Community of the Impoverished

There are an estimated thirty-five such communities in the United States, the closest one to our Nation’s Capital located in Falls Church, Virginia less than nine miles from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia, and less than twenty miles from Dulles International Airport (IAD) in Sterling, Virginia. They are Jamaat ul-Fuqra (JuF) (Arabic: Community of the Impoverished), an Islamist paramilitary organization based initially, in Pakistan and, since 1980, in the U.S. The Group’s founder and leader, Mubarik Ali Jilani Hasmi , is the Pakistani cleric WSJ reporter Danny Pearl was en route to interview at the Village Restaurant in downtown Karachi, Pakistan on January 23, 2002 when he was kidnapped, and nine days later beheaded, by his Islamist captors.

Jilani (alternately ‘Gilani’) founded the U.S. arm of Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Brooklyn, New York during his first visit to the U.S. in 1980. Since then, U.S. Fuqra jamaats (Arabic: assemblies or communities) have attracted many Muslim converts, including prison converts, swelling the Islamist militia’s size to an estimated 3,000, predominantly African-American, members. The group is currently headquartered in Hancock, New York.

A September 2004 National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) research report listed tax evasion; money laundering; worker’s compensation fraud; insurance fraud; bank fraud; wire fraud; marriage fraud; identification fraud; weapons violations; providing material support to terrorists; hazardous materials license fraud; and, immigration law violations among crimes for which Jamaat ul-Fuqra members have been prosecuted. Some Fuqra militiamen have been charged with conspiracy to commit capital murder. The list of Fuqra member prosecutions constitutes fourteen of the NW3C report’s ninety-four pages.

Other than distinguishing Jamaat ul-Fuqra as a magnet for recidivous ex-cons, white collar crime is not the group’s most worrisome enterprise. Basic training for Fuqra recruits has included AK-47 assault rifle, machine gun, rocket launcher, mortar and explosives training. Jamaat plebes have also been mentored in terrorism’s more nefarious methods included kidnapping, murder of hostages, sabotage, subversion, and urban warfare.

A partial list of JuF compounds in the U.S. (hat tip to The Foxhole ) includes: Deposit, NY; Hancock, NY (national HQ); Springfield, MA; Philadelphia, PA; Hyattsville, MD; Bethany, WV; Dover, TN; York County, SC; Augusta, GA; Commerce, GA; Macon, GA; Marion, AL; Houston, TX; Talihina, OK; Coldwater, MI; Buena Vista, CO (raided and shut down by CO authorities in 1992); Baladullah, CA (leader convicted of embezzling $1.3-million in 2006; compound abandoned); Oak Hill, CA; and Onalaska, WA.

The existence of Jamaat ul-Fuqra and similar groups in the United States is a matter of serious concern for federal, state and local law enforcement organizations, many of which maintain dossiers on militant groups that they distribute to partners and individuals with “a need to know.” This information is often withheld from the general public for a variety of reasons, particularly when disclosure might compromise an active investigation or prosecution. Nevertheless, forewarned is forearmed and infidels living within rocket or mortar range of JuF compounds ought to know about them as soon as reasonably possible, if for no other reason than to enlist their support.

A February 19, 2009 Human Events article by the indispensable Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch points out that Jamaat ul-Fuqra wasn’t on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) , even though “Justice and DHS [were] obviously aware of what [was] going on.” CBS News acquitted itself with equal fecklessness in its reporting, according to Spencer, by ridiculing Christian Action Network’s (CAN) compelling, two-years-in-the-making video documentary on JuF that had premiered in Washington, D.C. the week before. The CAN documentary included damning video of Fuqra militia engaged in urban warfare exercises, footage the CAN investigative team captured at great risk to themselves by crossing the perimeter of many JuF compounds. True to form, CBS News ignored the compelling CAN video footage and emphasized the documentary’s “incendiary” content instead.

With the exception of FOX News and the Blogosphere, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has been largely ignored by Big Media. Despite numerous Internet postings exposing the group’s proclivity for terrorism, dedication to Islamic jihad, and Fuqra members’ aggregate criminal history, most Americans have never heard of the organization.

