Convenient Amnesia

From this article in the August 14, 2007 edition of the Washington Post:

On April 19, 2005, Darrick Jackson completed an application to work as a private security guard at an entrance gate to Andrews Air Force Base.

"Have you ever used or been known by another name?" he was asked in the second of 20 queries.

"No," Jackson answered.

He got the job.

Federal prosecutors now allege that Jackson intentionally withheld his Muslim name, Abdul-Jalil Mohammad, to conceal a connection to a controversial imam in Southeast Washington....

Controversial may be an understatement:

Abdul Alim Musa, 62, is the outspoken imam at the mosque, Masjid al-Islam. In public statements, Musa has called Jews cowards, denounced the United States as the most criminal government in the world and lauded suicide bombers as heroes. He has praised Hezbollah and Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, and advocated the creation of an Islamic state in the United States by 2050.

In the interview, Musa joked that two of every five men at the Benning Road mosque could be undercover FBI agents. Musa said he recently taught three sessions of "How to Punk the FBI" at his mosque. Lessons included such "counter-harassment techniques" as asking an interrogating agent if his mother bought him his shirt, according to one of his Web sites.

[...]

...At issue are two essays, though it is unclear who wrote them. An essay titled "The Politics of Suicide and Self-Sacrifice" argues that Palestinians who conduct "self-sacrifice operations" do so in the same heroic spirit as Japanese kamikaze pilots. The other, "A Thought Provoking Process," faults the United States for its historical treatment of African Americans and Native Americans and, in a more conspiratorial vein, for allegedly spreading AIDS in Africa.

Musa uses both MuslimSpace and MySpace. On one site yesterday, visitors in an audio section could hear him lauding Hezbollah for kidnapping two Israeli soldiers last year. "It shows the rest of the Arab world that these Jews ain't nothing [but a] bunch of sissies and cowards," he said.

Prosecutors want to tell jurors that Musa once said Muslims would "burn America to the ground" if the mistreatment of Muslims continued. He was speaking at a fundraiser for Jamil Al-Amin, the imam who was formerly H. Rap Brown, a once-prominent Black Panther who in the 1960s famously said: "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."...

Read the entire article.

At present, Jackson a convert to Islam is free on his own recognizance until a hearing on September 4 and living with his wife and child in a house next door to the mosque.