Snitch of the Week: 11/20 - 11/26

The new Showtime show "Sleeper Cell" has got me focused on terrorism again so it's only right I give this belated Snitch of the Week award to Imam Mohamed Magid.

The role of post 9-11 Imam has changed and it is good that some of them are accepting the responsibility that comes with the powerful position they hold.

Working out of the Washington D.C. area, Imam Magid runs the ADAMS mosque, an acronym for All Dulles Area Muslim Society. With its middle to upper middle income and dozen plus ethnic demographic it ends up being one of the more progressive mosques in the U.S.

In case you're not buying it, they buck the longstanding tradition that requires women to pray in rooms separate from the men. At ADAMS, women not only pray in the same room with the men (although in a partitioned-off section in the back), they hold four of the 13 seats on the mosque's board of trustees and chair a majority of its committees.
For Islam, that's pretty good. Last time this was attempted, bomb threats came a knocking.

So with this in mind, it's not hard to see how this Imam would be intolerant of extremists seeping into his mosque.
He has worked with the FBI to follow up on leads, issue alerts of anything suspicious and creating a gateway between law enforcement officials and the community in starting dialogues.

Granted, the U.S. government hasn't been all that um, smooth?, in their differentiation between terrorists and regular Muslims, so his extracurricular FBI activities don't make him all that popular with different parts of the Muslim community. But in today's reality where the Muslims who speak the loudest and most violently dominate the conversation it is time for Muslims who hold a more moderate view of Islam to be speak up and Start Snitching.

For your post 9-11 redefinition of Islam and willingness to take the less popular road, we here at Start Snitching present you with the Snitch of the Week award.

Too bad he has to work with a government that may send his congregants on an unpaid vacation to Cuba, to do it.