Former bank robber Marcus Robertson, currently known as Imam Abu Tauba, would very much like you to know that he disavows any knowledge of the Orlando shooter.  Reports placing the Orlando shooter as one of his students are false, he claims.  He also asserts that his school teaches only the Koran, and not paramilitary training or politics.  He opposes taking Islamic law into one’s own hands “in America,” he says.

Robertson, or Abu Tauba, was responding to an earlier FOX News report that linked him with the gunman.

The gunman who murdered at least 50 people in a Florida nightclub early Sunday morning was a follower of a controversial gang leader-turned-bank robber who was released from prison last year despite warnings from prosecutors that he would recruit people to carry out violent acts, sources told FoxNews.com.

In addition to being a former bank robber, Abu Tauba also served as a bodyguard for the infamous “blind sheikh” who organized the first World Trade Center attack.  The so-called blind sheikh, properly known as Omar Abdel-Rahman, is serving a life sentence for his role in planning the terrorist attack.  He had also planned a coordinated series of bombings that would all go off within minutes of each other, blowing up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and a federal building housing the FBI.

Abu Tauba gave no account of how his role as a bodyguard of the blind sheikh was compatible with his claims not to be in favor of violence “in America.”  He also described as “facetious” his suggestion that certain journalists needed to be beheaded.  Abu Tauba also very recently spent four years in Federal prison on illegal weapons charges, a surprising fact for a man allegedly opposed to violence inside the United States.  The claim also seems to be out of order with Federal charges that he was caught on a wire tap instructing a student to travel abroad for paramilitary training.

There is also a record of Abu Tauba “openly and enthusiastically preach[ing] against homosexuality.”  See for yourself:

Ultimately, these attempts at deflection have to fail.  They are not surprising, however.  Abu Tauba has proclaimed that his lawyers come from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American propaganda arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.  CAIR is implicated in a bill before Congress declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization for the purposes of the US government, as it has been in states such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  This case underlines yet again why this bill is appropriate.  Please sign our petition calling on Congress to support this bill.