Christians Under Attack

April 9, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The Department of Homeland Security - [DHS] a cabinet level department - was created, with legislation signed into law by President Bush on November 25, 2002 as part of a governmental reorganization conducted post 9/11.

As part of this plan seven heretofore independent agencies have been rolled into this new bureaucracy - the Transportation Security Administration [TSA], U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration, U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard.

All of these sub-cabinet level departments report directly to the DHS Secretary, Michael Chertoff, a former circuit judge and federal prosecutor, who also served [1995-1996] as Special Counsel to the Senate's Whitewater Committee.

With a budget well over $50 billion DHS is the prototypical DC bureaucracy in which transparency and accountability are sometimes in short supply.

Starting in 2005 DHS, through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, commenced a program - UASI Non-Profit Security Grants - the purpose of which was to provide:

"...funding support for target hardening activities to nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of international terrorist attack. While this funding is provided specifically to high-risk nonprofit organizations, the program seeks to integrate nonprofit preparedness activities with broader state and local preparedness efforts..." [[DHS FY 2007 UASI Guidance]

In 2007 the amount available for this program was $24,007,500.00 [DHS FY UASI Grant Fund Distribution]

To clarify the decision making process in its grant making authority DHS promulgated a very specific set of guidelines to determine which nonprofits might be eligible for these awards:

"...Criteria for determining eligible applicants who are at high risk of terrorist attack include, but are not limited to:

Identification and substantiation (e.g. police reports or insurance claims) of prior threats or attacks against the nonprofit organization or directly related organizations (within or outside the U.S.) by a terrorist organization, network, or cell.

Symbolic value of the site(s) as a highly recognized national or historical institution that renders the site a possible target of terrorism.

Role of the applicant nonprofit organization in responding to or recovering from terrorist attacks

Findings from previously conducted risk assessments including threat, vulnerability or consequence.

In a 2007 article for Front Page Magazine Homeland Security's Islamist Payday, Joe Kaufman broke the story that a Florida based Islamist, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, had been the recipient of one of these UASI grants.

The resulting controversy apparently temporarily halted the awarding of the grant, which was resubmitted for further review.

In a series of calls made to DHS, these writers have now ascertained that the review of Zakkout's grant proposal is complete and that the agency charged with securing the American homeland, has in its infinite wisdom awarded Zakkout $69, 885.00, to be used to purchase security hardware for 23 mosques in Florida's largest counties, Broward, Palm Beach, Miami and Dade.

What kind of individual is Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout?

He is a long-time Islamist and a supporter of Hamas. The 501c3 which he runs, American Muslims for Emergency Relief [AMER] will be the beneficiary of the DHS award and through that group the funds will be distributed. AMER is a division of a larger organization, the American Muslim Association of North America [AMANA] also run by Zakkout who is based in South Florida, an area well known for the presence of Muslim extremism, with 11 of the 19 9/11 hijackers having cycled through the area.

As of this writing we have not been able to probe the manner in which Zakkout was vetted by DHS but under any reasonable interpretation of the funding requirements combined with Zakkout's long history as a radical Muslim we believe that process failed in a most fundamental way.

Zakkout served for a time as the vice president of the HRCP, Health Resource Center Palestine, which was closed down for because of links to the terrorist group Hamas. In an April 3 interview with PipeLineNews.org, he denied any association with HRCP.

However, contrary to Zakkout's claim, according to archived internet records that we have obtained, Zakkout was listed as the VP of HRCP from April 24, 2000 through December 28, 2000 on various iterations of the organization's website.

We have reconstructed, using as much of the original html coding possible, two HRCP website pages, which are reproduced in the below linked documents. [...]

Another aspect of this matter, perhaps even more damaging than the simple misappropriation of homeland security funds is that this award will give Zakkout and his two groups AMER and AMANA, increased credibility, something in high demand among domestic Islamist organizations which are continually striving to present themselves as anything but what they actually are, committed jihadists at war with the West. These hard-core fundamentalists look upon the type of action that DHS took in this case as a public relations gold mine, and use it to approach other governmental agencies, private institutions and religious organizations, offering it as validation of their claims of moderation.

Understanding this is key to understanding the nuance and subtlety involved in the dialectic of stealth jihad, we ignore it at our peril.

posted by / http://www.jihadwatch.org/