Thread: Springtime in Islamberg, USA

They keep saying that the Fort Dix Six were not connected with international terrorists. The media keeps calling them Homegrown Terrorists. Is that what this town is? A town of homegrown terrorists? I have added another related article further down the thread.
Click on link to see pictures.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/pau ... 051107.htm

Springtime in Islamberg
Radical Muslim paramilitary compound flourishes in upper New York state
By Paul L. Williams Ph.D., (author of THE DAY OF ISLAM)

With the able assistance of Douglas Hagmann, Bill Krayer and Michael Travis

Friday, May 11, 2007


Dr. Paul Williams at the entrance of Islamberg
Situated within a dense forest at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the outskirts of Hancock, New York, Islamberg is not an ideal place for a summer vacation unless, of course, you are an exponent of the Jihad or a fan of Osama bin Laden.

The 70 acre complex is surrounded with "No trespassing" signs; the rocky terrain is infested with rattlesnakes; and the woods are home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats.


Muslim Lane
The entrance to the community is at the bottom of a very steep hill that is difficult to navigate even on a bright sunny day in May. The road, dubbed Muslim Lane, is unpaved and marred by deep crevices that have been created by torrential downpours. On a wintry day, few, save those with all terrain vehicles, could venture forth from the remote encampment.

A sentry post has been established at the base of the hill.

The sentry, at the time of this visit, is an African American dressed in Islamic garb - - a skull cap, a prayer shawl, and a loose fitting shalwat kameez. He instructs us to turn around and leave. "Our community is not open to visitors," he says.

Behind the sentry and across a small stream stand dozens of inhabitants of the compound - - the men wearing skull caps and loose fitting tunics, the women in full burqa. They appear ready to deal with any unauthorized intruders.

The hillside is blighted by rusty trailers that appear to be without power or running water and a number of outhouses. The scent of raw sewage is in the air.

The place is even off limits to the local undertaker who says that he has delivered bodies to the complex but has never been granted entrance. "They come and take the bodies from my hearse. They won't allow me to get past the sentry post. They say that they want to prepare the bodies for burial. But I never get the bodies back. I don't know what's going on there but I don't think it's legal."

On the other side of the hill where few dare to go is a tiny village replete with a make-shift learning center (dubbed the "International Quranic Open University"); a trailer converted into a Laundromat; a small, green community center; a small and rather squalid grocery store; a newly constructed majid; over forty clapboard homes; and scores of additional trailers.

It is home to hundreds - - all in Islamic attire, and all African-Americans. Most drive late model SUVs with license plates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The locals say that some work as tollbooth operators for the New York State Thruway, while others are employed at a credit card processing center that maintains confidential financial records.

While buzzing with activity during the week, the place becomes a virtual hive on weekends. The guest includes arrivals from the inner cities of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and, occasionally, white-robed dignitaries in Ray-Bans from the Middle East.

Venturing into the complex last summer, Douglas Hagmann, an intrepid investigator and director of the Northeast Intelligence Service, came upon a military training area at the eastern perimeter of the property. The area was equipped with ropes hanging from tall trees, wooden fences for scaling, a make-shift obstacle course, and a firing range. Hagmann said that the range appeared to have been in regular use.

Islamberg is not as benign as a Buddhist monastery or a Carmelite convent. Nearly every weekend, neighbors hear sounds of gunfire. Some, including a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, have heard the bang of small explosives. None of the neighbors wished to be identified for fear of "retaliation." "We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," one resident said. "They own the mountain and they know it and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy a property near that?"

Islamberg's Grocery Store
Islamberg's Grocery Store
The complex serves to scare the bejeesus out of the local residents. "If you go there, you better wear body armor," a customer at the Circle E Diner in Hancock said. "They have armed guards and if they shoot you, nobody will find your body."

At Cousins, a watering hole in nearby Deposit, a barfly, who didn't wish to be identified, said: "The place is dangerous. You can hear gunfire up there. I can't understand why the FBI won't shut it down."

Islamberg is a branch of Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who refers to himself as "the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr," Gilani, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra or "community of the impoverished," an organization that seeks to "purify" Islam through violence.

Though primarily based in Lahore, Pakistan, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has operational headquarters in New York and openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in hamaats or compounds, such as Islamberg, where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority. Additional hamaats have been established in Hyattsville, Maryland; Red House, Virginia; Falls Church, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; York, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee; Buena Vista, Colorado; Talihina, Oklahoma; Tulane Country, California; Commerce, California; and Onalaska, Washington. Others are being built, including an expansive facility in Sherman, Pennsylvania.

Before becoming a citizen of Islamberg or any of the other Fuqra compounds, the recruits - - primarily inner city black men who became converts in prison - - are compelled to sign an oath that reads: "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake."

