OPINION:
Last week, nine Republican members of Congress sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., urging him to expand his agency’s nearly 5-month-old investigation into the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
What for? “Evidence of alleged grant abuses and ties to terrorism.”
The lawmakers, whose earlier prompting of Mr. Kennedy kick-started the original investigation, which opened in June, cited a July Middle East Forum report, “Health and Human Services Hidden Handouts.”
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The report “found 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations received nearly $80 million in HHS funding,” according to the Middle East Forum, most of it doled out under the Biden administration.
CAIR is among the recipients of the money, according to the paper, but so is a far less well-known entity: the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia.
Nestled right here by the nation’s capital, less than 8 miles from the White House, this registered nonprofit is no stranger to getting into Republican legislators’ crosshairs — and ultimately having nothing happen and getting to go back to aggressive fundraising on its website.
Federal investigators began looking into the mosque within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, the first U.S. citizen to be assassinated by an American drone strike, served as an imam from 2001 to 2002.
Two of the five American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi, reportedly worshipped at the mosque in 2001. Some FBI investigators suspected that Al-Awlaki introduced Hanjour and Alhazmi to another Dar al-Hijrah worshipper, who is said to have helped the men find an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, shortly before Sept. 11, according to the 9/11 Commission report.
Convicted Fort Hood attacker Nidal Malik Hasan also attended the mosque in 2001. Department of Homeland Security reports from 2002 called Dar al-Hijrah “a mosque operating as a front for Hamas operatives in [the] U.S.,” according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
In 2003, federal prosecutors charged 11 men — nine of them U.S. citizens — with conspiracy to train and participate in terrorist activities overseas. These “Virginia jihad network” members, said to have played “tactical paintball” games to prepare for their missions, reportedly met at Dar al-Hijrah to listen to “lectures” and watch tapes of “violent jihad,” according to CNN.
In 2010, Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican, sent a letter to General Services Administration Administrator Martha Johnson questioning a $23,000-a-month office space lease agreement that the GSA had signed with Dar al-Hijrah in 2008, years after the federal government should have been well aware of the mosque’s troubling past links.
“Because GSA committed the United States Government to make monthly rent payments to an entity with links to individual terrorists and terrorist organizations, I am specifically concerned that it appears there are insufficient procedures in place to vet potential contract partners,” Mr. Issa wrote.
These repeated associations with individuals later implicated with terrorism warrant further scrutiny, regardless of whether investigators established institutional wrongdoing.
Yet all this time, the mosque, founded in 1983, has remained open. Nothing resulted from Mr. Issa’s letter; the lease for office space for the U.S. Census Bureau continued until its contracted 2010 expiration.
Then, the U.S. government inexplicably gave this questionable entity money.
From 2021 to 2023, Dar al-Hijrah received almost $340,000 from the HHS, supposedly to help get COVID-19 and flu vaccines “to racial and ethnic communities experiencing healthcare disparities” and to “dispel myths related to COVID and influenza vaccination,” according to the Middle East Forum.
How did Dar al-Hijrah fulfill that requirement? In 2020, during the weeks after the pandemic’s outbreak, it hosted a “Coronavirus and Faith Series” of webinars, replete with virus conspiracies and featuring Shaker Elsayed, an imam at the mosque who was placed on administrative leave in 2017 after a video of him giving a lecture on female genital mutilation leaked.
In the video, Mr. Elsayed urges those listening to cut “the tip of the sexually sensitive part of the girl so that she is not hypersexually active,” according to PBS.
In 2024, HHS subgranted the mosque nearly $860,000 through the Virginia Department of Social Services. Most of the funding went toward “Afghan support services,” according to the Middle East Forum, administered via a program that reimburses groups for medical assistance and cash they provide to refugees.
“Consequently,” the Middle East Forum writes, “one of America’s most dangerous mosques was entrusted to assist newly arrived immigrants hailing from populations highly susceptible to radicalization.”
The Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center has received more than $1 million in federal funds and is long overdue for a rigorous investigation. Let us hope that Mr. Kennedy undertakes exactly that, immediately.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
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