Who Killed Daniel Pearl (47 page)

This map is interesting, of course. And, even more interesting is another, smaller map, an insert at the lower right, displaying the same “United States of Islam” in twenty years: the entire planet is colored green—the last infidel has fallen! The global
Oummah
has come to pass! But the important thing is the propaganda book itself, full of “poems” by the master, in the purest sectarian style, whose major motifs are trifold.

First, the jihad; the hymn to the “sub-machine gun,” the “true believer's” strength; and the exhortation of “our Sheikh Gilani” to “prepare one's head for sacrifice”; nostalgia for the days when the “warriors of Allah” brought Europe to its knees; and the idea that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, a third world war had begun, from which Islam would emerge victorious.

Next, the theme of purity; the idea that Islam has been “corrupted” by too long a contact with the West and with Westerners; the obsession with a return to the sources of the true Faith, in spite of all these heretics who have sold their souls to the Zionists and the Crusaders; the idea that this return can only be effected through violence.

And then another theme that seems less usual in Islam, dealing with the presence of the “forces of evil” or “forces from below,” that constitute the invisible underside to the visible world; magic Islam, esoteric and black, an almost Satanic Islam that warned the Americans in the early '90s that occult forces lay in wait for them, that innumerable tornadoes, terrifying earthquakes would be unleashed against the signs of their power and their pride.

Let us add (from the Anti-Defamation League report, “Muslims of America: In Their Own Words”), the strange vision the sect has of Christians: “By having put their God on the crucifix, as opposed to executing Satan, they not only have blasphemed against the Wisdom and Judgment of God Almighty, but reduced Him to a role of subservience to Satan.” Attacks against homosexuals: “A perfect example, of unspeakable crimes against humanity.” This declaration expressing an unbridled anti-Semitism: “As we all know, the Jews are master conspirators; they plot and plan for a century ahead.” This other: “Every God-fearing individual, whether in America or abroad, must become informed of the heinous, barbaric, and purely subhuman nature of Zionism and all of its offshoots.” This one again: “Jews are an example of human Satans; this is why Jews are the founders of Satan worship and are now trying to take over the entire globe in which the global religion is to be Satanism . . . ”

I don't dare speculate any further, of course, concerning Daniel Pearl's hypotheses. But my own is that there is a tone, a morbid power, in these strange writings that Osama bin Laden can only have found compelling.

6. But that isn't all. And here is the essential point, the one I cannot imagine having escaped Daniel Pearl's notice, the one that must have intensified his interest in meeting with Gilani.

This little group, the al-Fuqrah, this sect of hand-picked fanatics, may number only two or three hundred in Lahore. But there is a country in the world where they are more numerous and more powerful, where they recruit on a vast scale and enjoy a popularity never achieved in Pakistan. This country is not Yemen, nor Indonesia, not Iraq or any of the other countries constituting Mr. Bush's “axis of evil.” It is the United States of America itself.

The story begins early in the '80s in a Brooklyn mosque where a young imam named Gilani is taking his first steps as “venerated master.” The war in Afghanistan has just begun. American public opinion is solidly behind the freedom fighters who, from Kandahar to the Panshir, resist the Soviet army. And here is Gilani, more loquacious than he is today, noisier, generally dressed in fatigues and wearing ammunition bandoliers, who, from his mosque in the heart of New York, founds al-Fuqrah, whose purpose is to recruit volunteers for the jihad amongst black Americans, often the poorest, sometimes ex-convicts, preferably “converts,” who seem to be his specialty, his breeding ground, during these years.

Twenty years later, the Afghanistan war is a thing of the past. The al-Fuqrah sect has finally been outlawed in the United States. And Gilani himself, after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, after at least one of his faithful, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, alias “Abd al-Rashid Abdallah,” has been alleged to have been part of the attack, preferred to leave the United States and continue to direct his network from Lahore.

