News Story  #1: 

"Andrew Arena, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, contacted local imams and civil rights leaders in Detroit during Wednesday's operation "to bridge any gaps that could possible come over this," FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said.

"He'd rather they hear it from him," she added. "We have a good relationship with the community and we want to keep it that way."

News Story #2: 

"But as the case[of the Muslims in Dearborn whose  arrest made headlines Thursday, the FBI moved to downplay the connection to Islam, saying that Abdullah and his organization should be considered a fringe group.

"Any Muslim who took a look at what these people believed would not recognize this as the Muslim faith," said Andrew Arena, who heads up the FBI's Detroit bureau."

News Story #3: 

Arena on Thursday declined to offer any other details about the raid.

"This is obviously something we don't relish. But in the end, we take solace that we took some bad people off the street," he said.

Neither Abdullah nor his co-defendants were charged with terrorism. But he was "advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States," FBI agent Gary Leone wrote in an affidavit filed with the 43-page complaint Wednesday.

The FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam, or prayer leader, of a faction of a radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the U.S.

"This is a very hybrid radical ideology. I don't know that I'd call it a religion," Arena said.

 News Story #4:

U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg also asked people not to connect the group, headed by Luqman Ameen Abdullah, with Muslims in general. Abdullah, 53, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents Wednesday at a Dearborn warehouse.

Berg said the group in question “is a specific brand of radical ideology.”

My, how important it appears to be for everyone to rush to assure Muslims that in no case is a group consisting entirely of Muslims -- not all of them apparently recent converts -- using the language of Islam, relying on the texts and tenets of Islam, spouting -- in ways more aggressive and violent than we are used to hearing in this country -- their understandeing of Muslim doctrine, which has a heavy admixture, or subtext, of anti-white feeling. But Da'wa campaigns are especially strong, we all know, among black prisoners, seen, because of their social and economic marginalization, and a psychic desarroi that makes they ready prey for such campaigns -- imagine if all the black prisoners who convert to Islam instead became, because of clever government support for black ministries, Born-Again Christians. They'd be a bore, perhaps, but they wouldn't be have become a mortal threat, with an ideology that provided them with a justification for what, before, had only been seen as sociopathic behavior.

Of course "any Muslim" who "took a look" would be quick to deny a link between the Greater Cult and the Lesser. What would you expect? But what about those of us who are not Muslims, but have a perfectly good grasp of the contents of the texts, and of how those texts are received, through long familiarity with Muslim sources, guides, Internet sites, and long observation, sometimes from close up, of the behavior, and expressed beliefs, of adherents of Islam? Would we, if we "took a look at what these people believed," truly "not recognize this as the Muslim faith"? Could Andrew Arena tell us what it was, exactly -- really, give us the details -- that makes him be so sure that one can distinguish what these people hoping to establish an Islamic state in North America believed in and what other, presumably orthodox, Muslims are taught to believe in. A difference in timing and tactics does not matter. What matters is whether the ultimate goals are shared or not. 

Andrew Arena of the FBI owes the public much more of an explanation of his curious remark.

And he also should think to himself, and then possibly aloud, as to the ways in which that "very hybrid radical ideology" that he, Andrew Arena, thinks he doesn't know if he would "call it a religion"  differs, if at all, in its texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherics, from the perfectly orthodox Islam described by every articulate defector -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Ali Sina  -- from the Army of Islam.

Why does Andrew Arena think all of those defectors must surely have misunderstood, or must surely be lying, and that he knows better than they? Is it because the Muslims he monitors, at such great expense,  tell him so?