Mohamad al-Halabi, the imam of the American Islamic Center of Florida and father of a United States Marine, has been using his Facebook page to propagate the same type of hatred and fanaticism that his center had forced on the community one decade ago. But the big question is, was he also involved in an international terrorist group?
The American Islamic Center of Florida or AICF was founded in the city of Boca Raton, Florida, in 2003, as the Assidiq Islamic Educational Foundation. Unlike the Sunni mosques which had already been established in Boca, Assidiq was of the Shiite variety.
In April 2005, Assidiq attempted to broaden its following by inviting the community to a free dinner banquet that the mosque was sponsoring at the Boca Center Marriott. But instead of gaining support for Assidiq, the mosque succeeded in alienating a good number of residents by featuring a neo-Nazi as a speaker at the event and a representative of a Hamas-related group as a ‘Guest of Honor.’
The neo-Nazi that the mosque brought to speak was William W. Baker.
In 1984, William Baker was National Chairman of the Populist Party, a white supremacist organization founded the same year by notorious Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Officials from the party included neo-Nazis and former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. The previous year, in 1983, Baker had given a speech at a function run by the Christian Patriot Defense League, also a white supremacist outfit. Baker’s speech targeted Jews, referring to Reverend Jerry Falwell, a staunch supporter of Israel, as “Jerry Jewry” and discussing a trip he had taken to New York where the first people he came in contact with were “pushy, belligerent American Jews.”
The Hamas-related group was the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
CAIR was established in June 1994 as being part of the American Palestine Committee, an umbrella organization acting as a terrorist enterprise run by then-global Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, who was based in the U.S. at the time. In September 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, under a graphic of a burning World Trade Center, CAIR asked its followers to donate money to Hamas charity Holy Land Foundation (HLF) via a link on the CAIR national website. CAIR later was named a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with HLF and the raising of millions of dollars for Hamas.
Following the mosque’s neo-Nazi banquet, a little over a year later, Assidiq Islamic Educational Foundation incorporated under a new name, Florida Islamic Education Center. Two years after that, in June 2008, the mosque reincorporated using the name, Al-Huda Islamic Center. And in December 2012, the mosque reincorporated under its most recent name, American Islamic Center of Florida.
From the time the American Islamic Center of Florida (AICF) was founded, there have been three imams leading it. The latest has been Mohamad al-Ali al-Halabi, a radical cleric who was born and raised in Syria and received his Islamic education in Iran beginning in 1987.
Since immigrating to the United States in 1999, Al-Halabi has become a very important figure in the American Shiite community. He is the head of the Education and Research Department of the Imam Mahdi Association of Marjaeya (IMAM), and he sits on the Executive Committee for the Council of Shia Muslim Scholars in North America (CSMSNA).
On al-Halabi’s Facebook page, there are a number of disturbing posts.
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