In Whom Do We Trust?

Naser Abdo - The moderate who wasn't

Last week, Naser Jason Abdo - a Muslim in the US military - appeared in court on charges of planning a terrorist attack against the Fort Hood army base in Texas.

Investigators say Abdo was found in a motel room three miles from Fort Hood's main gate with a handgun, an article titled "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom" and the ingredients for an explosive device, including gunpowder, shrapnel and pressure cookers. An article with that title appears in an al-Qaeda magazine.

Abdo is the second Muslim to attempt an attack against the base - the first being Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed dozens of people in 2009. Fortunately, Abdo's own plans were thwarted before any lives could be taken, but according to reports, he exuntantly chanted Hasan's name as he was led out of the court on Friday.

The most troubling - and at the same time instructive - aspect of this new case is not that the same base should be targeted twice for jihad terror attacks by Muslims, or that Abdo was also recently charged with possessing child pornography (does he share a bit of his Prophet's soft spot for young children, perhaps?). No, the most worrying part of this story is the way that Abdo was able to deceive everyone he came into contact with by way of the most simplistic form of taqiyya, or religiously mandated deception.

Last year, Abdo appealed for consciencious objector status because he did not believe he was Islamically permitted to fight against other Muslims in Afghanistan (something Nidal Hasan also believed). At that time, he said the following in an interview with ABC News:

"I want to use my experience to show Muslims how we can lead our lives," he said. "And to try and put a good positive spin out there that Islam is a good, peaceful religion. We're not all terrorists, you know?"

And while we now know that Abdo supported the murderous actions of Hasan, at the time, he wrote an essay to Associated Press saying that the original Fort Hood shootings "run counter to what I believe in as a Muslim."

This would not be the first time that an American Muslim has claimed publicly to be a moderate, when in reality they are a jihadist. Late last year, a San Diego cleric with the wonderfully inventive name of Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, who was "known for advocating nonviolence and tolerance", was arrested for funding the Somalian jihadist organisation al-Shabab. And let's not forget CAIR.

In light of all this - the fact that Islam contains within it a doctrine that sanctions the deliberate deception of non-Muslims in order to progress the cause of Islam, and the fact that there are many available examples of Muslims telling unbelievers one thing and then doing another - I have to ask a question I have asked here a couple of times before: Why should we trust any Muslim who tells us that they are moderate?

I am not, of course, saying that all Muslims who profess to be moderate are lying. I am merely saying that we have no reliable way to tell the difference between a genuine moderate Muslim and a deceiver - until it is too late. This being the case, suspicion of Muslims is completely justified - and this is not a problem that I or any other "Islamophobes" have made for them. It is a problem that they - and in particular their jihadist co-religionists such as Naser Abdo - have made for themselves. Perhaps when they start to address that fact honestly, we'll all begin to trust them a little bit more.