The Islamist government of Turkey is building a 15-acre, $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland. Prime Minister Erdogan visited the site on May 15 in a ceremony that was attended by the leaders of two groups linked to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Also present was the Maryland Secretary of State, representing Maryland Governor and likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, Martin O’Malley.
The mega-mosque is called the Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center and, according to the Muslim Link, it “will likely become the largest and most striking examples of Islamic architecture in the western hemisphere” when it is finished in 2014. The Muslim Link explicitly says it is “a project of the government of Turkey.”
On May 15, Prime Minister Erdogan spoke to hundreds of people at the construction site and said he’d come back for the opening ceremony next year. He warned the audience that there are groups promoting “Islamophobia,” branding potential critics as paranoid bigots. Erdogan recently said that “Islamophobia” and Zionism are equivalent to fascism and anti-Semitism, saying they are a “crime against humanity.”
On the same trip to the U.S., Erdogan brought a special guest: The father of one of the Islamists killed in Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish flotilla that tried to break Israel’s legal blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Erdogan reportedly wanted to him to meet President Obama.
The site will have five buildings, including a mosque “constructed using 16th century Ottoman architecture that can hold 750 worshipers.” The site’s design reinforces concerns that Turkey wants to restore its glory days as the Ottoman Empire.
The event was also attended by the leaders of two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities.
The first, Naeem Baig, is the president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo, which says its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” lists ICNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” It even refers to meetings with ICNA with talk about a merger.
ICNA is linked to the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and its conferences feature radical speakers. A former ICNA president was recently indicted for horrific war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 succession from Pakistan – the torture and murder or 18 political opponents.
The second official from a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity that attended the event was Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA and several of its components are listed as U.S. Muslim Brotherhood fronts in the same 1991 Brotherhood memo. ISNA was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, dubbed the largest Islamic terror-funding trial in the history of the U.S. Federal prosecutors in the case also listed ISNA as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity.
The Turkish government has been quietly spreading its influence in the U.S., but this is the most blatant example. In October, The Clarion Project reported on the growing ties between the Turkish government and Native American tribes. With Congress’ help, thousands of Turkish contractors and their families may be flooding into America’s heartland and settling in semi-autonomous zones of the Native Americans, well out of the reach of American authorities.
In November, The Clarion Project reported on the Turkish Fethullah Gulen school network in America, which is currently under FBI investigation. The network is the largest charter school network in America. It is the same network that has been a critical component in Turkey’s regression from a secular democracy into an Islamic state.
Islamist-Watch.org‘s director Marc Fink has said that the Erdogan’s AKP party is “often associated with Turkish neo-Ottomanism – the desire to re-establish the Caliphate and unify the Middle East – and later the world – under Turkish Islamist rule and hegemony.”
Erdogan and his Islamist government calls Israel a “terrorist state” but calls Hamas a “resistance” group. Not surprisingly, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal is a big admirer of Erdogan.
Since taking office in 2003, Erdogan has been implementing his Islamist agenda, slowly but steadily changing Turkey from a secular democracy to an Islamist state. College admissions have been changed to favor religious students, the military has been gutted of its secular generals (with one in five generals currently in prison on dubious charges) and women have been routed out of top government jobs. Honor killings in Turkey increased 1,400 percent between 2002 and 2009. Persecution of artists and journalists has become commonplace as opponents are charged with vague crimes like “denigrating Islam” and “denigrading the state.”
The Turkish American Culture and Civilization Project will be the largest Islamic site in the Western Hemisphere. At the same time, Turkey is building a new mega-mosque in Istanbul with the tallest minarets in the world.
The construction project in Maryland is about more than a mega-mosque. It’s symbol of how Turkey aspires to lead the Islamic ummah, including the American Muslim community.