Convicted Al-Qaeda sympathizer taught children at NYC community center

Tarek Mehanna, 43, had been instructing children as young as four in Arabic and the Quran at the Muslim Community Center of Staten Island in West Brighton since January. He reportedly taught four days a week, four hours per day, according to the New York Post. Mehanna’s hiring was publicly announced by Mohamed Bahi, the center’s founder and a former senior advisor to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in a now-deleted Facebook post. The post included a photo of Mehanna among the center officials.

Federal prosecutors previously described Mehanna as a radical who was inspired by the 9/11 attacks. In 2002, he and unnamed co-conspirators attempted to enter Afghanistan through Pakistan but were turned away at the border. Prosecutors said the group then “agreed to explore ways in which they, too, could kill Americans.”

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mehanna discussed purchasing automatic weapons to carry out a mass shooting in shopping malls, but the group ultimately abandoned the idea as “impractical.” They then turned their attention to targeting US military personnel.

In 2004, Mehanna traveled to Yemen in an attempt to “seek training in Yemen, sought guidance on how to obtain it, received contacts, equipped and readied themselves for the journey, and made arrangements to sneak out of Massachusetts.” After failing to “find a suitable training camp,” he then attended an Al-Qaeda training facility in Pakistan where he received “paramilitary training so that he could eventually join Al-Qaeda in Iraq in fighting and killing American soldiers.”

Mehanna was convicted in 2011 on charges including providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit murder, and making false statements to the FBI. He served 14 years in federal prison.

The MCC of Staten Island, which is affiliated with the Muslim Community Center in Brooklyn, filed not-for-profit documents on June 5. An unnamed official with MCC Brooklyn told the New York Post that Mehanna’s work with the center “ended over a month ago.”

“He is no longer teaching at our center,” the official said. “We are a diverse community that believes in second chances and those that want to change themselves through service and education.” The center did not explain why Mehanna was initially hired or why his teaching ended.

City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov criticized the revelation that Mehanna had been teaching children following his previous conviction, claiming that “It’s clear he still harbors the same anti-American hatred he held before his sentence.”

“Do any of us really believe that someone who was convicted for colluding with Al Qaeda — a terrorist organization that’s committed terrorist acts on American soil and shed American blood — is truly ‘reformed’ and won’t continue to collude with other terrorists, and won’t indoctrinate the children in his care into a radical jihadist ideology?” Vernikov asked.