Jeffrey T. Kuhner

June 4: The Greater Boston area has become a safe haven for Islamic terrorists.

Muslim extremism has taken root in fertile soil, spreading through an elaborate network of radicalized mosques and Islamic cultural centers. The result is a clear and present danger to public safety. The state’s elites, however, have deliberately turned a blind eye. Paralyzed by political correctness and multicultural liberalism, Massachusetts’ political and media class have enabled the enemy to grow within. We have a radical Islam problem — yet, no one dares to speak its name.

Hopefully, the recent ISIL-inspired terrorist attack will change this. [The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant is known as ISIL, ISIS and the Islamic State.]

On Tuesday, local law enforcement and FBI agents shot and killed Usaama Rahim at a CVS Pharmacy parking lot in Roslindale, a neighborhood outside of Boston. He had been under 24-hour surveillance; he was part of a larger ISIL terrorist plot. When confronted by the FBI, Rahim pulled out a military-style knife and lunged at several officers. They fired two shots, hitting him in the torso and abdomen. He died upon arrival at a local hospital. Later that day, Boston police arrested David Wright in the town of Everett, and FBI personnel raided a home in Warwick, Rhode Island.

According to law enforcement authorities, Rahim and his fellow Jihadists planned to carry out one mission: Behead police officers. No longer content with beheading American journalists, Christians and Kurds in the Middle East, ISIS now seeks to bring its war onto American soil. The Islamic State recently called for its supporters to take up arms against U.S. soldiers or law enforcement officials. Had Rahim’s terror cell been successful, it would have been a stunning propaganda victory for ISIS. Just imagine the optics: a Boston cop’s throat slit on a slick video, while Americans are powerless to stop it. ISIS’s prestige — already considerable — would soar in the Muslim world. America would be rendered a helpless, pitiful giant on the global stage.

No one should be surprised that ISIL is now in Boston. For years, I have been warning about Boston’s creeping Islamization; the city is slowly being transformed into a militant Muslim mecca. The Associated Press reports that Rahim had done security work for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in mid-2013. For a while, he and his devout wife regularly prayed at the center, before falling away.

Yet, this begs the question: Why do so many Muslim terrorists seem to have ties with the Islamic Society of Boston? The ISB is either a victim of incredible coincidence or something deeper — and more sinister — is going on. According to Charles Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov, who run Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a Boston-based Jihad watchdog group, the ISB has served as a transit point for numerous Islamic radicals connected to terrorism. In a brilliant and insightful article published in Breitbart.com on Feb. 15, 2015, they lay out a damning indictment — one that the local media has deliberately ignored.

The authors demonstrate that, from its inception in 1982, the ISB had links to the Muslim Brotherhood — a terrorist organization responsible for the mass murder of Jews and Christians. Abdulrahman Alamoudi, a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, helped to found the ISB’s first mosque in Cambridge. He is now in prison, serving a 23-year sentence for raising money for Al Qaida.

It gets even worse. According to Jacobs and Feoktistov, ISB militants were able to recruit jihadists from Boston’s surrounding universities. One of them was Aafia Siddiqui, who regularly attended the ISB mosque. She was also a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she used her education and training on behalf of Jihadism. She became a fundraiser for Muslim terrorism at several Boston-area mosques. She was arrested in 2009 for plotting to launch a biological-chemical weapons attack in New York City, hoping to murder countless Americans. She engaged in a shootout with FBI agents, and is now serving 86 years in jail for attempted murder. Known as “Lady al-Qaeda,” Siddiqui at one time was the most wanted woman in the world. Prominent local Muslim leaders, such as Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, continue to praise her. In fact, among ISB circles, “Lady al-Qaeda” is a hero.

The authors also reveal the Saudi connection. In 2000, with the help of late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Saudi Arabia helped ISB build a huge mosque in the town of Roxbury. It is the biggest mosque on the East Coast. One of its founding trustees was Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi is an avowed Islamofascist. He openly champions the destruction of Israel, the mass murder of homosexuals and the extermination of Christians. He is wanted by Interpol for incitement to murder.

Tarek Mehanna, another regular ISB congregant, plotted to attack a shopping mall in the town of North Attleboro. Mehanna’s plan was to slaughter innocent shoppers with machine guns — eerily similar to what later took place at a mall in Kenya. In 2011, Mehanna was sentenced to prison for 17 years for supplying material aid to Al Qaida.

Ahmad Abousamra, Mehanna’s accomplice, left America, eventually becoming the leader of ISIS’ social media campaign. That’s right: The man responsible for many of the Islamic State’s influential and bloodthirsty beheading videos grew up in Stoughton, a town near Boston. Radicalized by local imams, Abousamra was turned into a Muslim fanatic, who declared war upon his own country. He had become so indoctrinated by hate-filled, anti-American sermons, Abousamra committed the ultimate act of treason: He decided to fight under the black flag of ISIL. He would still be waging Jihad had he not been recently killed by an air strike in Iraq.

