(Full disclosure: I work as a national security researcher for CAN.)
Unfortunately for MOA, the tape in question was made by members of the American Congress for Truth, not the Christian Action Network.
The MOA is reacting to CAN’s pressure by trying to silence the organization and label them as anti-Muslim hate-mongers that are part of an evil Zionist plot.
The legal notice denounces the ACT members’ characterization of MOA’s isolated communities as “compounds” and “training camps” as being “false and defamatory” but does not deny that paramilitary training takes place at these sites.
In December, CAN published a YouTube video showing excerpts of two tapes provided to me as the national security researcher for the organization by a confidential law enforcement source where MOA’s female recruits are seen receiving guerilla warfare training at their headquarters in New York called “Islamberg.”
They are seen practicing the scaling of fabricated walls, combat involving knives and swords including throat slitting, moving with stealth, marching in military formation and fatigue, and simulating ambushes culminating in firing guns into a lake.
The second tape explains the meaning behind this training. Two leaders from MOA are shown declaring the United States a Muslim country and warning that they “will not stand idly by and let our country be destroyed” and they will defend it from both foreign and domestic enemies targeting Muslims.
Islamberg responded to this latest tape with a bizarre video of their own on their YouTube channel accusing CAN of “media terrorism” by using a “digitally-created Muslim hate video.”
The legal notice also tries to discredit an earlier tape uncovered by CAN showing MOA’s Pakistan-based leader, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, giving his recruits firearms training and instruction on detonating explosives, killing guards, hijacking vehicles, and other aspects of the jihadi trade.
On the tape, Gilani is seen telling his viewers that if they are interested in his “advanced training courses in Islamic military warfare,” they can contact his International Quranic Open University offices in Pakistan, the U.S. or Canada.
The MOA lawyer that wrote the notice claims that the offer to train Muslims was “computer generated” and says that everyone on this tape are part of the Kashmir Liberation Front and none are Americans. This latest video showing training at Islamberg, which was released after the legal notice was published, easily rebuts any denial that training is being offered to Americans.
On November 27, eight days after the threat to sue CAN was written, the MOA website published a rant by Sheikh Gilani that only served to further expose his extremism.
He describes CAN as a “Zionist front group” that are “mere pawns of a larger, futile plot to destroy Christian-Muslim unity.” He compares CAN’s campaign against MOA to his perceived Israeli manipulation of the U.S. government to get it to invade Iraq and make it “a virtual slave of the Zionist World Order.”
He also claims that Israel was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that “evil, inhumane masterminds” carried out the 9/11 attacks and blamed it on Osama Bin Laden and other Saudi “activists” to facilitate the invasion of Afghanistan.
He continues, saying “they sent Daniel Pearl to target me.” Gilani has previously claimed that Pearl was part of an assassination plot against him and that he is still alive. Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded, and although Gilani was detained and released and not charged with involvement, these statements establish a motive for wanting Pearl dead.
His anti-Semitic extremism really shines through when he discusses Jews. “…I have never seen, in the whole of my life or even in the past thousand years, a Jew who will tell the truth,” he says. In one of his poems, Gilani also described Jews as “an example of human Satans.”
Gilani claims that he will be succeeded by the Mahdi, the messianic figure of Islam, who he claims to have met and even introduced to some of his disciples. “He is in his thirties and will appear to all at the age of forty,” Gilani writes, adding that the Mahdi will declare himself during the hajj in Mecca and that Jesus will arrive at the Dome of the Rock to unite Muslims and Christians after his appearance.
He also says that he knows and has met Jesus in the first heaven. He finishes with saying that Muslims are not afraid of death and love martyrdom more than the Zionists “love their gold, jewelry, women and wine.”
The members of MOA believe Sheikh Gilani speaks on behalf of Allah and follow his every word.
He says he is a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. On the propaganda tape received by CAN, one of the MOA speakers says that they follow Sheikh Gilani as Catholics follow the Pope. With thousands of followers in the U.S. ready to act on Gilani’s single command, we cannot give into the threat of a legal jihad to silence us from warning about this threat.