The FBI will ignore Hamas-linked attacks now, as it has in the past

FBI Director Christopher Wray went before Congress this week to address concerns that the October 7 massacre by Hamas, and Israel’s subsequent defensive war in Gaza, could result in Hamas-linked attacks here at home.

Wray attempted to convince Congress that the bureau was doing everything it could during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Monday:

We assess that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration, the likes of which we haven't seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago. In just the past few weeks, multiple foreign terrorist organizations have called for attacks against Americans and the West.

Wray’s statement should fill neither Congress nor the American public with any sense of relief, given the FBI’s track record. The truth is, Hamas-linked terrorists have already conducted attacks on U.S. soil, and not only has the FBI failed to prevent them, but the bureau refused to identify the terror connection after the attack.

The first thing to understand is that Hamas is the armed Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is an international Islamist network in which national branches are loyal to the main Shura council. Historically, when Muslim Brothers (including Hamas members) change countries, they became members of the Muslim Brotherhood chapter in the country where they reside but typically also continue to work on behalf of their home country causes abroad.

In the 1980s, Muslim Brotherhood leadership commanded every chapter to create “Palestine Committees” to support jihad against Israel and to make up the support network for Hamas. Some of these organizations remain active today, while others have changed names and identities but remain filled with individuals affiliated with the Palestine Committee.

This means the Hamas network in the United States does not consist primarily of “sleeper cells” of terrorist agents who were smuggled across the border. Rather, it is made up of “U.S. persons” — green-card holders, naturalized U.S. citizens, and even second and third generations of U.S.-born citizens who were raised and trained in Muslim Brotherhood-run mosques and who have participated in Muslim Brotherhood organizations.

The FBI does not take any of this seriously.

Consider that in 2015, jihadist terrorist Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez attacked a U.S. Army recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, killing four U.S. Marines and wounding a police officer before being killed. It took the FBI months to reach the conclusion that Abdulazeez was “self-radicalized” on the internet. At no point did the bureau raise the possibility that Abdulazeez may have been indoctrinated at his local mosque, the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga, despite the fact that the deed to the ISGC’s property was owned by the North American Islamic Trust, which the FBI had itself linked to terrorism in a 2008 case. A federal judge said the case provided “ample evidence” to link the organization to Hamas. At one time the NAIT held the deeds to one in five American mosques.

Additionally, the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga had held public fundraising meetings where the society cited the late Hamas financier and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and described the funding in jihadist terms. Abdulazeez’s father had reportedly been on the terror watch list but was later removed for reasons that are unclear.

Abdulazeez was also reportedly a fan of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda ideologue who was previously the imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Northern Virginia, which was itself founded by Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood leaders and which federal law enforcement described as “a front for Hamas operatives.”

Then there is the Muslim Students Association, the first organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, called a “terror factory” by investigators and an incubator for radicalism by the New York Police Department. Dozens of MSA members have been convicted of terrorism or terror support since the beginning of the Global War on Terror in 2001. Yet it remains a functional and respected organization on every U.S. college campus and in many public high schools.

The FBI did not express any interest in looking deeper into the case of Alton Nolen, an American-born convert to Islam who beheaded one of his co-workers in 2014. Nolen converted to Islam at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, which was founded by Mufid Abdelqader, a man whom the FBI convicted of material support for Hamas. Abdelqader was one of the original participants in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and a relative of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. The former imam of ISGOC was Suhaib Webb, a man with curious ties to the 9/11 hijackers who later became an imam for the Islamic Society of Boston.

The Islamic Society of Boston was the home of the Boston Marathon bombing perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, as well as a who’s who of Islamic terrorists. It was founded by a Muslim Brotherhood leader named Abdurahman Alamoudi, later convicted of financing al Qaeda, and included among its trustees the aforementioned Yusuf Al Qaradawi. Asked by former U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) whether the FBI was aware that the mosque was founded by an al Qaeda financier and had ties to Hamas, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller could only sputter that the bureau had done “outreach” there prior to the attack.

It turns out that “outreach” has been the government’s primary strategy for dealing with Hamas in the United States. Immediately after 9/11, President George W. Bush had his picture taken with the previously mentioned Alamoudi and with Nihad Awad, a vocal supporter of Hamas and a member of the Palestine Committee. Awad was a founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, established by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas, something the FBI was well aware of when he appeared behind the president.

In 2016, “outreach” only worsened with the Obama administration’s implementation of Countering Violent Extremism. The program eliminated the understanding of terrorism as an ideologically motivated tool of political violence and reduced it to a personality trait, which conflated hate crimes, terrorism, and all other violent crimes as “extremism.” Individuals linked to terrorism support have even played a role in designing and implementing CVE programs.

CVE in part explains why the FBI has ignored threats from Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists but has instead focused on parents critical of school boards and created a new category of “extremists” that, according to an unnamed FBI official in a Newsweek report, “refers to MAGA.”

When Hamas supporters launch attacks in the United States — and you may be certain they will — they will not do it in the name of Hamas or wearing a Hamas insignia. In all likelihood, they won’t sneak across the U.S. border at all. Instead, they will have been raised from childhood in Muslim Brotherhood-founded, Hamas-supporting institutions located in U.S. cities and on college campuses.

And when it happens, Christopher Wray and the FBI will say that there was “no nexus to terrorism” and that the individual terrorist was a “homegrown extremist,” radicalized “on the internet.”

As they have many times before.