Federal law forbids FBI agents from entering places of worship to conduct undercover surveillance unless they already have “actionable evidence” — such as the terrorist-training videotape recently reported by a store clerk near Fort Dix. Thus, federal agents cannot gather direct evidence when radical jihadists use mosques in this country to encourage insurrection and recruit adherents. Private groups, however, are not prevented from collecting such evidence.
So the Society of Americans for National Existence has begun a year-long project called “Mapping Shari’a in America.” Shari’a is the extreme Islamic code that prescribes such penalties as death for adultery and homosexuality, as well as severing hands for petty theft. SANE aims to determine if there is a correlation between calls for shari’a laws and incitement to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Undercover teams will visit all 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers in the U.S. (400 to 500 of which are believed to be highly radicalized) based on SANE’s belief that “the ideological infrastructure is already in place for the Islamic assault on American from within.”
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Nervous civil libertarians should recall Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who is remembered for his observation that the Bill of Rights should not be turned into a suicide pact. The Constitution guarantees each American the right to worship as his or her conscience dictates. But it does not require national suicide by giving anybody the right to incite armed insurrection just because he happens to be preaching in a mosque.