In the past, thousands of members of the U.S. branches of Jamaat ul-Fuqra traveled to Pakistan for paramilitary training, but encampments, such as Islamberg, are now capable of providing book-camp training so raw recruits are no longer required to travel abroad amidst the increased scrutiny of post 9/11.

Over the years, numerous members of Jamaat ul-Fuqra have been convicted in US courts of such crimes as conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud. Others remain leading suspects in criminal cases throughout the country, including ten unsolved assassinations and seventeen fire-bombings between 1979 and 1990.

The criminal charges against the group and the criminal convictions are not things of the past. In 2001, a resident of a California compound was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun-smuggling' and twenty-four members of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations.

By 2004 federal investigators uncovered evidence that linked both the DC "sniper killer" John Allen Muhammed and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid to the group and reports surfaced that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded in the process of attempting to obtain an interview with Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan.

Even though Jamaat ul-Fuqra has been involved in terror attacks and sundry criminal activities, recruited thousands of members from federal and state penal systems, and appears to be operating paramilitary facilities for militant Muslims, it remains to be placed on the official US Terror Watch List. On the contrary, it continues to operate, flourish, and expand as a legitimate nonprofit, tax-deductible charity.

(Paul Williams is the author of THE AL QAEDA CONNECTION and forthcoming THE DAY OF ISLAM. Lee Boyland is the author of THE RINGS OF ALLAH).

Web
Canadafreepress.com

Sounds like an Islamic Jonestown, but rather than commit mass suicide they want to snuff out a few hundred thousand of us.

Are you freaking kidding me??
This is NOT far from me and I've not heard ONE BLASTED WORD about it!!

AND HERE is the very reason why our country is going to hell in a handbasket...............FEAR AND STUPIDITY!!!

None of the neighbors wished to be identified for fear of "retaliation." "We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," one resident said. "They own the mountain and they know it and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy a property near that?"

THIS is the fault of AMERICANS in the area!

They have no one to blame but themselves for ALLOWING this to excelerate to this degree rather than nipping it in the bud BEFORE it got to this level!

Afraid? Well, everyone had better absorb this quickly and make a decision. Are you willing to give in to FEAR like scared little no nothing mice scurrying behind your curtains and barred doors or are you willing to TAKE BACK YOUR COUNTRY?

And the most amazing thing about this particular area is that it is within the Hasidic Jewish Summer resort area! Anyone wonder why the muslims are now inhabiting a MOUNTAIN here? Chance? Coincidence?

I found this article interesting because I heard that the Fort Dix Six trained and practiced shooting in the POCONOS....guess I won't be hiking alone in the mountains alone for a while......

Also, the man who wrote this was on Michael Savage today. He said there are a LOT of these communities all over the place in the USA.

Originally Posted by ProudAmericanFamily

I found this article interesting because I heard that the Fort Dix Six trained and practiced shooting in the POCONOS....guess I won't be hiking alone in the mountains alone for a while......

Up here, the POCONOS & CATSKILLS run across meeting at the Pa & NY lines right above the Appalachian. Ski Country.

The Dix 6 trained in the POCONOS and the muslim mountain is a hop skip into the CATSKILLS - all accessable via Rt. 84 E/W and some back roads.

See the picture???

Originally Posted by 2ndamendsis

See the picture???

I am afraid I do.
I think I am going to do some research and see if I can find out where the other towns are. Sigh...................

Originally Posted by ProudAmericanFamily

Originally Posted by 2ndamendsis

See the picture???

I am afraid I do.
I think I am going to do some research and see if I can find out where the other towns are. Sigh...................

I'm so pissed right now that I'm into shooting flames again!!

I'm right in the Poconos & Catskills with Dix and hildebeast's Kosovo/muslim VILLAGE in DIX below me!

NYC and 1/2 MILLION ILLEGALS to my SE.

I'm freaking surrounded!!!

But what's worse? NO NEWS.........NO OUTRAGE..........NO ONE KNOWS!!
{except the immediate neighborhoods}

Did you see in the article where the residents wondered why the FBI didn't shut them down?
I wonder why too. Please tell me this isn't more political correctness. PC is going to get us all killed!
The article says that alot of the Muslims there are ex cons...and that there are weapons there, ex cons are not supposed to be around weapons....so I am just not understanding.....why would they let them stay there unbothered?

I found this article to go along with the one above. It also ties in to the Home Grown Fort Dix Six.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities ... rticle=996

Sheikh Gilani's American Disciples
What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?
by Mira L. Boland
03/18/2002, Volume 007, Issue 26

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra's founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf's decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra's communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra's criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group's continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn't exist.



SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani's close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra's early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra's principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Lela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.



FUQRA'S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver's licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare "pledged" to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, "I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well." Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to "abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra."

