Two weeks ago I reported here at FrontPage that Yasin would be appearing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland”, sponsored by a local mosque, Masjid at-Taqwa. Pendra Lee Snyder has followed-up on that story by providing a first-hand account of Yasin’s appearance in Dayton, and how Masjid at-Taqwa prevented her from recording his hate-filled comments. Our reporting here at FrontPage even prompted Dayton NBC affiliate WDTN to cover and question Yasin’s visit. And last week John Perazzo exposed how Yasin was the featured speaker at events in April sponsored by the Muslim Student Association at several college campuses.

So it was quite a surprise Saturday morning when the Islamic community in Columbus was informed that Yasin would be touring our city for the next week, paying visits to at least four different mosques affiliated with the Islamic Society of Great Columbus (the local chapter of the Islamic Society of North America) and putting in an appearance on Thursday at The Ohio State University.

Event organizers had presumably delayed announcing Khalid Yasin’s visit until the day of his first appearance to prevent the negative media attention he received in Dayton as a result of the coverage here at FrontPage and JihadWatch.

There is good cause why Yasin’s local supporters don’t want to raise the attention of the Central Ohio community, for fear of them learning about Yasin’s extensive extremist statements reported by the international media.

For example:

• Yasin says that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks. (“Khalid Yasin: The New Voice of Islam?” Sunday [Australia], October 9, 2005)
• Yasin claims that AIDS was invented at a US government lab and spread by Western governments through UN agencies and Christian missionaries. (“Khalid Yasin: The New Voice of Islam?” Sunday, October 9, 2005)
• Yasin advocates for the death penalty for homosexuality. (“Home Grown”, Sixty Minutes, Channel Nine [Australia], July 24, 2005)
• Yasin justified the terrorist bombings in Bali because of years of alleged Western oppression. (“Khalid Yasin: The New Voice of Islam?” Sunday, October 9, 2005)
• Yasin says that the Quran permits wife-beating and that equal rights for women is a “delusion” and “foolishness”. (cited in “Undercover Mosque”, Dispatches, Channel 4 [UK], January 15, 2007)
• Yasin openly derides the beliefs of Christians and Jews as “filth”. (cited in “Undercover Mosque”, Dispatches, Channel 4 [UK], January 15, 2007)
• Yasin says that Muslims cannot have non-Muslim friends. (“Home Grown”, Sixty Minutes, Channel 9 [Australia], July 24, 2005)
• Yasin rejects any separation between Islam and the state and openly advocates for the reestablishment of the caliphate. (Sunday Nights with John Cleary, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 7, 2003; “Khalid Yasin in conversation”, The Religion Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio, September 10, 2003)
• Yasin visited Jemaah Islamiah terrorist leader Abu Bakar Bashir in prison, who ordered the Bali bombings. (“Koranic TV next step for radial sheikh”, Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 2005)
• Yasin has lectured with Hizb-ut-Tahrir hatemonger Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was banned from the UK in 2006.
• Yasin was in Saudi Arabia on 9/11 soliciting support from the Al-Qaeda front Al-Haramain Foundation, which was designated a terrorist organization in 2004 by the US government, to help finance his Islamic Broadcasting Company.

It’s not as if Central Ohio is facing some shortage of catalysts for Islamic radicalization.

In fact, one of the mosques Yasin will be visiting three times this week, Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab, just north of the Ohio State campus, is derisively known in the area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”, as it was the home of the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the United States since 9/11. Two members of the cell, Iyman Faris and Nuraddin Abdi, have already been convicted of support for terrorism (Faris, in fact, was in direct communication with Al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammad), and a third, Christopher Paul, who was the mosque’s martial arts instructor, has been charged and will be coming to trial on terrorism support charges soon. Other cell members have fled the country and/or been deported, and as many as 10 individuals were known to be involved in the Columbus Al-Qaeda cell.

And as FrontPage readers might recall from my “Hometown Jihad” series, international HAMAS/Muslim Brotherhood cleric Salah Sultan was living and operating in my own hometown of Hilliard, Ohio until he fled the country last year after having his US citizenship application rejected (due in no small measure to our own efforts). CBN terrorism correspondent Erick Stakelbeck reported from Columbus last year on the network of Islamic extremists tied to international terrorist groups that had taken root in Central Ohio (“Jihad in Central Ohio”) – a network in which my neighbor Salah Sultan played a leading role.

Recently here at FrontPage, I revealed how a designated terrorist organization had been funding events for the Ohio State Muslim Student Association – the very same group that ran the MSA News list that had served as Osama bin Laden’s media front and a public relations outlet for virtually every Islamic terrorist organization in the world before 9/11.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Khalid Yasin has chosen Columbus as the next stop in his “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland” tour. Our city has proved to be fertile ground for Islamic radicalism, and Yasin’s local sponsors no doubt hope to bring in a veritable harvest of hate with his multiple appearances this week. The effects of Khalid Yasin’s tour of Central Ohio will no doubt continue to reverberate through the community for months and years to come.

Those outside our area, however, should not content themselves that such an event could never happen in their own city. Who knows? As Dayton and Columbus have already found out, Khalid Yasin’s next stop on his “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland” tour could be your own hometown.