Obama: Rout ISIL Everywhere (Except In U.S. Mosques)

Worshippers attend evening prayers at a mosque in Minneapolis, Minn. AP View Enlarged Image

Homeland Insecurity: President Obama has vowed to "hunt down (Islamic State) terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are" in Iraq and Syria. News flash: They're also in American mosques.

Yet Obama is not going after terrorists in radical mosques. And he's making it harder for local governments to stop the construction of recruiting and training centers for the enemy.

In fact, as a grand jury investigates another Minneapolis mosque for radicalizing recruits for ISIL, the Justice Department is suing local officials for blocking a new extremist mosque in the area.

Attorney General Eric Holder sued St. Anthony, Minn., after the Minneapolis suburb rejected the Abu Huraira Islamic Center and its 15,000-square-foot mosque over zoning issues. Holder began investigating two years ago at the request of a radical Islamist group after his own department a few years ago named an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism case.

"We applaud this decision," the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations said. "We urged the Department of Justice to investigate."

Besides traffic and other problems, local citizens feared the large fundamentalist mosque — which says on its website that Muslims are instructed to fight and take "captives" in "warfare" — will "condone violence."

It's a valid concern.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a local grand jury is investigating the nearby Dar Al-Farooq mosque and its youth center in connection with the radicalization and recruitment of as many as 40 Muslims who have left America to fight for the Islamic State.

The investigation centers on a 31-year-old Egyptian volunteer at the mosque, Amir Meshal, whom the FBI released after questioning him for training at an al-Qaida camp in Africa. The paper says authorities suspect he may be recruiting young Muslim men for ISIL.

Al-Farooq says it has asked Meshal to leave the mosque, but the Egyptian cleric who leads prayer at the facility does not exactly inspire confidence that the problem is isolated to him.

Al-Farooq imam Waleed Edreese al-Meneese, who's also president of the mosque and youth center, recently hosted and spoke with radical Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Al-Meneese, moreover, sits on the board of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, which issues fatwas, including ones condoning "offensive jihad" against America and the West. Recent fatwas also prohibit charity for American troops and cooperation with the FBI in terrorism probes.