Local TV News Looks at Jamaat ul-Fuqra

 
An alert reader (Update: Snarking Dawg has given permission to be acknowledged as my source) from New York writes that his local WNYW-TV FOX 5 News did a report on the “Islamberg” Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound near Hancock.

I just wanted to let you know that our local Fox news affiliate in NYC just did an extensive report on ‘Islamberg’ in upstate NY. Here is their website, WNYW-TV Fox 5 News, although there is nothing on it about the report just yet.

I wish I had known it was coming on so I could have taped it.

The reporter walked into the camp with a hidden camera. The place looked pretty barren with a few beat up trailers. There was a schoolbus which looked like it had been shot up. The reporter encountered 2 black Muslims who were actually kind of friendly. They said they did have guns and occasionally shot them off when celebrating weddings. Yeah right. The report mentioned the financial problems one of the leaders was having and how the IRS had confiscated his business.

The reporter confronted him with the recent internet report from the Northeast Intelligence Network… they laughed and said it was all a product of the Jew media. They also hinted that 9/11 was a part of some larger Jewish conspiracy. They brought up the tired misrepresentation that the Air Force was ordered to stand down on the morning of 9/11, apparently to allow the attack.

They also spoke with a couple of townspeople. One gentleman said prior to 9/11 he had seen them training in fatigues but said they had been relatively quiet since. A local sheriff said they basically keep to themselves and aren’t a bother.

The people that Fox 5 interviewed in the compound are followers of Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, the charismatic fundamentalist Pakistani Islamic leader, and founder of Jamaat ul-Fuqra. CP’s latest report on the group is here. It’s the same organization that has several compounds here in Virginia, as I reported last October.

The Islamberg people may be just regular folks like you and me, members of our great national rainbow coalition, misunderstood and misrepresented by the media, with their unfortunate anti-semitic comments taken totally out of context. But I wouldn’t bet on it. To recap the sheikh’s background, I remind you of the 2002 article in The Weekly Standard:

Fuqra’s founder and chief, the man [Daniel] 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.

I hope that local TV reporter knew what he was getting into when he walked into Islamberg. A reading of his tea leaves might show the Federal Witness Protection Program in his future.


Update: CP has a post up about this. He’s got a lot more detail than I do, because the reporter actually talked to him.

…they were approached and spoke to a couple of the compound’s residents. Asking to see “the boss,” they were told he was in the city and wouldn’t be back until later, but then he showed up rather mysteriously. “The boss” was Hussain Abdallah, reportedly one of the early organizers of Fuqra in the United States and the guy that runs “786 Security” in Brooklyn. Abdallah said that his business had been raided by the IRS in Dec. 03 and the case was in process. The reporter said that a legal search of judgements or liens might turn something up. He owes something like $300K to the Feds and $40-50K to the state in taxes.

Go over and read the whole thing.