Saudi regime, which spends billions of dollars spreading the strict Wahhibist interpretation of Islam around the world.

“He said, if I want to be pure Muslim, and a true Muslim, study these. Look at these,” Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz and his team gave its highest rating, a 10, to the Brooklyn mosque of Imam Siraj Wahhaj.

Wahhaj, a former board member of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, “is in my opinion the most dangerous person in the U.S. in regards to our national security,” Gaubatz said.

He has documented Wahhaj declaring in a lecture, “Muslims in America are the most strategically placed Muslims in the world. The U.S. government can’t bomb them.”

Gaubatz said his week-long assessment of Wahhaj’s mosque also uncovered violent material calling for the death of law enforcement officers and instructing Muslims who commit a crime how to go underground.

Wahhaj also has called for recruiting gang members to help carry out jihad.

“Give them Islam, then send them back to the streets with UZIs,” the imam said, according to Gaubatz.

Gaubatz contends many Islamic groups and organizations take on a legal and peaceful veneer in English-speaking settings but often preach quietly in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu “a very violent and anti-American jihad.”

Virtually all Islamic leaders in the U.S. have been particularly careful since the 9/11 attacks about what they say publicly, Gaubatz said. But many Shariah-compliant mosques and schools distribute materials supporting or calling for violent jihad. In a widely distributed DVD, for example, an Islamic scholar in the U.S., Ahmad Sakr, declares in a pre-2001 sermon, “Do not follow the laws of the U.S. Constitution, do not follow the congressmen and other U.S. leaders, they will all go to hell, follow Shariah law.”

Gaubatz pointed out Wahhaj sells old, pre-2001 lectures.

“He says nothing off-line in any of his lectures now,” said Gaubatz. “But he says if you want to understand pure Islam, to do the right thing, this is what you do, you take from this one (lecture) and this one and this one – and they are all prior to 2001.”

Gaubatz has spent a considerable amount of his time investigating CAIR, which has enjoyed access to the White House, the State Department, Homeland Security and other branches of government despite evidence of its ties to Hamas and other radical groups.

Gaubatz noted CAIR has a campaign to put Shariah-promoting materials into American libraries.

“I’ve gone to several hundred public libraries and this material is in there,” he said. “People don’t realize what it is until you start looking at the author, and it came from Saudi Arabia, sent to CAIR. And CAIR is putting it into our public libraries.”

As WND reported, Gaubatz publicly served CAIR leaders in November with legal notice of a lawsuit on behalf of Muslims who claim the group victimized them in a fraud scheme involving a lawyer who is unqualified to practice.

Gaubatz, a U.S. State Department-trained Arabic linguist and counter-terrorism specialist, has more than two decades of experience in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. He was deployed to Nasiriyah, Iraq, in 2003, where he collected intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and espionage.

The mapping project’s administrator and legal adviser, David Yerushalmi, is an expert on Islamic law and its intersection with Islamic terrorism and national security. He also serves as general counsel and policy adviser to the Center for Security Policy, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-administration official.

The mapping project is sponsored by a group formally established by Yerushalmi in January 2006, the Society of Americans for National Existence, or SANE.

Robert J. Loewenberg, the project’s senior police director, is the founder and president of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, a Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem-based think tank specializing in geo-strategic, security and political analysis on Western relations with the Middle and Near East, and the former Soviet Union.

Minimizing the threat

Gaubatz points out federal authorities have attempted to track financial transactions between U.S. Muslims and foreign terrorist entities, but he says there is no evidence that a systematic study like Mapping Shariah has been carried out.

His website explains: “If we do not know the organizational structures of these organizations and who provides the religious and political instruction, we will never have a satisfactory picture of the threat from jihad.”

Already, according to Gaubatz, his team has received positive feedback from local law enforcement authorities. The ultimate aim, he said, is to “assist law enforcement in focusing their manpower and resources to the areas with the highest ratings.”

FBI agents on the ground have been positive, he said, but once the information “gets up the chain, then it just disappears.”

“There’s no action taken. It becomes political,” Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz said his group has been told by many sympathetic Muslims that to minimize the threat of another attack, authorities should ask foreigners seeking entry into the U.S. if they agree with Shariah.

“If they agree, according to the Muslims who have told us this, then they should probably not even be given entry here,” he said.

“It’s so easy. You can’t agree with Shariah law and say that you are peaceful,” Gaubatz continued. “You can’t do it. Now there are Muslims in the United States who do. They say, we don’t agree with Shariah law, we don’t want Shariah law. But then, to the pure Muslim, they are not Muslim.”

Some Muslims want to reform Islam, he said, and retain only peaceful elements.

“That’s fine, but then you are not pure Muslim,” Gaubatz said.

Similar to Christianity or Judaism, he argued, you can decide to adhere to some of the Ten Commandments and reject others, and form a religion based on that belief, but it’s not Christianity or Judaism.

“What we are looking at is pure Islam,” he said. “That’s where you have strict adherence to all factors of Shariah.”

The plan

Gaubatz and his team have completed the first two phases of the project: to identify all of the known mosques, Islamic day schools, political organizations and social clubs in the U.S., and to conduct a pilot to test field protocols, methodology and assumptions.

Phase Three is to identify the strain of Shariah taught or preached at each locale and the adherence to Shariah by the leadership and the members. Phase Four will incorporate the data into a central data base and apply link and data analysis technology, which permits a thorough analysis of interrelationships. Phase Five is an annual data update and re-analysis.

Gaubatz said nobody really knows exactly where all the mosques are, because some move from month to month, and the majority are in residential areas, in homes. The contact number often is the cellphone of the person who happens to be leading at the time.