How jihadis intimidate moderate Muslims.

Within a year, Yahya -- born Adam Gadahn to parents of Jewish and Catholic heritage -- had fallen in with a group of young men who prayed regularly at the mosque [at the Islamic Society of Orange County] but also picked ugly political squabbles with the placid, middle-class congregation from the suburbs south of Los Angeles.

[Imam] Bundakji remembers the men as angry, rigidly pious, and hypercritical of any Muslim who adopted Western clothes or manners. But they were also bright, articulate and well educated. . . .

* * * *

. . . [They were a] group of seven or eight men who had begun attending prayer services a few years before Gadahn's arrival.

The men -- all in their twenties and thirties, most from Pakistan -- would spend hours at the mosque, praying in a circle and "supposedly studying Islam together," Bundakji said. They wore turbans, long robes and long beards, and they spent a lot of time criticizing other members of the mosque.

"They were very rigid, cruel in talking to people," Bundakji [the local imam] said. "They were radicals, super-orthodox."

And . . . some of these young men ended up on an FBI list of terror suspects.

From how the source depicts him, Mr. Bundakji sounds like a decent sort. We note this because we are skeptical of the concept of "moderate Islam" and are deeply suspicious all all Muslims who have not distanced themselves from the key concepts of Islam like jihad, infidels as filth, compulsion in religion, polygamy, female subordination, and the sharia. We also favor the creation of highly negative legal presumptions that Muslims and their defenders -- pending the resolution of The Present Emergency -- must be required to rebut in all civil matters. (Criminal standards as always.) These would have to apply to "moderates" as well. We recognize that.

Like we care.

Moderates are out there, though we believe they are few in number and provide important financial and operational support, either naively or under compulsion. The real issue is, Are the they able to be an effective counterforce to the radicals who obviously can and do show up in American mosques? We doubt it. The imam in California was lucky the crazies left, though they appear to have engineered an assault on and battery of him.

In the meantime, we note that in the year 2005, the U.S. permitted "96,000 new Muslim legal permanent residents in 2005 alone."

Part of the new bold American strategic vision on how to fight global "terror": import more Muslims.

"Muslim Teen Made Conversion to Fury. Intelligence Sources Say Californian Was on Tape." By Amy Argetsinger, Washington Post Staff, 12/2/04.