But the fact remains. Al-Fuqrah was born in New York. Al-Fuqrah is originally an American organization. Its first acts of violence, its first murders, its bombs in hotels, stores, cinemas managed by Indians, its intercommunity settlings of scores that led to the execution of, among others, an imam in Brooklyn and another in Tucson—all took place in the United States. It still has today between two and three thousand followers in the United States.

7. Gilani, probably realizing that one day al-Fuqrah's violence would attract, if not America's federal antiterrorist authorities, then at least those in charge of combating organized crime—such as the FBI and the local New York City Police—took precautions as early as the beginning of the '90s by establishing another organization, then another, the sect's democratic fronts. Both were still going strong when Pearl wanted to see Gilani and both are still flourishing today, as I resume Pearl's investigation. One is called Muslims of America, the other the International Quranic Open University.

Their main purpose is to pursue, among all the activities of al-Fuqrah, those that will never be considered unlawful and could, consequently, possibly serve as a cover for other activities. Teaching, of course. Consciousness-raising campaigns centered upon the “martyred Muslim peoples.” Bosnia. Chechnya. Intellectual resistance to the “Zionist lobby.” And, finally, one of al-Fuqrah's long-standing goals, perhaps its “holiest” mission and, in any case, the one Gilani seems proudest of, the establishment of small “
jamaats
” or “communities” of the faithful who have in common the teachings of the master and constitute a religious commune in the countryside, far from the urban gangrene of moral pollution and a climate of decadence, whose members live according to the precepts of Islam.

Phalansteries of this type already exist, in Virginia, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, in Canada and in the Caribbean.

There are dozens, perhaps thirty, of these strange “green bases” whose existence supposedly follows Koranic precepts which, in fact, have been largely reinterpreted and revised by Gilani-think—several thousand “brothers” dispersed from one end of the North American continent to the other.

They are model villages, Islamic
kolkhozes
in the middle of enemy territory, hundreds of acres often in deserted regions, purchased and offered to the faithful who have heard the call to leave the cities of the Demon and return, if not to the desert, at least to the earth and its truth, to create, in the sight of Allah, these counter-societies protected from the corruption of this materialistic, Godless world—these are the Islamist enclaves in the heart of George W. Bush's America that allow us to say that the organization Pearl was investigating is still, more than ever, an American organization.

8. I visited one of these enclaves. I went, in the Town of Tompkins, Delaware County, New York, to the place where a handful of faithful, twenty years ago, established one of these model villages, since expanded to a population of around 30 families and two hundred people.

A countryside of hills and forests. A two-lane road, Roods Creek, not a soul on it, which leads to a simple gate. Before the gate, a small wooden sign indicating, on one side, “Muslims of America,” and, on the other, “International Quranic Open University.” A little sentry shack, with a cheerful old man who serves as guardian. Trailer homes planted in a circle like Conestoga wagons in a western. Others scattered up the hill. We're in the heart of what other people in neighboring Deposit, or in the little hamlet of Trout Creek, call, with a trace of fear or suspicion, “Islamberg.”

The circled trailers are the school, and the women's quarters. Beyond them is the former mosque. Farther off, in an old quarry carved out of a hillside, will be the new mosque, larger, built on a foundation and still under construction, the ground floor in concrete block with a wooden second story. A similar building nearby is a general store that provides basic necessities and allows the “Brothers” to avoid going outside the compound and to live, if they choose, in quasi-autonomy. Higher up the hillside is the school for older children, and nearby, on another hill, a workshop for repairs or recycling or both. A small pond serving as a fish farm, on the edge of which is kept like a relic the trailer of the founder— he is still here, and still running his security guard company in New York. And, back down the hill, on the right, a ramshackle building whose walls are covered with silvered insulation panels, and which serves as both a dining hall and a library.

“We have nothing to do with al-Fuqrah,” insists a big, friendly, athletic, black man who has lived here with his family for the past eight years. “We're related to Muslims of America, which is quite another organization, and advocates study and prayer.”

Another man, a lawyer who commutes every day to New York City, and adopts the same look of a cool, ecologist pioneer, adds: “We aren't involved in terrorism; none of our members has ever been implicated in any act of the kind; did you know the kids from our community school went to New York as early as 12 September to help the firemen clear up Ground Zero? You won't find anyone more patriotic than we are.”

