The Terrorist Next Door (12 page)

Sheikh Gilani Lane was named in honor of Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the founder of Muslims of America and a man whom MOA members follow with messianic fervor. MOA has close ties to a violent Pakistani Islamist group, also founded by Gilani, named Jamaat al-Fuqra. According to a 1999 U.S. State Department report on terrorism, al-Fuqra “seeks to purify Islam through violence.”
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Sheikh Gilani serves as al-Fuqra's and MOA's ideological bedrock; his images and messages dominate the MOA website. He founded the group during a visit to Brooklyn in 1980, encouraging his pupils—mostly African-Americans—to move to rural areas and establish Muslim communes free of Western decadence. Shoe bomber Richard Reid and Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad are rumored to have been among his followers.
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Gilani also trained jihadists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s,
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and he attended a 1993 terrorist conference in Sudan that included members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and yes, Osama bin Laden himself. According to a
Weekly Standard
account of the conference, “In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of “Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!” and (in Arabic) “Death to the Jews!”
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As if that weren't enough, American journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002 when he was kidnapped by jihadists and brutally murdered .
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The sheikh denies any connection to Pearl's killing, but suspicion of his involvement is understandable: in 1990, for instance, Gilani produced a video called “The Soldiers of Allah” in which he instructs his American followers in tactics including guerilla warfare, murdering enemies, hijacking cars, kidnapping, weapons training, and explosives.
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Prior to our trip to Red House, I spoke to “Mustafa,” a former MOA member who fled the group and now fears for his life. He told me he and others had lived in Pakistan and were trained in paramilitary tactics by Gilani and the Pakistani military for several months.
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According to Mustafa, Gilani runs MOA with an iron fist from Lahore, Pakistan, and members almost literally worship him; they believe he is a direct descendant
of Islam's prophet Mohammed. Moreover, like the founder of Islam, Gilani reportedly kept several wives—including some black American converts—at his opulent residence in Lahore.

“He's the leader of the group,” Mustafa said of Gilani. “He's a former member of the Pakistani military. His father was one of the founding fathers of Pakistan. He has great connections to Pakistani intelligence, the ISI.”

Given the history of corruption and pro-jihad sympathies among Pakistan's military and intelligence services, Mustafa's account of Gilani's connections within those two entities did not surprise me.

He went on to tell me that Muslims of America serves as a cash cow for Gilani and for Jamaat al-Fuqra. Each member is required to send 30 percent of his or her income to Gilani in Pakistan. The group even has a treasurer that checks members' pay stubs.

“[Sheikh Gilani] said that the 30 percent is money that God has chosen to take from you,” Mustafa recounted. “And if you spend that 30 percent you are stealing from God. The money got to Pakistan through the [MOA] elders who traveled to Pakistan. They carried cash with them or they sent it Western Union. Since there's Americans under Gilani's rule who live in Pakistan, it's like from one American name to another American name and it's never linked to Gilani at all.”

Sheikh Gilani uses these American dollars to help fund the Taliban and other terrorist groups, according to Mustafa. Group members hand deliver thousands in cash at a time to Gilani in Pakistan. Mustafa said the money is “earned” by MOA members through illegal means, and that male members often set up kiosks at local shopping malls or on the street to hawk their wares.

“A lot of the guys will do bootlegging—you know, it's all illegal—videotapes, CDs, clothing,” Mustafa explained. “The counterfeiting comes in with the bootlegging. It's all counterfeit movies not sanctioned by Paramount or MGM or things like that—they're not legitimate.”

Now, as Sheikh Gilani Lane loomed before us, I replayed my conversations with Mustafa in my mind—he had confirmed that all MOA
members possessed at least one gun—and tried to summon any important details about the compound that we may have missed.

Mike, however, was in no mood for baby steps. “Let me out,” he ordered. “It's nothing but a bunch of women and children in there. I want to go get some footage.” We reluctantly agreed to let the old pro go and prayed silently to ourselves that no one would come charging out of the compound once they saw a white man with a $20,000 camera filming their private property. In the meantime, Daveed and I brainstormed about what I would say when I taped my report from beneath the Sheikh Gilani Lane street sign.

Since we were constantly glancing over our shoulders to make sure Mike wasn't dodging bullets as he filmed, I didn't have much time to be clever or creative. Instead, I kept it simple, attempting to paint a picture for viewers of the jarring contrasts at work in Red House: on one hand, you had an overwhelmingly Christian, dirt-poor, southern town. On the other hand, you had a sprawling compound filled with radical, well-armed Muslims who had dedicated their lives to a terror-linked Pakistani cleric. “Red House, Virginia is as rural as it gets,” I began as Mike's camera rolled. “There are no traffic lights, and the only signs of industry are a pair of convenience stores. So when a street sign popped up here named after a radical Pakistani sheikh—along with men and women dressed in traditional Islamic garb—locals took notice.”

Just as I finished speaking, a carload of African-American women and children came driving out of the compound. We waved hello, and the car stopped at the entrance. A veiled woman in the passenger seat stared out at us bemusedly.

