American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson Page B

other single group. The Investigative Project has even been on the trail of a tantalizing possibility: Osama himself may have once applied for a U.S. visa.
     
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    In 1993, immediately following the first World Trade Center bombing, federal prosecutors and FBI agents reexamined raw materials, documents, and data they had collected after the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El Sayeed Nosair in November 1990 and the murder (still unsolved) of the fundamentalist head of the Alkhifa office in Brooklyn, Mustapha Shalabi, in February 1991. The boxes of material seized from Nosair’s apartment following his arrest in 1990 contained the very seeds of the World Trade Center explosion, but these materials also provided at least a partial road map to understanding and reconstructing the bin Laden network. In particular, new attention was focused on the Alkhifa Refugee Center, also known as the Office of Services for the Mujahideen, that gave birth, as prosecutors laid out in their complaints and indictments, to bin Laden’s secret terrorist organization. The Alkhifa Center was established in the early 1980s in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Azzam.
    Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdullah Azzam moved to Jordan, then to Saudi Arabia before migrating to Pakistan at the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Starting with not much more than a storefront in Peshawar, Azzam ultimately succeeded in reviving the concept of jihad among the Muslim masses.
    People who met Azzam were always dazzled by his spellbinding oratory, his religious scholarship, his abilities as a military strategist, and his interminable energy. The bearded, barrel-chested sheikh hated the West, specifically Christians and Jews, whom he routinely accused of carrying out diabolical conspiracies against Islam. Combined with this was nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic caliphate, when non-Muslims were the ones who were treated as second-class citizens.
    It was in the United States that Azzam was able to raise much of his money, enlist new fighters, and—most important—enjoy the political freedom to coordinate with other radical Islamic movements. From 1985 to 1989, Azzam and his top aide, Palestinian Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, visited dozens of American cities, exhorting new recruits to pick up the sword against the enemies of Islam. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and enlisted hundreds and hundreds of fighters and believers.
    The First Conference of Jihad was held at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1988. In a speech recorded on videotape, Azzam instructed his audience of nearly two hundred to carry out jihad no matter where they were, even in America. “Every Moslem on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine,” he shouted in Arabic. “The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan…. Jihad means fighting…. You must fight in any place you can get…Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.” 1
    Azzam’s Office of Services started off in Peshawar, but by the end of the decade, he had succeeded in establishing scores of jihad recruiting centers around the world, in addition to a network of mosques and Islamic centers that joined the jihad orbit. Azzam had also motivated tens of thousands of Arabs from all over the world to volunteer for jihad.
    By 1985, according to his own statements and accounts published by the Office of Services in its banner publication Al-Jihad, Azzam had teamed up with Saudi financier Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden would soon emerge as the largest single financial backer of the Office of Services for the Mujahideen and of the “Arab-Afghan” jihad movement. Having heard the call of Sheikh Azzam to join the jihad, bin Laden left the comfort of his family’s multi-billion dollar construction company in