World Net Daily asks an important question:
Alleged Army terrorist counseled 48 Muslims in chaplain's absence
The suspected Fort Hood terrorist served as a lay Muslim leader running Islamic services on the base in the absence of the Muslim chaplain, WND has learned. He also mentored at least one young convert to Islam whose parents worked at the sprawling Texas post.
Hasan's religious activities raise the specter that others may have been radicalized, investigators worry. There are nearly 50 Muslim soldiers serving on the base.
Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly shot 46 fellow soldiers and security guards and murdered 13 in the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11.
Witnesses say the devout Muslim officer jumped up on a desk and shouted, "Allahu akbar!" – Allah is greatest – before opening fire and spraying more than 100 bullets inside a crowded building where troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
"He was preparing for a martyrdom operation," a U.S. Army intelligence official said. "There is no evidence that this was an issue of an emotional aberration. It was well planned."
Not long after Hasan transferred to the base earlier this year, he sat down with Muslim chaplain Maj. Khalid Shabazz to discuss carrying out Shabazz's "vision" at the Fort Hood chapel when Shabazz was away. Shabazz helped lead Islamic services at the base's Ironhorse Chapel, which serves 48 Muslim soldiers.
"I found him to be very pleasant," Shabazz said of Hasan.
Shabazz, who recently left the base, met privately with Hasan several times.
Before his posting at Fort Hood, Shabazz ministered to Muslim inmates at the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was known as a "sympathizer" among military police. Shabazz scolded MPs for making noise while al-Qaida detainees were praying.
"I would have to go down and chastise those guys," he recalled in a 2008 interview with NPR, "telling them, 'Hey man, those guys are praying. Have the decency not to play the national anthem and agitate them while they're praying.'"
The NPR interview was posted last year on the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the FBI says is a front group for Hamas terrorists. (Following CAIR's blacklisting by the Justice Department as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, the FBI last year cut off formal ties to the group.)
Shabazz, who says it's tough trying to be a good Muslim and a good U.S. soldier, serves as a member of a chaplaincy steering committee for the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA.
Federal prosecutors recently named ISNA – a sister organization to CAIR – as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history. ISNA, they say, like CAIR is a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, parent of Hamas and al-Qaida.... (read more)
