The Chicago Tribune printed a story on March 12 dismissing the Clarion Project‘s reporting on an Islamist group in Oak Brook, Illinois named the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The Chicago Tribune could have found the truth about NAIT’s Islamism by checking out a critical source: Its own archives.
The article was published in reaction to a segment on The O’Reilly Factor in January that featured the Clarion Project‘s research, including a map that shows an Islamist organization in Oak Brook, Illinois. The organization is the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and you can see our fully-documented profile of the group here.
The Chicago Tribune article implies that the Clarion Project was evasive when questioned about NAIT, reporting that Oak Brook Village Manager Rick Ginex emailed me to inform me that the FBI found that no extremist group exists in the area.
I received no such email from Ginex nor did I receive a message from anyone identifying himself as being from the Chicago Tribune. Neither seems to have taken the logical first step of searching our website, where they would have easily found the widely-known facts about NAIT.
The irony in this reporting is that it was this same Chicago Tribune that published a blockbuster series of articles about Islamist groups in America, including the organization in question.
On September 19, 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an intriguing article titled “A Rare Look at Secretive Brotherhood in America.”
The expose is about the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood including Ahmed Elkadi, who led it from 1984 to 1994. The Brotherhood is an Islamist extremist group rejected by many Muslims and banned as a terrorist group in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It deceptively presents itself as a moderate movement that rejects terrorism.
In fact, the Tribune itself writes in its 2004 expose:
“While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic. The group also champions martyrdom and jihad, or holy war, as a means of self-defense and has provided the philosophical underpinnings for Muslim militants worldwide.”
The Tribune report says that Elkadi served as president of NAIT and that groups set up by the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood promote Islamist texts that many Muslims in the area found objectionable.
On February 8, 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an article titled, “Hard-liners Won Battle for Bridgeview Mosque.”
It describes a battle between Islamists and anti-Islamist moderates for control of the Mosque Foundation, which was brought under the control of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network.
A turning point in that battle came when the deed was handed over to NAIT in 1981 despite how “the old-timers did not want the mosque turned over to an outside group with a growing reputation for fundamentalism.”
One of the Muslim moderates interviewed by the Chicago Tribune recalled it “was like a broken heart” when that happened. These Muslims tried to sign up new members in order to vote out the Islamist leaders before their mosque went to the radicals.
One flier that was sent around as part of the campaign warned that “the essence of NAIT is the [Muslim] Brotherhood.” It accused the Brotherhood of using “deliberate and distorted means of dividing the community and tearing down what we have been attempting to build for one-half of a century.”
Another flier from the opposition declared that their faith “is the Islam of flexibility and commitment to faith rather than fundamentalism and tension.”
The women’s group at the mosque responded to the signing of the deed to NAIT with a lawsuit accusing the leaders of having deceived their way into power. It did not work and, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “the hard-liners were now firmly in control.” The rest of the article makes it clear that these hardliners have not lost their grip.
The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood listed NAIT as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in a once-secret explanatory memorandum from 1991. The objective of these organizations, according to the memorandum, is to “work in America as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within…"
The March 12 article by the Tribune quotes Oak Brook Police Chief James Kruger as saying, “They [the FBI] said it is a legitimate place of business; there are no threats or other concerns in the village.”
The FBI is a branch of the Justice Department and the Justice Department designated NAIT as an unindicted co-conspirator in a trial related to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s secret financing of the Hamas terrorist group. NAIT is listed in section VII of a Justice Department’s document submitted to the Dallas district court as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
A federal judge upheld the designation in 2009 because of “ample” evidence linking NAIT and related organizations to the Hamas-financing scheme. Federal prosecutors noted that money for Hamas was routed through a NAIT bank account.
Two declassified FBI reports show that an informant inside the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood was warning about NAIT as far back as 1987-1988.
The first documents that the confidential informant is “convinced that this organization has a secret agenda which includes the spread of the Islamic Revolution to all non-Islamic governments in the world which does include the United States.”
The second documents the intelligence that NAIT is receiving a flood of foreign financing and its leaders “have also indicated their support of terrorism in the U.S. to further the revolution.” It says that NAIT’s “support of jihad” includes the distribution of anti-Western propaganda and organizing political rallies.
There is plenty of more documentation of NAIT’s Islamist extremism in our profile, but some of the best news reports exposing NAIT came from the Chicago Tribune itself. They are free for anyone to access—obviously including Chicago Tribune reporters themselves.