Several documents described the activities and code of the "Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5," who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed "Incogs" instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed "targeting packets" on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn't yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric's mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was "a carbon copy of the handwritten plan," said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque's kitchen at night, proceeding by "the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic]," and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa's death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.



FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of "recon team," "guard team," and "hit team" roles, and a description of how "time delay" bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would "allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout." A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of "conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life." A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators' arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, "Muslims of the Americas" and Sheikh Gilani's "Quranic Open University." On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani's own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their "foremost duty" was "to wage Jihad" against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani's poems is entitled "We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun." Another exhorts, "Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say 'Victory is in the air' / The kafir's [infidel's] blood will not be spared."

Gilani's appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: "We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us."

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who's who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an "ex"-Pakistani intelligence official. In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of "Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!," and (in Arabic) "Death to the Jews!"

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. "Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university," he said, "they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them."



THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani's current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors' "tightening the leash" after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra's core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a "cost effective" strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy's CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay's 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra's compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers' compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made "straw purchases" of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers' compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall's arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: "Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan."

And apparently the travel isn't all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted "many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic." Pakistan, of course, isn't an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra's American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra's headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani's U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake." At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.


Mira L. Boland's articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.


© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

In the Way of the Prophet: Ideologies and Institutions in Dearborn, Michigan, America's Muslim Capitol

by Patrick Belton
Printable Version


Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Rahim: on Fridays in America’s Muslim capital of Dearborn, Michigan, the ancient Islamic sentence of invocation wafts over the blighted streets of greater Detroit, drifting out from residents gathering for prayer.

The blighted streets lined with hourly-rental motels that lead from Detroit into the suburb of Dearborn gradually give way to busy avenues dotted with mosques and thriving small businesses. Arabic signs advertise attorneys and physicians, passers-by speak Levantine and Gulf dialects of Arabic, and on the sidewalks women wear the colorful headscarves of hijab.

Dearborn is a microcosm of the Middle East planted in the Midwestern United States. The roughly 40,000 of Dearborn’s 100,000 residents that are Arab American defy the myth many Americans hold of a unified Muslim world, filled with parading masses bearing the likeness of Ayatollah Khomenei. While there are some radical Islamists, Dearborn’s growing Muslim population runs the gamut from international traders to educated professionals to local business owners. Every Arab nationality and religious sect is found here, from Yemeni traditionalism to secular modernity.

Dearborn was founded as the first overnight stop on the stagecoach route linking Detroit to Chicago. Its streets are named for the German Catholics who have since given way to Polish and Italian Americans, whom Arab immigrants and their descendents, in turn, are replacing. Southfield Freeway separates the city’s Western and Eastern worlds, roughly demarcating three neighborhoods: Southend is now mostly populated by Yemenis; East Dearborn is a bustling Lebanese community of Arab restaurants, bakeries, and halal butchers; and West Dearborn’s residential streets remain populated by Italian and Polish ethnics.

The Muslim presence in metropolitan Detroit dates to the last decade of the 19th century, when men from the Lebanese Biqa Valley, working as peddlers and traders, followed a larger number of Lebanese Christian emigrees to the U.S. When Henry Ford began to offer generous five-dollar daily wages for workers at his Highland Park assembly line in 1913, Detroit became the predominant destination for Lebanese immigrants. Immigration accelerated when Lebanon’s economy fell apart in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse at the end of World War I. The restrictive National Origins Act of 1924 reduced Lebanese immigration to a trickle, but over the next twenty years, wives and dependent children, whom the Act still allowed to immigrate, gradually reunited with their husbands and fathers. In 1927, Ford shifted operations to the Rouge River plant in his native Dearborn, and a Muslim neighborhood soon followed.

By the close of World War II, the Dearborn population numbered about 200 families. Most subsequent immigrants–Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi–arrived in Dearborn as political refugees, with only Yemenis coming to Dearborn in this period primarily for economic opportunity (see sidebar). Collectively, the communities in Dearborn represent the second largest concentration of both Arabs and Muslims outside the Middle East, behind only Paris.

East and West in Dearborn Mosques

The evolution of Dearborn mosques reflects the ongoing debate since the late 1960s between conservative and liberal elements of American Muslim society. Conservative movements, including Islamic revivalism, can be traced to Middle Eastern influences such as the Iranian Revolution, which parts of Dearborn embraced when the spiritual guide of Hizbollah, Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, spoke to an enthusiastic audience of Shi’a refugees in neighboring Southfield’s Bonnie Brook Country Club. More religious than political in appeal, Islamic revivalism tries to stem the tide of integration into non-Islamic American society. Liberal movements descend both from the secular pan-Arabic movement pioneered by former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser–Nasserism–and from American influences such as the Civil Rights Movement. Liberals work to construct a distinct Arab American identity and incorporate it into mainstream American life.

