Spies, Lies from “Mapping Sharia” Group Hit Dar Al-Hijrah
Islamophobe group aims to infiltrate all area masajid, schools
By Tariq Nelson
The online conservative website Insight Magazine recently posted an article titled “Private undercover team exposes nationwide network of radical, anti-U.S. Islamic centers”.
The article covers a supposed private investigation group looking at “jihadism” in US masajid and Islamic Schools. The group’s first arena of operations is the DC-VA-MD area. Dar Al-Hijrah in Falls Church, Virginia was their first target. The leader of this private group is David Gaubatz.
A portion of the article states: “Gaubatz is a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who now works for the Mapping Shari’a in America Project (
www.mappingsharia.com), which is supported by SANE, a national non-profit group devoted to investigating the 2,300 Islamic centers in the U.S. for extremist activity.
“Gaubatz and his investigators are currently active and will soon form a team of about 12. They pose as people interested in converting to Islam or who are current Muslims. Their goal is to infiltrate mosques and Muslim centers. Recently, he and his team penetrated the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, located in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
“Sporting a beard and Muslim dress, Gaubatz said he went on May 18 to the center, pretending to be an American interested in becoming a convert to Islam. He discovered the center espoused terrorism and jihad against America. “They are teaching what they call Jihad Qital, which means physical jihad,” Gaubatz said. “They’re teaching violence and hatred of the United States.”
“Gaubatz said that he met the two primary clerics at Dar Al-Hijrah, Imam Shaker Elsayed and Imam Johari Abdulmalik. Both men have been trained in Saudi Arabia. He says another key individual is Yusef Estes, an informal senior leader at the center and an internationally influential Muslim scholar who was trained in Saudi Arabia. “They put me through the process of learning their faith and ideology,” Gaubatz said. “They felt close to me and they gave me literature and CDs. They told me to study. The literature is very Jihad Qital.”
The following is a response from Tariq Nelson, an active member of the Dar Al-Hijrah community who actually met Gaubatz at Dar Al-Hijrah during the groups spying activities:
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As everyone may or may not know by now, there was a vicious and libelous attack written in “Insight Magazine” the week of June 10th about the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in which they stated things that were flat out lies.
I wanted to take this opportunity to not only set the record straight but to warn the rest of you about who these people are and let you all know that that these people are planning to come after the rest of the Muslims. When the article in Insight Magazine came out, we initially thought it was completely made up as the article claimed that a person visited the mosque on May 18 “sporting a beard and Muslim dress” pretended to be interested in Islam. There were many outright lies in that article which I have documented on my blog. The entire article was a work of fiction that was written for someone with preconceived biases. In refutation of that article, I can state that:
- No such person “sporting a beard and Muslim dress” visited the mosque as indicated in the article. (I suppose that was added for effect)
- Imam Johari was in Houston on the day claimed in the article that he met him
- No one at Dar Al Hijrah – including Yusuf Estes - said anything anti-American or violent or gave him or anyone else any anti-American (or any other) material that encouraged violence against the United
States or any other country or entity.After seeing a picture of the individual (David Gaubatz) I then saw that the article was only 99% made up. I recognized the person in the picture as the “Father” in what I know now was a fake “Father/son” combo that feigned interest in Islam and pretended to convert. They both showed up at the Spanish language event that Dar Al Hijrah held on May 12, 2007 where the “son” (supposedly) converted.
The “Father” came back on the ensuing Friday (May 18th) and “converted” at the hands of Yusuf Estes. I personally witnessed Yusuf’s conversation with that man and I can bear witness in front of God and here in this newspaper that Yusuf Estes and the brothers working with him said absolutely nothing anti-American and certainly did not try to “recruit” that man into some kind of misguided “jihad”.
I personally witnessed that the audio CD Yusuf Estes gave to that man was a basic Islam CD (such as his “Share Islam” CD) and that it certainly was not any “jihad qital” material as that man described it in the magazine.
The entire account that Mr Gaubatz gave – other than the fact he visited the mosque on that day - in Insight magazine was complete and utter fiction.
I would later find out that it was this “father/son” duo that did this slander, works for a white supremacist organization called Society for Americans for National Existence (SANE) that has a project called “Mapping Sharia” in which they aim (according to their website) to “visit America’s 2,300-plus mosques and associated day schools and collect information that includes statements by their leaders, the literature they use, the level of orthodoxy in prayer and discussion”
This means that they eventually plan to “visit” your masjid! And if their visit to Dar Al Hijrah is any indication, they will lie on your masjid too. In fact every masjid is “our masjid” and we should be equally concerned when our brothers and sisters are slandered and attacked in such a foul and vicious manner.
After doing some research on this organization SANE, I found their website to be riddled with neo-white supremacist jargon, hatred, and racist goals. They are part of the new white nationalist movement (they call themselves “racialists”) that does not wear swastikas or hoods and sheets, but instead wear suits and ties and use more carefully crafted language to promote the same white nationalist garbage. They carefully avoid using the “n-word” and other racial slurs in public. They now veil their agenda in words such as “heritage”, “national identity” and “national existence” to mean “white power”. Instead of giving fiery speeches, these new white nationalists appear to make rational arguments by using loaded statistics and painting extreme cases as the norm to make their case.
They relish in terrorist attacks around the world, so as to feed their demands for an all-out war on Muslims and point out every black on white crime incident as proof that blacks are inherently inferior and a danger to whites.
They even used the catastrophe in Virginia Tech as evidence of why America needs to be an all-white nation in spite of the fact that non-whites died in the tragedy as well. All of this is done in a calm voice, a suit and in an “academic” and pseudo-scholarly tone.