Right. No doubt that's all true. And it's a sure thing that in the bucolic world of Islamberg, with its back-to-the-earth-and-the-great-outdoors utopian feel, in this isolated community that seems miles from the world of crooks and losers that was al-Fuqrah's lot in the beginning and of which Richard Reid is nonetheless still representative, things fit more easily into the pattern of a nineteenth-century utopian society than they do into that of an Islamist training camp. Except that . . .

9. Except that the sect has another face. I won't enter into the details of the criminal past of al-Fuqrah in and of itself, of no concern to the people of Islamberg, as they would insist that they belong not to al-Fuqrah but to the Muslims of American and the International Quranic Open University. I'll skip over all we know today about the thirteen assassinations and the seventeen bomb attacks committed by Gilani's men in the '80s on United States territory. I won't emphasize the 1989 police raid on one of his hideouts in Colorado that turned up an arsenal of semiautomatic weapons, fifteen kilos of explosives, blank social security cards and birth certificates, fake drivers' licenses, blueprints of New York bridges, photos of power stations and oil installations, guerrilla manuals, and notes indicating assassination plans targeting Rashid Khalifa, the imam of Tucson, Arizona, which, incidentally, were effectively carried out. I'll pass over (although we're not talking about al-Fuqrah here but Muslims of America) the NGO system implanted in the '90s that functions today as a series of bogus associations that have managed to embezzle $1.3 million in the state of California alone—all of it sent directly to the home office in Lahore. The important thing is that the friendly rural communities of Muslims of America and of the International Quranic Open University continue to adhere to the teachings of the master of al-Fuqrah, as though nothing has happened.

The important thing is that the acronym of the sect still appears on the gates of some of the villages, including Islamberg.

The important thing is the video, presented during one of the innumerable court actions brought against the organization in the past few years in North America, in this case in Canada. Here we see Gilani, battle dress over his
shalwar kameez
, presiding over a military training session in a green-hilled setting that could very well be Islamberg, and declaring to the camera: “We give recruits highly specialized training in guerilla warfare; we are at present establishing training camps; you can easily reach us at the Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York, or in Canada, or Michigan, or South Carolina, or Pakistan; wherever we are, you can reach us” (Mira L. Boland, “Sheikh Gilani's American disciple,”
Weekly Standard,
18 March 2002).

Still more recent is the 2001 FBI investigation of the murder of a deputy sheriff in the county of Fresno, near the community of “Baladullah” (in Arabic “City of God”) in the Sierra Nevada foothills, that concludes (Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 25 December 2001) that the alleged murderer is a member of both organizations, Moslems of America and al-Fuqrah.

And then, finally, the sniper that terrorized the Washington, D.C. area, John Muhammad, a convert who left the Nation of Islam and whom the FBI suspects had joined not only al-Fuqrah, but also Muslims of America (which, thus, would appear to be an organization linked to assassins; is not Wadih El Hage, the African embassy bomber, and former personal secretary to bin Laden, also suspected to be linked to al-Fuqrah, the parent organization of Muslims of America? And similarly, as we saw, is not Rodney Hampton-el, convicted along with Sheik Rahman, not only in connection with the first World Trade Center attack, but in a plot to bomb New York City's bridges and tunnels, a known member of al-Fuqrah?)

I know the conclusions of Douglas Wamsley, a prosecutor of the case the Attorney General of Colorado, concerning the murder of Rhasid Khalifa, in Arizona in 1990. I also know the reports of Thomas Gallagher, special agent with the U.S. Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about another Muslims of America compound in Virginia. I know the conclusion of the 2002 investigation of Jonathan Bernstein, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League's Central Pacific region, about the links between Muslims of America and al-Fuqrah in the area of Fresno, especially in the education field. And finally, there is the note of the Department of Law regarding Colorado's prosecution of James D. Williams, condemned to sixty-nine years of prison for attempted murder and extortion.