Dearborn Mosque–the second mosque ever built in the nation–was gradually raised on Southend’s Dix Road between the 1930s and 1950s. In 1976, it saw the conflict between Americanizing and Arabizing ideologies come to a head when Palestinian-born Hajj Fawzi, leading a group of Yemeni and Palestinian immigrants called the musalee’een, broke into the mosque one Friday when it was closed for prayer and occupied it. Later, they wrested legal control of the mosque, through board elections and litigation, and invited to the imamate a young Yemeni sheikh of the conservative Wahhabist tradition. The new imam banned a women’s group from the mosque when they protested his prohibition of weddings and fundraising events from the mosque’s basement. And he required women who wished to attend the mosque to enter through a side door, don hijab, and keep to certain areas of the mosque.

The sheikh’s tenure was short–he was forced to resign and return to Yemen after molesting a twelve-year old girl–but the Yemeni and conservative takeover of the mosque was complete. With time it has come to reflect the Yemeni Zaydi sect of Sunni Islam and has become known as the Yemeni Zaydi Dearborn Mosque. Only Arabic has been spoken there in the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, the musalee’een began to broadcast the daily calls to prayer over loudspeakers, to the annoyance of some Southend residents. The city of Dearborn attempted to end the broadcasts but was prevented when the courts ruled that the broadcasts constituted the Muslim equivalent of church bells.

More liberal observers of Islam founded their own places of worship. In the 1960s, the most significant of Dearborn’s–and the nation’s–mosques was founded by the highly educated, English-speaking Lebanese Imam Mohamed Chirri. Invited by a group of Dearborn Muslims to serve as the imam of a new place of worship, Chirri began fundraising for a mosque on Joy Road, several blocks across the Detroit border from East Dearborn. Imam Chirri, having befriended one of Nasser’s acquaintances in Lebanon, raised $44,000 from Nasser himself, $7,000 from Jordan, and sizable amounts from the local community.

Imam Chirri’s support for the Americanization of the Islamic community was so pronounced in the 1950s and ‘60s that the imam often appeared in public wearing a business suit and no turban. At the mosque he founded, the Islamic Center for America, or the Jami’, English and Arabic were used equally, and Sunday services for a time became the principal services of the week, drawing whole families as well as men.

The Balance of Left and Right

Imam Chirri sought to construct the Jami’, as an ideologically broad church, and served well as statesman both in responding to pressures from his more conservative constituencies as well as in casting a favorable public image of his religion in America. He was always grateful to Nasser for financial support, defending him publicly when Nasserism had waned as a popular Arab ideology. Initially distancing himself from the Palestinian cause–early on, he counseled Palestinian activists to resign themselves to the reality of Israeli’s statehood and the need for a two-state solution–as his mosque filled with Lebanese refugees, Chirri became publicly opposed to Israel.

In response to the conservative desires of recent immigrants, some changes have taken place–hijab is now common practice, where it had not been before, and the use of the Center for wedding dances and other communal celebrations, common until the 1960s, has ceased. Some Americanized Muslims in Dearborn feel that the arrival of more conservative immigrants has diverted the earlier project of creating an Islamic community that was at once truly Islamic and American.

Imam Chirri died in 1994 and was succeeded by Imam Sayed Hassan Qazwini. Both attained positions of national prominence as the day’s most visible imam during their tenures; Qazwini occasionally serves as an informal consultant to the White House on American Muslim issues. And on a more local level, Qazwini has undertaken projects of unprecedented scale in the community, including a new $15 million complex near the two college campuses on Ford Road and a Muslim American Youth Academy with 170 day students, from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Chirri’s project to balance the left and right of Dearborn’s Muslim populace did not go uncontested. Rejecting the centrism and Americanization of the Islamic Center, several more conservative mosques were founded in Dearborn in the 1980s. Most recently, the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center opened in 1993 as a community center for Iraqi Shi’a refugees. The center lies in a 6,000 square-foot hall on Warren Avenue that had earlier housed a nightclub–Club Gay Haven.

Grown From a Backroom

Places of worship have not been the sole forum for the conversation regarding the role of religion in the lives of Dearborn’s Muslim community. The debate has extended into non-sectarian Arab organizations, and even into municipal government. Secular Arab organizations, such as the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), founded by Donnie Unis in 1967 and presently led by Ishmael Ahmed, have struggled to find a niche for themselves in a diverse community. ACCESS emerged when a group of young, second-generation Arab Americans, influenced by the war in Vietnam and by contact with the Black Panthers, came together to become more politically involved with the local Arab community. Local mosques initially disparaged the organization as an institutional competitor run by radicals and atheists. On two occasions, ACCESS’s first building was victim to arson.

The first years of ACCESS’s history were characterized by great idealism but little institutional development. According to its current vice president, Hassan Jaber, ACCESS’s founders were “more used to discussing political theory than delivering services.â€