The Boston Marathon terrorist bombers also had ties to the ISB. According to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s former girlfriend, the murderous Chechen had been turned into a Jihadist only after he joined the ISB.

“One minute he was a normal guy, the next minute he is watching crazy Muslim videos,” she said. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan’s evil younger brother, also attended the ISB.

In other words, there is an obvious pattern: Radical Islamic imams operating in mosques across Boston are inciting young Muslims to wage violence against Americans.

According to Jacobs and Feoktistov, Imam Faaruuq — whose allies include Secretary of State John Kerry and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey — regularly champions Jihad and Islamist resistance. “They call this the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Faaruuq thundered. “And I call it the land of the coward and the home of the slave.” In another sermon, he told Boston’s Muslims to “pick up the gun and the sword, don’t be afraid to go out there and do your job.”

And that’s the problem: Usaama Rahim did precisely what he had been urged. He picked up his sword — or rather, his large knife — in order to decapitate the infidel.

Instead of confronting this growing Islamist threat, the state’s political and media elites prefer to minimize it. They are recklessly endangering public safety and citizens’ lives. The problem will not go away; like a cancer, it will only metastasize.

It is no surprise that Boston has become ground zero in radical Islam’s war against America. Once the cradle of the American Revolution, it has now become the very opposite: A secular leftist stronghold blindly wedded to open borders and liberal multiculturalism. Boston is a sanctuary city, where Third World illegal aliens are openly welcomed.

Welfare, public housing, free health care — illegal immigrants have access to every possible entitlement program. The state’s progressive leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, peddle the fiction that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

It isn’t. A significant number of Muslims seek to impose a global caliphate. They are engaged in a clash of civilizations. Peaceful coexistence is impossible — a utopian liberal fantasy. Progressives refuse to confront this seminal reality: Islamists seek to conquer the West.

The fact that only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims feel this way is irrelevant. Islam is a militant — and expanding — faith with over one billion followers. This means there are about 100 to 150 million hard-core Islamists all over the world — a massive army larger than the German Wehrmacht.

A society serious about self-preservation would take decisive, proactive measures. It’s time to crack down on the area’s radical mosques and Muslim cultural centers; repeal Boston’s sanctuary status; promote an aggressive program of assimilation; and end welfare benefits for illegal aliens. Government handouts only enable would-be Jihadists to spend their days fostering grievances and planning attacks.

On a national level, our porous borders must be finally secured. We should not allow any more Muslim immigration from Islamic hotspots, thereby stopping the flow of potential Jihadists into our country.

We should stand up to Saudi Arabia’s funding of religious schools and mosques across Massachusetts and America. We should no longer tolerate the Muslim Brotherhood’s presence on our soil.

And finally, the FBI and Justice Department should do what is long overdue: Thoroughly investigate the Islamic Society of Boston. Local politicians and media outlets should expose and denounce the Muslim extremists in our midst. They must be told they are no longer welcome in Boston — or anywhere, for that matter.

Instead, the establishment media remain silent, gripped by fear and political correctness. Both the liberal Boston Globe and the RINO Boston Herald refuse to uncover the unholy alliance between Islamic fundamentalism and the area’s burgeoning Muslim community. In fact, the papers’ smear merchants have directed their fire at an unlikely source: Yours truly, Jeff Kuhner.

Writers at the Globe and the Herald have engaged in a campaign of vilification aimed at portraying me as a xenophobic nationalist — even though I am a legal immigrant to this country. My real crime, however, is that I am one of the few voices in the Boston media speaking out against the insanity of open borders, rising Islamic radicalism and cultural liberalism.

In the eyes of the corrupt — and cowardly — media elite, constitutionalist conservatism poses a greater threat than Muslim terrorism. This could only happen in Massachusetts.

It is no accident that ISIS has come to Boston. For all of their savagery, the Jihadists are not stupid. They understand only too well what conservatives have known all along: Progressives would rather commit suicide than stand up to radical Islam. Liberalism is the ideology of surrender; filled with loathing and hatred for America, progressives are unable — and unwilling — to defend this nation.

As a result, the terrorists in our midst will only continue to get stronger.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at WorldTribune.com and the host of “The Kuhner Report” weekdays 6-10 am EST on WRKO AM-680 in Boston.

  2015 GREATEST HITS, Jeffrey Kuhner, NO. 1: Boston’s radical Islam problem and the media elites that dare not speak its name, WorldTribune.com