The Case for Mosque Surveillance?

A recording surfaced over the weekend of a Muslim imam telling a group of teen followers at a mosque in Britain that it is “permissible” to keep women as sex slaves, raising fresh concerns about the lack of protocols to monitor sources of radicalization in western nations.

This sort of radicalization in broad daylight, unfettered and not monitored by authorities, may cause some to give a fresh look at the controversial notion of mosque surveillance.

“We’ve got to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘That’s enough!'” Cutler said. “If people are using their freedoms to abridge the freedoms of other human beings, then we aren’t free.”

“Society has the imperative to uphold its moral standards,” Michael Cutler, a retired criminal investigator for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), told LifeZette. “It’s one thing to be religious. It’s another thing for your religious beliefs to collide with the legal and moral standards of [a society’s] jurisdiction.”

The recording was of Ali Hammuda, an imam at the Al-Manar mosque in Cardiff, Wales, speaking to a group of teenage boys in October 2014. The recording, which was obtained by an undercover reporter for TV company Hardcash Productions, shows the imam explaining the meanings behind a series of Hadiths, or sayings, that were left behind by the Prophet Mohammad.

“One of the interpretations as to what this means is that towards the end of time there will be many wars like what we are seeing today, and because of these wars women will be taken as captives, as slaves, yeah, women will be taken as slaves,” Hammuda can be heard saying on the recording. “And then, er, her master has relations with her because this is permissible in Islam, it’s permissible to have relations with a woman who is your slave or your wife.”

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Hammuda was a practicing imam at the Al-Manar mosque when the three infamous “Cardiff jihadis” visited and worshiped there before joining the Islamic State in Syria. The three jihadis were subsequently featured in a 2014 Islamic State recruitment video.

“We have to forget about hurting people’s feelings … The fact is there are people out there who want to kill us,” Republican New York Rep. Peter King told Megyn Kelly on Fox News. “If we hold back, it’s looked upon as a sign of weakness … We have to have more surveillance.”

King added, “We have to be looking at the Muslim community. We have to be calling on them to make sure they cooperate and step forward.”

There are others who recommend the “Italian model” of counterterrorism.

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In a December 2015 article titled, “Doing Counterterrorism Right,” military analyst Edward N. Luttwak praised the Italians because they do not do what the “French or Belgians or British” do by “monitoring suspects, filling ample files with lots of reports, photographs, videos, and intercept print-outs, as if they were biographers of the most encyclopedic kind.”

“The Italians by contrast take action the moment the very first indication comes in,” Luttwak wrote. “What follows is an expert interrogation. Many are soon sent home, classified as mere boasters if they turn meek. Those who are proud to be militant are held, and their records are minutely examined to find any criminal infraction for which they can be arrested, tried, and imprisoned … If any faults are found in the immigration paperwork, they are deported … With these methods, the number to be followed 24/7 falls to manageable levels — the key to the success of the entire system.”

Cutler, who worked as a senior special agent with the INS on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, said surveillance inside mosques could be a preemptive move to prevent violence and acts of terror.

“We’ve got to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘That’s enough!'” Cutler said. “If people are using their freedoms to abridge the freedoms of other human beings, then we aren’t free.”