Home Grown Terrorism
New York’s Catskill Mountains is an area I have seen. As a teenager, my father had to go through technical school in Poughkeepsie, New York and we lived in Kingston while he did that - twice. The Catskills are absolutely beautiful. An area I used to hunt in with a few of the natives was dubbed “The Valley of the Blue Moon” by us - it didn’t matter which way you looked, the view was always gorgeous.
Now it seems that a training camp for radical Islamics is located next to this American beauty. There seems to be all sorts of information about how dangerous, threatening, and intimidating the occupants are - including a helluva lot of gunfire. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has noted the most recent story in the Canada Free Press:
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?”
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.”
CFP also notes the connections the leader of this group, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, an Islamic Pakistani:
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.
A security site in India describes Jamaat ul-Fuqra in a less than positive light:
The JF, in its early phase, sought to counter what is perceived as excessive Western influence on Islam. It also concluded that violence was a significant aspect in its quest to purify Islam. In its ideological moorings, the Fuqra regards as enemies of Islam all those who do not follow the tenets of Islam as laid out in the Koran, including those Muslims who they consider as heretics as well as non-Muslims. One of Gilani’s works published by the Quranic Open University in the US and seized in a 1991-investigation instructed his cadres that their foremost duty was to wage Jehad against the ‘oppressors of Muslims’. Members of the group are described as Islamist extremists with much hatred toward their ‘enemies’.
And this isn’t the first report of this conclave. The name of this homegrown Islamic training camp is may be Islamberg but the group who runs the place has been well documented by a web site called The Politics of CP. They have a digest of the group that calls Islamberg, New York (just out of Hancock) their American home - and training camp.
In April 2005, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service made available a report (94 pages) that was published in September 2004 (as part of a federal grant) by the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). The report is titled, “Identifying the Links between White-Collar Crime and Terrorism” [subtitle: “For the Enhancement of Local and State Law Enforcement Investigation and Prosecution”]
This report focused on the white collar crimes “associated with terrorism, including credit card fraud, insurance fraud, identity theft, intellectual property crime, investment fraud, money laundering, immigration fraud, computer crime, and tax evasion.” These crimes are committed to support other activities in which the group may be involved. The case study that made up the bulk of this report was a very large multi-agency investigation of Jamaat ul-Fuqra by officials in Colorado that spread across many states and led to several convictions.
“Members of the Fuqra group have raised money by taking advantage of a variety of social services programs, including worker’s compensation, public health care, welfare, and food stamps programs. Other crimes committed by Fuqra members include the creation and use of false identification cards, birth certificates, and other forged documents…”
I read through this report and took note of a number of what I thought were some key details about the group. The group has been around awhile. The report says, “The first investigation of Fuqra was initiated by the FBI in 1983,” and it refers to Fuqra as “one of the most elusive terrorist groups resident in the U.S.”
If this sounds a little “odd”, think of it more as a little “scary”. These people are using the freedom of this country’s constitution to cover their activities - and to protect their sorry asses from having to be responsible members of a republic. Read through the above links. There’s much more information. Including a few eye opening quotes about the leader of this Islamic group - Sheik Mubarak Ali Gilani.
Spencer urges you to write your congressional representatives - in both houses I would add.
I doing just that.