“Hi,” I said as I approached the car. “My name is Erick Stakelbeck. We're with CBN News in Washington. We'd love to interview one of your spokespeople for a story we're working on. Is there anyone around who we could speak to?”

The woman seemed unfazed. Strange visitors bearing notepads or video cameras and questions about the goings-on inside the compound had become more common since 9/11.

“The guy you want to talk to isn't here,” she replied. “But if you go inside and ask, someone will help you.”

With that, she turned to the woman driving and said something. They immediately sped away before I had a chance to thank them. Daveed, Mike, and I looked at each other. “You guys ready?” I asked. Both of them nodded, and we entered the compound.

You might be shocked that a compound like the one in Red House exists in rural America. After all, we're not talking about Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia—we're talking Dukes of Hazzard country. As I write these words, I can just hear our enlightened Left's indignant response: “We'd believe it if you found white supremacist rednecks and far-right militia types setting up a backwoods shooting range and railing against the government. But sprawling camps filled with Islamic jihadists (er, ‘violent extremists'), just a few miles from the local Wal-Mart? Stakelbeck, you're an alarmist fearmonger and an intolerant Islamophobe. Anyway, there are no Muslims in the South.”

Oh no? Have you heard about the $10 million al-Farooq Masjid mega-mosque that opened in 2008 in Atlanta?
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Or what about Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (formerly Omar Hammadi), the Alabama-bred kid who has become a leading spokesman for the al-Qaeda-linked Somali terror group al-Shabaab? And have you checked out the demographics lately in Tennessee? About twenty years ago, following the first Gulf War, Nashville was designated by the U.S. State Department as a “gateway city” for Iraqi refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime.
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In the ensuing two decades, those gates were opened to Muslims from Iraq as well as other countries—because our government elites aren't satisfied to see Islam only spreading in major cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. No, the residents of America's Christian heartland must also learn to be “tolerant” and “accepting” of Islamic culture, and open their longestablished
communities to a way of life that is completely antithetical to their values. Whether they want it or not, it will be rammed down their throats with bureaucratic efficiency, and their neighborhoods and towns will be changed irrevocably. Forget about waking up to the sounds of the rooster crowing, Farmer John. The call to prayer billowing from the local mosque will be your new alarm clock.

A 2008 survey showed the percentage of non-Christians in Tennessee's population tripled from 1 percent in 1990 to 3 percent in 2008.
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The greater Memphis area is now home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Muslims, and local Islamic leaders put the number of Muslims in Nashville at around 20,000.
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It's tough to verify those numbers, but spend a few days on the ground in Nashville and in nearby towns in middle Tennessee like Murfreesboro and Shelbyville, as I have, and the growing Islamic influence is unmistakable—from shops to schools to restaurants to, of course, the shiny new multi-million-dollar mega-mosques.

As we discussed in chapter one, this trend comports with a specific agenda: Islamists are taking the fight directly to what they view as the heart of American Christendom. What better way to show Allah's dominion over infidel land than to build giant victory arches in the form of sprawling Islamic centers?

If the current Muslim influx continues, terrorist recruiters overseas may begin to take Tennessee's nickname, “The Volunteer State,” quite seriously. And if the case of Abdulhakim Muhammad is any indication, they've already begun. Muhammad, as you'll recall, is the Little Rock jihadist who murdered a U.S. soldier and seriously wounded another in a 2009 attack on an Army recruiting center—and he was born and raised in Memphis.

But back to those U.S.-based jihadi compounds. Their genesis dates back to late 1999 and early 2000, when a Seattle native named James
Ujaama attempted to enlist some powerful foreign connections to help him set up a terror training camp in rural Bly, Oregon. Ujaama, an African-American convert to Islam, was an associate of the notorious London-based cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, a jihadist firebrand who is currently imprisoned in Britain on terrorism charges. U.S. authorities are still seeking al-Masri's extradition to this country to face charges over his role in attempting to set up the Oregon terror training camp.

The purpose of the camp was to school aspiring holy warriors from the United States and Great Britain in the finer arts of hand-to-hand combat and automatic weapons skills in preparation for joining the jihad in Afghanistan.
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According to a fax sent by Ujaama to al-Masri, Oregon was a “pro-militia and fire-arms state” where a little gunplay out in the woods wouldn't raise eyebrows. Al-Masri sent two of his cronies, including convicted terrorist Haroon Rashid Aswat, to scout out the Bly locale in the fall of 1999. Aswat engaged in firearms training with Ujaama and his cohorts during his month-long stay at the Bly ranch, but was ultimately turned off by the amateurish operation he found there. He returned to London, and Ujaama's grand plan to establish an international jihadi training hub in southern Oregon subsequently fizzled out.
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Other terror cells, however, have taken advantage of the vast rural expanse of the continental United States. The so-called Virginia Jihad Network featured eleven men training for jihad in a wooded area near Fredericksburg, Virginia—about an hour's drive south of the nation's capital—in 2000 and 2001. After using paintball to simulate battlefield combat, members of the group traveled overseas to fight alongside the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar e-Taiba against Indian forces in Kashmir. Other members made their way to Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks in an attempt to join the Taliban and fight against U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan.