Investigative Project on Terrorism executive director Steven Emerson claims that radical Islam is alive and well in America - thanks to the tacit cooperation of government agencies which embrace the very groups they should be investigating.

Steven Emerson. 'The sad reality is that the vast majority of institutional organizations in the hierarchical Muslim spectrum represent the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabis or the Salafists. It's a microcosm of the Muslim world.'
Photo: Courtesy Photo

Steven Emerson's delicate delivery belies the pungency - and punch - of his words. Whether this is the result of having heard it all and said it all in every possible forum is not clear. In fact, delving beneath the surface of radical Islamic activity, only to discover additional layers with each dig, could just as easily have the opposite effect on one's demeanor. Particularly when the information being uncovered is pooh-poohed in some fashion. Or when its disseminator is dismissed as alarmist at best, and anti-Muslim at worst.

But Emerson - an investigative journalist turned NGO director - doesn't appear to be perturbed on a personal level. It's the public response to what he claims is a pernicious network of terrorist cells within the United States, fronted as humanitarian organizations, that gets to him.

"The US government, the media and the intelligentsia are witting and unwitting enablers of radical Islam," says Emerson, a best-selling author, whose books include American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002) and Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (2006), and creator of the prize-winning documentary film Jihad in America (1994).

Here earlier this month to speak at the seventh annual conference of the International Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Emerson, who founded and heads the Washington DC-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, gave The Jerusalem Post an overview of the situation he believes will only really be solved when Islam undergoes a genuine reformation.

In an hour-long interview at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv on the eve of the conference, Emerson, 50, punctuated this sentiment by pointing to the Dolphinarium across the street - the site of the 2001 suicide bombing that left 21 people dead and more than 100 wounded.

Suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem, 2001. Ahlam Tamimi, who drove the suicide bomber to the restaurant, was slated to receive a medal sanctioned by PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

"What we're looking at," he says, poker-face intact, "is the marker of where 'lesser jihad' was carried out against young Israelis at a discotheque."

What is the purpose of conferences on counterterrorism? Do they have any effect?
Conferences are ubiquitous - mainly good for networking and making contacts. In the intelligence community, the best way of developing information and getting new ideas is to meet people who do different things in the same area. And conferences also bring in revenue for the organizers.

What about meeting people with different views on terrorism and how to combat it? These conferences, both in Israel and abroad, seem to have such a wide range of ideological slants as to render them useless.
Oh yes. Take the Aspen Institute's annual terrorism symposia, for instance. There participants believe that Prozac and therapy should be dispensed to terrorists. It's so "Kumbaya" that one would gag if forced to attend. It all comes down to the Harvard University view of terrorism, according to which terrorists carry out aggression because they are "humiliated." It's the pseudo-psycho view that offers justification for the committing of violent acts, and ends up blaming the victim rather than the terrorist. This is ridiculous, of course. I feel humiliated when I get a ticket; but that doesn't mean I get to shoot a cop. The whole field became a gravy train in Washington for many people after 9/11, thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars dispensed by the US government to think tanks and academic centers.

These centers are overwhelmingly anti-American and anti-Israeli, and thus full of pro-Islamist ideologues or just plain charlatans. My organization does not take a dime of government money, so we are free to call the shots as we see them.

How do you see General Wesley Clark, the keynote speaker at the ICT conference this year, for example?
Clark is not someone for whom I have much respect, since he's been championing the notion that we should be talking to Iran and Syria, effectively rewarding them for their terrorist activities. He has also spoken about being nicer to terrorists. In fact, in 2004, when he was running for president, he sent a tape of an address to a radical Muslim convention, greeting participants as though they were members of the Rotary Club. Now, this was a combined group of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America, both of which have long been affiliated with radical Islamic groups, and whose previous conventions have been full of invectives for the US and Israel, replete with calls for jihad. Had Clark cared to do any due diligence, he would have discovered the extremist ideologies of these groups. But either he didn't bother to investigate, or he simply bought into the propaganda that these two groups were "moderate."

Even after I pointed out these groups' ulterior radical agenda in a debate I had with him on cable television about the appropriateness of his speaking before them, he continued to perpetrate the charade that all he was doing was engaging in "outreach" to innocent Muslim groups.

The new book and documentary film I'm working on - The Grand Deception - is about how the US government, the media and the intelligentsia are witting and unwitting enablers of radical Islam, by accepting front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood or for Hamas as credible and legitimate. This is particularly egregious at the highest levels of the government - such as the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department and the FBI - who meet and greet groups they should be investigating, not embracing. This sends a terrible signal to genuine Muslim moderates and the Muslim rank-and-file, reinforcing their sense that it is the radical groups who are respected by the government.

There is a criminal trial presently under way in Texas of a suspected Hamas charity. The revelations that have emerged in the trial - probably the most striking findings since those that came out in the 1949 Alger Hiss trials - are that the Muslim Brotherhood had secretly set up shop in the US under the cover of "charitable" organizations, with the specific purpose of waging jihad from within and subverting the United States until it became a Muslim country. Yet, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published these findings.