So what’s the big deal about 3,000 Islamist militiamen out of an 81% urban-dwelling U.S. population of 312 million?  Well, it depends on which “house” you live in. In Islamic jurisprudence there are two. Anyone who isn’t Dar al-Islam (Arabic: “house of Islam”) is, by definition, Dar al-Harb (Arabic: “house of war”). All “infidels” (i.e. non-Muslims) are harbis which puts most Americans in the camp of “the enemy” Jilani and his cabal are “fighting to destroy.” “Live and let live” devotees should know that there are no “noncombatants” in Islamists’ twisted “rules of engagement” as the barbarous murders of Danny Pearl by self-identified members of The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty (NMRPS) in 2002 and Smadar Haran Kaiser’s family by Palestine Liberation Front terrorists in 1979 attest.

After abducting and beheading Pearl, his Islamist executioners divvied up his body and buried the Jewish journalist’s severed head and dissevered body, ten pieces in all, in a shallow grave in Gadap, about thirty miles north of Karachi. Kaiser’s account (The World Should Know What He Did to My Family) of the equally-gruesome murders of her husband and two daughters appeared in the Washington Post on May 18, 2003 under the title, “The World Should Know What He Did to My Husband” (section B, B02):

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day.  My Husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border.  Around midnight ... four terrorists [from Lebanon], sent by Abu six miles south of the Lebanese border.  Around midnight ... four terrorists [from Lebanon], sent by Abu Abbas … landed in a rubber boat on the beach [and] burst into our building … Outside, we could hear the men storming about.  Desperately, we sought to hide … I went [into the crawl space over our bedroom] with Yael in my arms … Danny grabbed Einat and [dashed] out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.  They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael … [I, knowing] if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed … kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe … the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach … one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see.  Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt … By the time we were rescued from the crawl space … Yael, too, was dead.  In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The murders of Danny Pearl and Smadar Haran Kaiser’s husband and two daughters are not anomalies on Islamists’ endless rap sheet. Putting a COEXIST bumper sticker on one's will accomplish nothing; only conversion to Islam will.

Fast forward to Wednesday, October 27, 2010, the day jihadist Farooque Ahmed of Ashburn, Virginia was arrested by the FBI. Before Ahmed’s arrest, FBI surveillance had determined that he was an al-Qa'ida spotter providing support to the international Islamist terror network’s plan to bomb multiple targets in the Washington area. Dr. Walid Phares, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. and Director of FDD’s Future of Terrorism Project says Ahmed’s multi-site bombing plan reflects an ominous emerging trend in jihadi strategy in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Phares also noted that the Ahmed case is consistent with his research and analysis findings which suggest a strategic, coordinated targeting of U.S. urban centers by jihadist groups operating inside our borders.

Use “coordinated” in conjunction with “targeting of U.S. urban centers” suggests that JuF is not the only U.S.-based Islamist group intent on using terrorism as a means of claiming America for Allah. In fact, there are several as a perusal of the Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation (NEFA Foundation) website makes readily apparent. This suggests that other groups like Jamaat ul-Fuqra got the same urban jihad memo that Ahmed did. Islamist groups like JuF exist for one overarching purpose—Jihad, and they will not remain latent forever.
Jamaat ul-Fuqra and similar groups are emboldened by U.S. authorities’ reluctance to shut them down, even when their stated ambitions are ample justification for doing so. Furthermore, Dar al-Islam interprets equivocation as weakness and weakness in Dar al-Harb is provocation to Dar al-Islam. Jihadist groups are seizing on America’s lack of resolve to increase their foothold and expand their operations in the United States.

A dangerous ideology-driven movement aided and abetted by bromidic public policy and superficial journalism, has been steadily accruing power and leverage within our legislative, legal, educational, military, national security and industrial establishments for decades while America fights herself out on preventing terrorism.  Now in our tenth year since 9/11, many are just discovering that Islamist ideology is the animating principle behind Islamist terror and Islamists’ efforts to supplant our way of life with Shari’ah. The fact that the post-9/11 decade was only the first of fifteen-rounds in an epic fight for Western Civilization's survival is enough to make anyone want to throw in the towel. We might even want to shut our eyes like CBS News did, tap our heels together, and chant “Islam is a religion of peace” until ul-Fuqra goes away. If only.

Chanting “hopey-changey” platitudes might have worked in the Land of Oz, but Jihad is no allegory and “Islam” as “a religion of peace” is wishful thinking, wastes precious time and provokes our enemies. It is only a matter of precious time before Jamaat ul-Fuqra militiamen or members of some other Islamist terror group apply the training they have received, in a U.S. city.