Sheriffs
sound off on Islamic 'terror camps' in U.S. Do locations inside America pose threat? By Leo Hohmann 1/21/15
Sheriff John Carter of Wayne County, Georgia, received a hot tip
in February last year that he remembers well.
The caller said he had reason to believe the Muslims of America,
a mysterious Islamic commune with cult-like devotion to a radical Pakistani
sheikh, was building underground bunkers on its land near the tiny town of
Jesup.
He immediately paid a visit to the reclusive Muslim group’s
compound, where Mecca Circle turns off of Oreo Road several miles north town.
About 38 people live in the commune, where women wear burqas and the men don
the skullcap common among Suni Muslims.
“We haven’t had a lot of crime out there. They have not been
unfriendly or rude in any way. They do want their privacy. It is a concern.
We’re monitoring them, and I believe they’re monitored federally, although I
don’t know that for sure because they’re not going to tell you,” Carter told
WND. “But most of the concerns that bring us out there have come from outside
the county.”
The sheriff has a file in his office about an inch thick titled
“Mecca Circle,” filled with articles and CDs about the clannish Muslim enclave
that keeps an extremely low profile in Wayne County.
And what about the report about those “bunkers?”
“I personally went up there, February a year ago, because this
person was saying they were putting in bunkers,” he said.
He inquired of the leader, a man named Kareem, who led him to a
site where the ground had been disturbed.
“They were replacing a septic tank,” Carter said.
Most police calls to the 22 MOA compounds nationwide have
resulted in similar “false alarms,” as residents are understandably upset when
they find out they have a possible jihadist training camp operating in their
county, or even their state or region.
There has been a few crimes committed by MOA members in Wayne
County, Carter said, but nothing approaching an act of terrorism.
“The only thing I can recall, and I was chief deputy for 16
years before I became sheriff, was two of them did an armed robbery at a liquor
store some years ago. We caught them and they went to prison,” Carter said.
“There’s eight trailers out there on Mecca Circle, one vacant lot, a frame
house and a mosque facing the east. I haven’t seen much more than that.”
The remote compound outside of Jesup is the smaller of two MOA
encampments in Georgia whose members swear allegiance to Sheikh Mubarak Ali
Gilani, the Pakistani cleric and spiritual leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra. The
group’s U.S. headquarters, Muslims of America, is in Hancock County, at the
foot of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, at a place called
Islamberg.
At another compound in Red House, Virginia, the local sheriff’s
office says they have about 20 trailer homes and a mosque. Another large
compound exists in York County, S.C., with others in Michigan, Tennessee,
California and other states.
The Virginia camp, in a
remote area of Charlotte County, also happens to be the closest to the
Lynchburg office of Christian Action Network, an activist group led by Martin
Mawyer that produced the documentary film “Homegrown Jihad.” The film takes a
critical look at Muslims of America and Jamaat al-Fuqra. The network’s film
crew has visited the compound in Virginia several times.
Maj. Donald Lacks of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office told
WND that the sheriff does not consider MOA to be a threat and he doesn’t take
seriously the information put out by Mawyer and others about the network of 22
“jihadist training camps.”
But the phone calls and
visits from concerned Americans continue to occur intermittently, mostly from
folks outside Charlotte County, Lacks said. They often occur after an article
has been published, such as WND’s story last week about the MOA communes.
“These people live there, they have their own mosque there. They
don’t bother us. I’ve gotten a couple calls this week from West Virginia where
they’re reading on the Internet what a militant place we have here and that’s
not what it is,” Lacks said. “They’ve been here a good while, probably 10 to 15
years. It’s not a city, it’s a residential area, probably 15 or 20 mobile homes
there and a mosque. We go there all the time. It might be a civil paper we’re
serving or it might be to unlock a vehicle. Routine stuff.”
‘Nosy people’ are the problem
Lacks said he’s never been inside the mosque, but he has entered
the commune.
“I have an officer that lives within a mile and a half of that
community. There are no complaints. The only complaints I get are from people
who read articles that are not true. We’re a rural county but we have residents
living near there and have no complaints,” he continued. “The biggest problem
we have is people driving here from outside the area being nosy, trying to find
out what we have here. They give us more problems than the Muslims.”
Lacks had harsh words for the Christian Action Network and its
investigative work.
“They’ve been banned from here. They fly over and drop numerous
pamphlets. One of them got charged. I believe it was for littering. They’ve got
it in their minds that these people are militant and wanting to kill
everybody,” Lacks said. “Well, that’s not been our experience here.”
Mawyer stands by the
accuracy of his 2012 book, “Twilight of America,” which he co-authored
with Patti Pierucci, and their documentary film, “Homegrown Jihad.” He said one of the
group’s members was charged with littering but the charge was quickly thrown
out of court.
