A new documentary by Americans for Peace & Tolerance showcases a troubling finding: al-Qaeda has a base at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Once again, we learn how the goals of diversity, inclusivity, multiculturalism, and the increasing foreign student population in our tertiary education system are national security threats.

The APT report by Ilya Feoktistov and Charles Jacobs focuses on Suheil Laher, MIT’s Muslim chaplain for nearly 20 years.  Laher still preaches, now at the Islamic Society of Boston, which, as the APT notes, is the “extremist mosque founded by MIT students near campus, where the Tsarnaevs [the Boston Marathon bombers, Chechen refugees Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] worshipped during their radicalization.”

According to the APT, “in the late 1990s, there were students at MIT who helped recruit for the Chechen jihad and raised funds for al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Tsarnaevs’ homeland.”  Laher apparently led this fundraising effort.

The APT chronicles Laher’s history at MIT, beginning as a student in 1990, becoming the school’s chaplain by 1998, and “[b]y the year 2000, he also became president of a Muslim charity based in Boston called Care International, which was founded by Osama Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam and was originally called ‘Al Kifah Refugee Center.’ Care International was, in essence, a fundraising vehicle for mujahideen.”

Following the conviction of Omar Abdel-Rehman – the “Blind Sheikh” behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – the APT report notes that “Boston’s Care International took over as al-Qaeda’s main base in the United States.”

Laher’s preachings at MIT recruited a female biologist named Aafia Siddiqui.  Siddiqui began as a fundraiser for Care International, “but by the time she was arrested by the FBI in Afghanistan in 2008, she was known as ‘Lady al-Qaeda’ and had become the most wanted woman in the world.”

Siddiqui is currently serving an 86-year prison sentence for attempting to kill the arresting FBI agents.  “Her belongings upon arrest included two pounds of cyanide and plans for mass casualty attacks on New York using chemical and biological weapons, as well as literature about the Ebola virus,” said  Feoktistov and Jacobs in their report.

The APT’s investigations have shown that Laher’s “successor as MIT’s Muslim Chaplain, Hoda Elsharkawy, is herself closely linked through her husband to Laher and to Islamic extremism in Boston.”