A U.S. Mosque with "hundreds of Taliban supporters"

Terrorism analyst Steve Emerson said the following on a recent FOX appearance:

Listen, before I came on the show I was talking to a dissident Islamic Imam in New York City and he was telling me about the fact that he broke away from a Mosque that was full of Taliban supporters. Hundreds of Taliban supporters in his Mosque. This gives you an idea, Martha, of the extent to which there is sympathy for the Taliban or for Al Qaeda. And the question is are they just wannabes, are they home grown or are they taking direction. We don't know at this point.

First:  Well done to the imam for his brave choice to break away. Second:  A mosque on American soil with "hundreds of Taliban supporters" is frightening.  My assumption is that if its imam left, this may mean he believed transformation of the ideology rampant among the congregation was unlikely, which is also disturbing.  Recent news stories have highlighted the home-grown terrorist threat.  The men who have been apprehended in these plots are not acting in a vacuum.  Their ideas come from somewhere.  Unless more efforts to combat the spread of this ideology are made, the current threat will continue to grow. I applaud the imam for what I hope is an attempt to build a spiritual environment free of political Islam.  Other attempts to create these spaces need to emerge from within the community, and further efforts need to be made to uproot problems where they currently exist.  As Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser recently said: "We can defeat political Islam only if we engage it and marginalize Islamists while positively engaging spiritual Islam."