When his film crew showed up at the compound in Red House they
were greeted by hostile Muslim of Americas members. The leader of the group
confronted the crew as they exited their car.
“Leave,” he said. “Don’t say another word. Leave, period. You
understand?”
As the crew drove off, the Muslim leader struck their car window
with his cane (watch film clip below).
“We toured a lot of
these camps and by and large all the camps have a pretty good working
relationship with the police department or the sheriff that is in the immediate
area,” Mawyer told WND. “Whenever we’ve tried to meet with any of these police
agencies and present our findings they won’t let us in to show any of the
evidence. Maybe it’s just to keep their heads buried in the sand because they
certainly don’t approach this group with any degree of seriousness.”
He said local sheriffs refused to take a
serious look at evidence indicating that MOA has its roots in the jihadist
ideology of its Pakistani leader and, according to Mawyer’s research, is a
ticking bomb “ready to go off.”
When Mawyer approached residents living near
the encampments, he says he found plenty of nervous neighbors.
“If you talk to the people that live there
they will express a great deal of fear of these people for the most part,
although you always have some that will tell you they have no problem with
what’s going on,” he said. “You can imagine how much more heightened that fear
would be if the local sheriff said they have a terrorist camp in their county.
“So I think that is why the sheriffs are
reluctant to criticize this group.”
Mawyer also believes Gilani selected the
remote, rural outposts for a reason.
“They know these are small communities that
don’t have the resources to regularly monitor what’s going on,” he said.
Group not on federal
radar, at least not officially
In the 1990s, the U.S. State Department listed
Jamaat al-Fuqra under “other terrorist organizations” in a document called
“Patterns of Global Terrorism.”
That was after a raid on a Colorado camp
turned up a stash of AK-47 assault rifles and pipe bombs that were primed and
ready to fire. More troubling, however, was a recruitment video captured in the
raid in which Sheikh Gilani boasts, “We have an advanced training course in
Islamic military warfare.”
At some point around 1997 Gilani and his
network of camps dropped off the federal watch list.
“We did away with that section many years ago
and only list the groups that are designated as Foreign Terrorist
Organizations,” said Rhonda Shore, press secretary for the State Department’s
Bureau of Counterterrorism, in an email to WND.
The administration of President Barack Obama
has preferred to deal with domestic terrorist threats in terms of more generic
“violent extremism,” avoiding at all cost the term “Islamic” or “terrorist”
when describing incidents such as the Fort Hood shooting by Maj. Nidal Hason
that claimed 13 lives. That incident, like others, have been designated as
“work place violence.”
The White House announced last week it will now move forward with plans to host a previously
delayed summit on “violent extremism” on Feb. 18.
While the federal
government treads gingerly through the weeds of Islamic radicals, it has
expressed no such reticence in calling out “radical right wing” extremists such
as pro-life people and disgruntled veterans, citing them in a 2009 report as potential terrorists. This trend has its
roots in the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas,
during the Clinton administration in 1993, and the FBI’s fatal shooting a year
earlier of Randy Weaver’s wife, son and dog at Ruby Ridge under President
George H.W. Bush.
The White House later pulled the 2009 report
following a strong backlash from conservatives in Congress.
Frank Spano, executive director of the Counter
Terrorism Institute, said in a 2013 interview with WUSA9, a CBS affiliate in
Washington, D.C., that the differences in the federal government’s approach to right
wing extremism and Islamic extremism are stark.
“It’s almost to the point now where we buy
their story upfront: ‘Oh, we’re just a group of individuals, like-minded, who
choose to live together and defend ourselves,’” Spano said. “Well, that was the
same case with the Branch Davidians at Waco.”
Spano said that outlook is “dangerous.”
“That’s the terrorist next door,” he said.
“That’s where the U.S. really needs to reconsider how we address these
organizations.”
A known ‘jihadist’
organization
Because Jamaat
al-Fuqra and Muslims of America are not on the State Department’s foreign
terrorist list, state and local law enforcement have less freedom to monitor
them, said Clare Lopez, vice president of research and analysis for the Center for
Security Policy in Washington, D.C.
“I don’t know if Jamaat al-Fuqra has ties to
al-Qaida, but they are known to be a jihadist organization,” Lopez said.
“They’re definitely jihadist in their ideology, and what’s concerning is they
are in the U.S.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was
investigating Jamaat al-Fuqra in 2002 and was on his way to interview Gilani in
Pakistan when he was kidnapped and beheaded.
“And the one who did the beheading was Khalid
Sheikh Muhammad (the al-Qaida operative considered the architect of the 9/11
attacks),” Lopez said. “A lot of these groups are not formally connected. But
they are jihadist and any group with a jihadi ideology is linked by Islam.
