Islamic spiritual leader Ali Al-Timimi's pen is mightier than his sword, prosecutors contend. It's not so much his actions but his words that make him so dangerous, they say.
Less than a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Timimi told a group of Northern Virginia Muslims that it should train for violent jihad abroad and wage war on the United States, prosecutors say. In 2003, he celebrated the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in a message that prosecutors say reflected his view that the United States itself should be destroyed.
"He is not accused of anything except talking. It's all about him saying something," said Shaker Elsayed, a member of the executive committee of Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church. "If this isn't a First Amendment issue, I don't know what is."
Prosecutors declined to comment for this story. When Timimi was indicted in September, U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty accused him of counseling young men to take up arms against the United States "while bodies were still being pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
In 2000 and 2001, Timimi, a U.S. citizen who grew up in the area, was the primary lecturer at the Center for Islamic Information and Education, also known as Dar Al-Arqam, in Falls Church.
On Sept. 16, 2001, the government contends, Timimi met with a group of followers from the mosque. The indictment says he told them that "the time had come" for them to join the "violent jihad" in Afghanistan and that U.S. troops likely to soon arrive there "would be legitimate targets.''
At the same meeting, the indictment says, Timimi approved of a plan for group members to prepare for jihad by obtaining military training from Lashkar-i-Taiba, an organization trying to drive India from the disputed region of Kashmir. The U.S. government has labeled Lashkar a terrorist organization,
Several of the men then went to a Lashkar camp, where they fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, court records show.
On Feb. 1, 2003, in what the indictment describes as a "message to his followers,'' Timimi said the space shuttle crash meant that "Western supremacy [especially that of the United States] . . . is coming to a quick end." The message also referred to "the destruction of the Jews.''
In a court filing, prosecutors contend that the message constituted Timimi telling his followers "that the United States was their greatest enemy and should be destroyed.''
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