In light of last weekend's "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" played before seeing "Waiting...," I've an idea for a new game: "Six Degrees of Bin Laden."
Give me a place, name, or mineral and I'll come up with a relationship path to OBL. (And yes, Bert to Bin Laden is still way too easy). Colorado you say?
Ok, and I'll raise you the non-obvious, putting aside the 1949 Greeley, CO/Sayyid Qutb/Muslim Brotherhood connection (Greeley; Qutb; Zawahiri; OBL) and the list of prisoners
at the ADX Florence, CO supermax prison (Ramzi Yousef, for one;
his uncle, KSM; OBL) . This week's installment will be
Jamaat al-Fuqra.
Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Arabic for "community (or party, organization) of the impoverished," is a militant Pakistani Islamist group "formed by a Pakistani cleric, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani [alt. spelling: Jilani, also Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Jilani Hashemi or Hashmi], in New York in 1980, on his first visit to the US" -
via a group also known by the distinctive name of "Muslims of
America" or "Muslims of the Americas" - that has a presence
in Colorado and Virginia, apparently. The objective of the
group, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, is to purify Islam
of percieved Western influence via violence. Hallmark targets in
the 80's were Hindus, Hindu temples, and Hare Krishnas (Seattle,
Denver, Philly, KC).
JF is linked to the 1993 WTC bombing (Clement Rodney Hampton-el), to members DC shooter ex-NOI John
Allen Muhammad and shoebomber Richard Reid, and to the Daniel
Pearl murder (Pearl was abducted while going to interview Gilani about
Reid in Pakistan).
Jilani's reported to have preached at a Brooklyn mosque in 1980
recruiting for the Afghani jihad, has worked with Pakistanis ISI, and
has been placed in Sudan at the same time as OBL (December 1993).
Jilani pulled Clement Rodney Hampton-el ("Dr. Rashid") out of the
streets of NYC and onto the Afghani battlefield.
Colorado;Jilani/JF;OBL QED
Colorado connections stem from Sheik Gilani's visits to the
state in the late 1980s. A Rocky Mountain News article
of Feb 12, 2002 ("Al-Fuqra Tied to Colorado Crimes") cites
that Jilani or Jilani's followers looked into purchasing property in
downtown Buena Vista, 101 acres 12 miles east of Buena Vista near Trout
Creek Pass which was raided in 1992, and an incident involving a
Colorado Springs rented locker containing explosives, pipe-bombs,
handguns, manuals, surveillence maps, etc.
Fuqra popped onto the radar after a 1990 killing of a Tuscon, AZ progressive Imam, Rashid Khalifa,
but only after the Colorado Springs locker was opened in 1992, and then
in 1993 when Hampton-el was caught after the first WTC bombing.
Operating for more or less 10 years in the US is a good lead time for
them.
Checking into some of the Fuqra members charged in the 1992 raid, we get a better picture of what occured in Colorado:
From "Fuqra member's hearing set April 2," Pueblo Chieftan, 1992
The small religious sect consists of black
Muslims who believe their faith is superior to other Islamic religions.
The leader of the local sect, James D. Williams, 39, was living on a
101-acre compound near Buena Vista.
That compound was the site of an intensive search by more than
60 law-enforcement officers last October. Among property seized during
that search was a hidden cache of about 30 guns.
The compound Williams owns also was home to four Muslim women
and more than 20 children. That property is being foreclosed on and
will revert to the original owners if Williams cannot come up with the
$87,000 he owes on the property.
Oddly, apart from the Colorado articles (RMN, local CO papers), most
of the other sources are ever so slightly less reputable:
FromTheWilderness, panic from Freepers, and the Moonies'
WashingtonTimes.
An article apparently from the New York Times of January 2002, "Rural Muslims Draw New, Unwanted Attention"
is about the Red House, VA compond where some familiar names appear:
Vincente Pierre, who'd jumped bail in CO was picked up there along with
his wife Traci Elaine Upshur.
Searching on Suhir A. Ahmed -- a Ph.D quoted in that
article, the national spokeswoman for Muslims for the Americas, the
Gilani-established group (who, incidentally, received her doctorate
from Quranic Open University, a Gilani-established school, 70 miles
east of Fresno, CA in a town named "Baladullah," or "City of God" in Arabic) -- leads to the Muslims for the Americas website: holyislamville.org. Do a whois on that and check the street address in York, SC. Yeah. The compound in Red House, VA is on Sheikh Gilani Lane. Theme?
So who is this guy, this Sheik Gilani? According to his followers, he's a decendant of both
Imam Hasan and Imam Hussain ("al-Hasani wal-Husani," in Arabic).
That'd make him a double-Shi'a, right? Wrong. He's got
enough sufism in his teachings to lead towards his own offshoot, his
own sect, of Islam. And that, my friends, is flirting with the
haram. I've got a bit of reading on his philosophies
(particularly "Quranic Psychiatry" and his claims of curing cancer - a
sure sign of real ultimate power) and will definately get back with
some analyses. Or, at least some snide remarks. Is it him
or is it his followers who've got a penchant for violence?
Gilani was arrested and held a few weeks after Pearl went missing,
but was released shortly thereafter and still resides in Lahore,
Pakistan.
Sheik Gilani, CBS News, 03/12/2002
Google: International Qur’anic Open University
Locations of Fuqra compounds:
Hancock, NY
Red House, VA
Tulare County, CA
Commerce, GA
York, SC ("Islamville")
Dover, TN
Combermere, Canada
They're purported to have a classic cell structure, where each group
doesn't know the exact details of the others and where the cells each
cover a certain geographic region, set up by Gilani himself from his
Lahore headquarters. The Colorado group called themselves
"Mohammed Soldiers 5" implying that they were the 5th cell.
Finally, Fuqra appears in the State Department's publication Patterns of Global Terrorism
from 1996-1999, but not in subsequent issues. I believe the
Muslims of America group and JF are not considered terrorist or
terrorist-linked organizations anymore or they've dropped off the radar.
Some future "Six Degrees of Haramiat": "Baladullah, Fresno
County, CA's charter school system" to "Florida's USF Sami
Al-Arian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad"?
[Edit: If you've got Google Earth, I've started to make a placemark & overlay list on my Earth page 
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