Sometimes they do cooperate across organizational structures.”
Iran helps fund Hamas, for instance, even
though Iran is Shiite and Hamas is Sunni Muslim.
“It’s the fundamental ideology that binds them
even when the sectarian differences might divide them,” Lopez said. “All of
Islamic doctrine divides the world into Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, and
it’s the Dar al-Harb that becomes the target either through conquest or through
civilizational jihad… so they do cooperate against the enemy, which is us.”
Three criteria must be met for a group to get
placed on the State Department’s foreign terrorist list: The group must be
foreign based, it must have committed violent acts, and it must be deemed a
national-security threat. The State Department reviews its list every two
years.
The Center for Security
Policy released a study Jan. 16 that outlines a new strategy Lopez says would provide a more
systematic and thorough assessment of the global jihadist threat, both at home
and abroad.
Sleeper cells
waiting to wake up?
A group like Jamaat al-Fuqra could be a
sleeper cell that lies dormant for years, only to be activated one day by its
leader, analysts such as Lopez and Spano surmise. It has not carried out any
organized acts of violence for more than a decade.
“It’s troubling, because we’ve got this
network of dozens of encampments across the U.S. and of course it’s not like
the no-go zones in Europe because these are out in the countryside and
neighbors report that they have heard gunfire inside the encampments but gun
ownership in America is legal,” Lopez said. “So you would need a warrant,
probable cause, all these things. It’s just been difficult for law
enforcement.”
Even if a local sheriff wanted to thoroughly
investigate MOA, there is no legal basis for doing so because they operate on
private property and have separated themselves from society under the premise
that they are practicing their religion.
“That is pretty clever of the group,” Lopez
said. “Our Jan. 16 report is a national strategy to defeat the global jihad
movement, recognizing it is not only a religion, because a religion is
pietistic. It involves worship of a deity, maybe has a diet, rules for living,
and that’s completely covered by the First Amendment and if that was all Islam
was then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Islam also has its own legal system, shariah
law, which Lopez said could be seen as a violation of Article 6 of the U.S.
Constitution.
“So we have to stop talking about it as a
religion only. It is a totalitarian political system and supremacist in nature,
and as part of the belief system itself obligates Muslims to conquest,” she
said. “Now, happily, a big percentage of Muslims don’t want anything to do with
that.”
Lopez cites a 2013 Pew Research survey of the Muslim world, which includes 1.6 billion adherents. In
this survey, a surprising 19 percent of U.S. Muslims did not agree that suicide bombings were
never justified.
“Even if a majority of the 1.6 billion never
pick up a gun or a bomb they still go to mosque and still make donations, and
one-eighth of the donation goes to jihad. That’s according to the law of Islam.
They’re supporting it, they’re perpetrating it,” Lopez said. “So it’s not just
the ones that pick up the guns and the bombs. It’s every single parent that
allows them to go to an Islamic school. I can understand why people don’t want
to take that on. It seems pretty daunting. But if one-fifth of world’s population
is Muslim think of the other side, four-fifths are not Muslim. So we’re going
to be concerned about a backlash from the one-fifth?”
Watch the local CBS affiliate in Washington,
D.C.’s report on the 22 communes operated by Muslims of America:
WND informed Lacks that several reputable researchers, media
outlets and even the FBI itself, have documented the terrorist ties of Gilani’s
group. Comments from Gilani himself make reference to America being the “enemy”
of Islam and that he was “establishing training camps” for the “Soldiers of
Allah.”
Lacks said he had to go answer another phone call and abruptly
ended the interview with WND before he could be asked if he was aware of
specific incidents, such as the 1992 raid on MOA’s Beuna Vista, Colorado,
compound that found a cache of assault rifles and explosives, or about the
firebombing of a Hindu temple in Colorado by MOA members. The camp in Colorado
was also where a recruitment video was captured in which Gilani touted the
“Soldiers of Allah” and showed members engaging in military-type drills,
marching with rifles, setting off explosives and assaulting fictional enemies.
One police chief not convinced group is ‘peace loving’
But not all law enforcement officers are dismissive of the group
and its potential as a terrorist sleeper cell within the U.S.
John W. Gaissert, the police chief of Commerce, Georgia, near
the MOA camp in Franklin County, is a retired Navy commander who has spent a
career in law enforcement, working directly on military and civilian
counter-terrorism issues.
Gaissert was a security consultant for the 1996 Olympic Games in
Atlanta and also testified in 2010 to a U.S. House Subcommittee on
Intelligence. He believes it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamaat Fuqra and
Muslims of America as merely pietistic Muslims trying to live in peace out in
the countryside.
“Their spiritual mentor is Sheikh Gilani and his concept is to
make your enemy your friend and then kill them,” Gaissert said.
Gilani came to America in 1979 and got his start in a mosque in
New York.
“And of course the U.S. always seems to back the wrong hound,
and when the Afghans were fighting the Russians he recruited 100 men who
trained in Pakistan and then fought under Osama bin Laden,” Gaissert said. “In
any event he is a radical clerical.”
Yet, the compound on Madinah Road outside of Commerce in a
remote area of north Georgia has not had any reported acts of violence.
“You could probably surmise that all these groups are probably
on a federal radar screen, but there is no department of pre crime. We act on
intelligence but until someone commits a crime there is not much to do, we
still have a free country,” Gaissert told WND. “We’ve had no overt acts of
violence. That is not to say they are benign because if you research Jamaat
Fuqra in other parts of the country we have had acts of violence. We have not
had any violent acts from the group here but you have to look at the roots. We
have enough information to know there are specific facts that can be stated
about this particular organization.”
FBI documents show the group’s members have been tied to 10
murders, three firebombings and one attempted firebombing, as well as welfare
fraud.
“We know al-Qaida and ISIS have called for lone-wolf attacks
against law enforcement and now we’ve seen object lessons in Europe, and we’ve
also seen them in Fort Hood, Texas, and in Oklahoma, and in Boston and in New
York. This is not something to take lightly. The notion that it can’t happen
here and it can’t happen to me is pretty myopic in terms of a world view.
That’s a fatal philosophy for police.”
Mawyer said he believes the favorable treatment from local law
enforcement boils down to politics.
“You can speculate about why the local law enforcement community
always puts out such positive stuff about these groups, but put yourself in
their position. They don’t have any legal means to do anything with these
camps, and to try to face re-election every four years with the possibility
that you have a terrorist training camp in your jurisdiction, it’s just easier
to try to say these are not terrorist camps, just peace-loving people trying to
educate their own kids and do their own farming,” he said. “There’s a lot of
political pressure on these sheriffs.”
Gaissert said one thing is certain – that political correctness
has seemed into law enforcement at the federal level and some of that has
leaked down to the state and local levels.
“It seems that if an attack is sponsored or directed by a
terrorist organization they will label it a terrorist act. But if an act or
event is jihadist inspired, that is by someone who was radicalized by a
teaching in a mosque or over the Internet, they will not call it an act of
terrorism,” he said. “But a rose by any other name is still a rose. Why would
you want to cloud the issue or deny the reality of it?”
Sheriff Stevie Thomas of Franklin County, where the larger of
the two Georgia camps has operated for years, near Commerce, did not return
repeated phone calls from WND. Sheriff Bruce Bryant of York County, S.C., which
also has a large MOA enclave, also did not return calls.
“So for any sheriff to claim that we put out false information,
they will never put a finger on anything we’ve shown that is in anyway false
because they can’t. It’s all very well researched,” Mawyer said. “We hear this
all the time, not just from sheriff’s departments. Is the video false? Are
Gilani’s own words false?”
Mawyer points to Gilani’s diatribe in the captured video from
Colorado as the most damning evidence.
“He said, ‘We are establishing the most advanced Islamic warfare
training camps and we’re in upstate New York, we’re in Georgia, we’re in
Michigan and you can reach out to join us. And America is the enemy.’”
Mawyer said he has no message for the local sheriffs who ignore
or denigrate his research.
“They have a duty to perform in their communities,” he said. “I
hope they do it well.”
“Why Sheriff Jones (of Charlotte County) feels these are nice
peaceful people, I don’t know,” he continued. “Our entire goal was just to say
‘Look, they are here and here’s what they’ve done in the past, and here’s what
they are capable of doing now.’”
What happened in Colorado in 1992 should stand as a lesson, he
said.
“They had their Colorado compound raided and shut down, and if
you were to read all the newspaper pieces from back prior to that raid it would
sound the same way — these are nice peaceful people — and then they found
cashes of weapons and explosives.”
Little chance of congressional hearings
Mawyer said he asked one congressman, “who will remain
nameless,” about holding hearings on Jamaat Fuqra and Muslims of America. His
response was jolting.
“How far would I get if I tried to advance hearings on Capitol
Hill into a group dealing with a lot of women in its camps, most are black, and
a minority religion, how far would I get?’” the congressman asked him.
“It’s like three strikes and you’re out. You’re not going to
hold a hearing on these people, because you’d be depicted as racists and
Islamophobes and anti-women,” Mawyer said. “All the facts are in the
documentary, and the book, it speaks for itself. If people want to take the
word of their sheriff’s department over what this group puts out themselves,
then so be it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment