80% of U.S. mosques are complicit in promoting violence.

Islamist Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” We are witnessing the truth of his remarks.

Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques are just some examples of places where individuals go to worship, pray, learn, and fellowship. However, there might be more going on at the local mosque or Islamic center than just songs of praise. These places can also serve as incubators for radicalization for Islamists and jihadists. The Muslim Brotherhood has already given us an idea of the role that the mosque/Islamic center plays in their plan to establish an Islamic Caliphate with the implementation of Sharia law.

The Muslim Brotherhood in North America is committed to its strategy of “civilization jihad” – a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated.” Through its process of settlement, the Islamic center plays a pivotal part for the Brotherhood as revealed in the Center for Security Policy’s An Explanatory Memorandum: From the Archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, which states:

The center we seek is the one which constitutes the “axis” of our Movement, the “perimeter” of the circle of our work, our “balance center”, the “base” for our rise and our “Dar al-Arqam” to educate us, prepare us and supply our battalions in addition to being the “niche” of our prayers. This is in order for the Islamic center to turn – in action not in words – into a seed “for a small Islamic society” which is a reflection and a mirror to our central organizations. The center ought to turn into a “beehive” which produces sweet honey. Thus, the Islamic center would turn into a place for study, family, battalion, course, seminar, visit, sport, school, social club, women gathering, kindergarten for male and female youngsters, the office of the domestic political resolution, and the center for distributing our newspapers, magazines, books and our audio and visual tapes. In brief we say: we would like for the Islamic center to become “The House of Dawa”’ and “the general center” in deeds first before name. As much as we own and direct these centers at the continent level, we can say we are marching successfully towards the settlement of Dawa’ in this country.

Even though Dawah is a form of Islamic proselytizing, it can also be used as a cover to spread radical Islamic literature at the mosque. Perspectives on Terrorism, a peer-reviewed journal, takes a deeper look into what’s going on in America’s mosques and found some starting results of the prevalence of material advocating violence – highlighted in a 2011 report titled Sharia Adherence Mosque Survey: Correlations between Sharia Adherence and Violent Dogma in U.S. Mosques (The Middle East Quarterly “originally published the results of this study in its Summer 2011 edition”). The abstract reads:

A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers. Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all. Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts. In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts. The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques. Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad. The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises.

The fact that over 80% of U.S. mosques are complicit in promoting some level of violence is alarming to say the least. These results fly in the face of the typical media narrative that tries to make most ISIS supporters out to be “lone-wolf” terrorists that get radicalized via the internet. While the internet does play a role, there are usually deeper networks that extend to the mosque/Islamic center. In the U.S. there are a number of mosques/Islamic centers that have produced jihadists such as the Islamic Society of Boston, the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga, and Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab among others.

There is also a connection between radical mosques and rogue foreign funders. Even France has admitted to this recently when French Prime Minister Manuel Valls proposed the idea of a moratorium on foreign entities funding mosques. France has had problems with foreign funded mosques such as those backed by Saudi petrodollars that allegedly preach Wahhabism (similar to Salafism) – one opened in Nice a couple weeks prior to the recent truck attack. Kosovo also has been in the news lately in regards to their foreign influenced jihadist problem when an Iranian cleric was charged “with financing terrorism and money laundering through an ostensible nongovernmental organization that worked to spread Tehran’s version of Shi’ite Islam across Europe[.]” It’s reported that after the Kosovo War ended in 1999 Iranian charities created schools and mosques – seeking to spread the Islamic Revolution in Kosovo. Besides Iran, Islam in Kosovo is influenced by Saudi Arabia. According to a New York Times article from May of 2016, “Kosovo now has over 800 mosques, 240 of them built since the war and blamed for helping indoctrinate a new generation in Wahhabism.” Furthermore, “Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2015 reveal a system of funding for mosques, Islamic centers, and Saudi-trained clerics that spans Asia, Africa and Europe. In New Delhi alone, 140 Muslim preachers are listed as on the Saudi Consulate’s payroll.”

Politicians are either ignorant or foolish not to realize that mosques/Islamic centers are different than other places of worship; therefore, mosques that teach violence shouldn’t be afforded the same religious protections as everyone else. As we have seen, a significant portion of mosques in the U.S. are not just allowing the spread of Islamism but also violent literature that has inspired numerous terrorists to join the cause of jihad (problem isn’t exclusive to the U.S.). Since much of the media is ignoring this politically inconvenient truth it’s time for citizens to educate our elected officials on these issues to ensure our country’s national security. We must act now!