The Jihad Next Door

As longtime readers know, three and a half years ago I took an interest in Jamaat ul-Fuqra because two of its compounds — Red House and Meherrin — are quite close to us. As I researched JuF and its front organization, the Muslims of America, I discovered that there was almost nothing new available online — after the Beltway sniper crisis of 2002 had faded out of the news, further coverage of the group had dried up.

So I took a little ride that October afternoon and began my investigation. Immediately afterwards CP, the Christian Action Network, and other dedicated investigators picked up the ball and ran with it, and now internet users can find a wealth of information about Syed Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, the sheikh from Pakistan, who founded Jamaat ul-Fuqra and is the emir of its rural training compounds scattered throughout the United States.

Don’t believe the skeptics who dismiss all this information. Scroll down our sidebar to the Jamaat ul-Fuqra section and start with my first report, or check out the Charlotte County Files, which is the single most comprehensive source on JuF and MOA available on the internet — most of it drawn from U.S. government material.

In other words, we’re not making any of this up. I discovered, as did Martin Mawyer and Christian Action Network, that there are rural communities across the USA whose residents are terrified of the well-armed prison-recruited Islamic fundamentalists who are living in their midst.

Some of these people are too frightened by their Muslim neighbors to go on record about their experiences. I have talked to them myself, and found out that they don’t trust the federal government or local law enforcement to protect them from the mujahideen of JuF, when push comes to shove.

So this post is dedicated to them, and to all the other people around the country who are learning the hard way that they will have to take of their own.

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Martin Mawyer, Jason Campbell, and the other brave people of the Christian Action Network have spent the last three years researching, videotaping, and gathering material for their documentary Homegrown Jihad. They have done the country a tremendous service, and I recommend that you visit the CAN site and get yourself a copy of the DVD.

Full disclosure: I know Marty and Jason, and I have worked with them in the past, pooling information, sharing tips, and chronicling their group’s efforts to force the Charlotte County authorities to rename “Sheikh Gilani Lane”. So I’m not a disinterested party.

However, I can assure you that this documentary is a careful and accurate summary of what is known about Sheikh Gilani, the Muslims of America, and Jamaat ul-Fuqra. It’s not absolutely comprehensive — after all, they had to fit everything into an hour-long video — but it is a well-crafted introduction.

Marty and Jason did an enormous amount of legwork to put it all together. When you watch their visits to Islamberg in New York, or the compound in Commerce, Georgia, or the newly-discovered camp in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, you’ll see that these two guys have more thatchers than most people.

Their biggest coup was obtaining Sheikh Gilani’s terrorist training video, “Soldiers of Allah”. Over the years the Sheikh has repeatedly insisted on the peaceful nature of his group, and denied that it has any connection with violence or terrorism. But when you watch his training video, you’ll hear Gilani himself explaining to the camera that he is setting up camps in the USA for the “Soldiers of Allah”. You’ll also see him supervising the mujahideen, participating in some of the training, and actually firing automatic weapons.

And most tellingly of all, you’ll hear him admonish his followers in the USA to make sure that they don’t let his video fall into the wrong hands. Be careful, he says: no unauthorized copies!
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Alas for Sheikh Gilani! One of his people failed to heed his warning, and with the publication of Homegrown Jihad, his secret training video has now been spread far and wide.

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During the course of the documentary, several residents of MOA compounds are interviewed, both on and off camera. About halfway through the movie, a brief quote from one of these fellows stuck out like a sore thumb.

When confronted with Sheikh Gilani’s terrorist training video, “Assad” said:

“So Muslims got secret groups, Americans got secret groups, Russians got secret groups…”

That is, Assad doesn’t consider himself an American. To him, Islam is a nation, equivalent to Russia and the United States.

This is the crux of our problem.

Muslims are clear about it: Islam is a nation. The Ummah is a single political entity, just like China or France.

But we don’t recognize it as such. Our countries don’t have diplomatic relations with Islam. We can’t declare war on Islam. Our enemies, the terrorist operatives of the Great Jihad, are innocent civilians until we catch them with a smoking AK-47 — or pick up their scattered pieces after they blow themselves up in a bus full of innocent civilians. They are always non-combatants, and must be accorded the full protection of the law in our countries.

Yet they are at war with us. They are in no doubt about it. If you pay attention to what they say in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, you will find them to be quite straightforward.

The nation of Islam is at war with all the nations of infidels.

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Last week I was invited to the first official public viewing of Homegrown Jihad in Washington D.C. After the movie was screened, Marty, Jason, and Peter Leitner took questions from the audience and led a discussion about the problem of domestic terrorist groups and what can be done about them.

One thing was quite clear: the federal government does not seem interested in addressing the problem. All the local law enforcement agencies that Marty and Jason dealt with in the field were interested in his research and eager to learn more. But not the feds — the issue of MOA is too difficult and thorny for Washington to deal with.

So if you live near one of these compounds — and if you’re in a rural area in the United States or Canada, there’s a fairly good chance that you do — don’t expect any assistance from the federals in dealing with them. The state police and the local cops are more likely to help, and I can testify from my own experience that the Virginia State Police take a very active interest in JuF.

Changing the federal attitude will require a lot of pressure from ordinary people. Write your senator or congressman (be polite!) and refer him to this video. When politicians feel enough heat from their constituents, they will pass it on to the bureaucrats in the FBI, Homeland Security, and the State Department.

Make sure you watch the movie all the way to the end — just before the credits there is a list of states in which Sheikh Gilani claims to have training camps, but whose exact locations are unknown. All of those camps were news to me.

And, much to my surprise, one of them is alleged to be in New Jersey. There’s not much countryside there — Fausta, are you listening?