abe mashal
Ibrahim "Abe" Mashal, Marine veteran and Muslim placed on No Fly list and recruited to inform on fellow Muslims
Richard Silverstein
Tikun Olam
May 17, 2012
Today’s To the Point show reported on an ACLU class-action lawsuit by 14 U.S. Muslims against the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security for the arbitrary and capricious manner in which it maintains the No Fly lists of those who may not fly within the U.S. The program told the story of Abe Mashal, an Illinois resident who maintains a dog-training business. Mashal served seven years in the Marines, where he was in the K-9 unit. After leaving the service, he began his business and flew regularly around the country to train dogs for clients.
Suddenly, one day while checking in for a flight from Chicago to Spokane, he was told he could not board because he was on the No Fly list. After months of meetings with FBI agents and a failed appeal to the federal government to be removed from the list, he was told he was likely on it because he’d supposedly written to an imam the FBI was monitoring with questions how to raise children in a mixed faith marriage (his wife is Christian). No reason was specified for being on the list or why the government refused to remove him from it. During this entire period he could not fly nor could he pursue any business prospects that required him to fly.
Mashal’s only recourse at that point would be to hire an expensive lawyer and appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. At no point would he or his attorney have access to whatever information, charges or claims landed him on the No Fly list. Instead, he appealed to the ACLU, which added him to this class action suit which is being brought in the Ninth Circuit, where I live. This is the latest legal development in the case.
Mashal believes, and I find this entirely credible, that the FBI may’ve added him to the No Fly list because it wanted to pressure him into becoming an informant. The last voluntary contact he had with the agency was when they invited him to a private hotel room, where over coffee and doughnuts they propositioned him, asking him to become an undercover informant to ferret out Islamic extremists at local mosques.
We’ve seen ample examples of such Muslim snitches recruiting losers and malcontents into grand schemes to blow up U.S. monuments and landmarks. Usually, the end result is a major press conference with Attorney General Holder boasting that the Status of Liberty could live to stand another decade due to the diligence of his brave men and women. When the public finally sees the dangerous conspirators who were about the strike a blow against America, they turn out to be alcoholics, druggies, and no-accounts who had to be dragged into the plot thanks to the wheedling of the snitch.
It’s a wonder Mashal turned down the chance to live such a glamorous life of intrigue under the tutelage of the FBI. Thankfully, he did. He’s written a book, No Spy, No Fly.
Read the full story at Tikun Olam