This image makeover is done in the hopes of convincing other whites that white nationalism is a respectable political program and they are using anti-immigrant, anti-black and anti-Muslim sentiment to further their cause.
More and more often I am finding that those who are virulently anti-Muslim are in many cases also white nationalists.
In the aftermath of 9/11 (and with the current immigration debate) the white nationalists in general (not just SANE) have been working the anti-immigration angle and this has helped them to attain national exposure that was impossible to get just a few years ago.
As an example, Jared Taylor – an unabashed white nationalist and Muslim hater - was on CNN recently debating racial issues and not once was it mentioned that he was a white nationalist. (This man is in support of SANE’s project by the way) He is educated and quotes lots of overstated and ideologically biased statistics to prove his bigoted points.
This is a very real and growing problem that one academic observer, Carol Swain, has already given a name: “the new white nationalism.”
The backbone of their argument is that non-whites – particularly blacks – are having social problems, not because of negative social factors, but because they are inherently inferior genetically, are naturally less intelligent and genetically more apt to behave immorally. Thus they argue that lower intelligence, based on genetic inferiority, lies at the heart of the social pathology in black communities and nothing else.
So, according to them, one must not take into account the importance of the many different variables that affect the behavior of people such as environment, economic and social configurations, upbringing, and culture that shape a person’s response to the world we live in. No, it is because non-white people are inherently inferior. Full stop!
To be clear, no one should deny problems within the black community, but we should also recognize that no one chose to be born whatever color they are. It is a heinous argument to say that blacks (or any other race) are inherently immoral and there is nothing that can be done about it.
What does this have to do with Muslims? Well, they pointed out, for example, that the participants of the cartoon riots were not white and therefore acted this way because they are inherently less intelligent and lack the capacity for rational thought. And if a people are “inherently criminal”, then what is the only option for dealing with them? The logical conclusion of their argument is frightening.
All of this – along with the terrorist arguments after 9/11 – forms the basis of their anti-immigrant/anti-black/anti-Muslim stances. In short: All non-white groups (along with Muslims) are dangerous and must be by implication – in the long term - exterminated.
All of these white nationalist groups are looking to foment an environment of racial hatred – by preaching a combination of racial superiority and white victimization - that will in their estimation become a force in a time that they hope people are highly segregated by ethnicity and race.
Understanding this rationale is essential to understanding SANE. So needless to say, when I went to SANE’s website, I was not surprised to find in their “mission” the following passage:
“America’s founding, and its greatness was neither accident nor staging ground for some better existence or world state. America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white, who ventured from Europe to create a nation in their image of a country existing as free men under G-d.”
This is was the first clear sign that these people were white supremacists that are calling for America to be a “white nation”. But that was only the beginning as in their mission they call for “A return to the original U.S. Constitution and the principles of limited government for which it stood. “
This is particularly telling as the “original U.S. Constitution” does not contain the 13th amendment and other rights to minorities. As I searched their page, I found that they backed up their argument with the following passage in which they argue that the Founders of this nation did well in not allowing women and blacks to vote:
“There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?”
I also found that they believe that blacks (African American and otherwise) are inherently inferior. They argued:
“Is there something unique about the Black American (or, at least the Black New Yorker) that leads him to murder so disproportionately and to most often kill and victimize his own? Do we see patterns of Black culture that arise out of Africa and the wanton murder of blacks by blacks there? Why have the colonized blacks of the African continent, after having acquired their freedom and independence, so willingly slaughtered their own and live in despicable disease and squalor despite a land of enormous riches while Indians of the Indian sub-continent have successfully moved from British rule to democracy and relative civility even in a country that still maintains social inequalities as a fact of their culture?”
They also say on their site that “blacks are the most murderous people”, call for the legalization of torture, call for a war on all Muslims, and explicitly state that they are lobbying for the practice of Islam to be outlawed.
They state that it should be “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison” to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”
Note that they add “to support” the adherence to Islam. This means that even non-Muslims who support our right to practice our faith would also be imprisoned under the state they envision.
This explains why on their site SANE calls for “a rejection of the Open Society agenda and Multiculturalism that so dominates and permeates our society.”
SANE’s promotional material is littered with hate, racism and bigotry and they are determined to see their agenda be enacted. So we in the DC Muslim community have seen first hand that they are Machiavellian and will lie to achieve their goals.
At the end of the day, it was not surprising to me that in the aftermath of the attack on us in Insight magazine - and given the nature of those who read and support web sites like SANE - that someone threw a stone through the window of the masjid.
SANE states that they are planning to visit ALL the mosques and schools in the US by next year. I don’t see how they will do this without making up things as they did at Dar Al Hijrah. This is nothing but a planned smear campaign that must be nipped at the bud.
As I mentioned in a previous issue of the Muslim Link, this is part of a dehumanization campaign that has been done before by the KKK on blacks If they can make decent people think of Muslims as sub human - as they did with blacks before - then their goal of criminalizing Islam will one day become a reality.
They know this. They also know that because of the skewed image of Muslims we would have to prove our innocence no matter how absurd the claims they make.
This is why we must call upon decent people of all faiths to stand with us in the face of such bigotry and blind hatred. We must call out groups like SANE for what they are: white supremacist goons.
And finally I should note that we should keep our Islamic Centers open and free for all visitors and we should not retreat into a siege mentality. If we do that, then the likes of SANE will have won. Let us continue to work in our communities in good will.
Tariq Nelson can be reached at
tariqnelson@gmail.com or through his blog at tariqnelson.com