An Inland Pirates' Cove

A couple of disturbing stories came to me from quarters I don't visit regularly enough. Oddly, they both involve medieval barbarians and satellite technology.

Via Belmont Club comes this rather disturbing account by a blogger who decided to investigate an outpost (Jamaat) -- in rural Virginia -- of an Islamofascist organization called Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which the Beltway Sniper joined after he decided the Nation of Islam was not quite militant enough. The account is long, but well worth it.

Shirley said that there are other Jamaat locations besides the compound. One of her hobbies is historical research, and recently she was tracking down old homesteads in the wilds of Charlotte County. Her maps led her down a back-country lane, a non-state route through the wilderness that required a four-wheel drive to negotiate. When she neared the old homesteads she was looking for, she was surprised to find an establishment with a sign that identified it as a "Training Camp for Young Muslim-American Men."

There were a lot of men there, and some boys, and they came up to us to ask us what we were doing. I was a little bit scared, you know, asking their permission to go back and look at the ruins of the house. They weren't real helpful, just pointed us in the general direction. We never did find the place.

This "training camp" was across Route 615 and a couple of miles from the main compound on Rolling Hill Road.

According to Shirley, Jamaat ul-Fuqra operated some kind of jewelry-and-essential-oils business at a kiosk at a Lynchburg Mall. A friend of hers who worked at UPS reported that the men running the kiosk would come in to collect C.O.D. packages from New York, and pay for them with large amounts of cash. Her friend didn't understand how they could acquire such quantities of money from the kind of business they ran at the Mall.

I floated the idea that it might be a money-laundering operation. Perhaps they brought in drugs from their Central Asian contacts, and then laundered the money to buy their firearms and run their camps. Pure speculation on my part, but …

What we do know is that an organization with a history of violence had set up shop locally, refused to let its girl children go to school, and had top members arrested and convicted by the FBI for firearms violations. In addition they have set up a remote and isolated "Training Camp for Young Muslim-American Men" [bold added] -- to train young men for what? Auto repair? The food service industry? I have my doubts.

Fantastic! We have terrorists biding their time in training camps in the backwoods! Aspects of this account remind me of places I saw signs for in Florida and Oklahoma years ago.

At the same time, via MEMRI, it seems that these peaceful Moslems will not lack for satellite viewing options when they get tired of trying to assemble nuclear weapons "in their kitchens", as that old Islamic canard goes.

On October 10, the Iranian Student News Agency, ISNA, reported that Iran 's Hizbullah is planning to operate a new satellite TV channel, named Kheibar.

...

It should be noted that Kheibar was a rich and fertile oasis north of Al-Madina, inhabited by Jews, and destroyed by Prophet Mohammad in 628. The fate of the Kheibar Jews today is used by Hamas as a symbol to the fight against the Jews and Israel.a

I saw this story first and wondered whether their use of satellites might make it easy to figure out from whence they broadcast. This would be valuable information, to say the least.

What to do about the infiltration of the West by Moslem fanatics? I'm no legal scholar and I have some reservations about this approach, but an article about a similar war, the one against maritime pirates, comes to mind.

Coming up with such a [legal] framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction -- meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

Unless I am mistaken, the chief difficulty lies in the fact that American citizens are among the numbers of these pirates. But then citizens belong to such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia, too, and our legal system seems to be able to cope with them. If we need to expand the scope of say, racketeering laws, to include criminal activity that aids a terrorist organization, we ought to.

In any event, if Islamists can use satellites to transmit propaganda over the airwaves, we can use satellite imagery to find them. In the meantime, our enemy, despite the wide availability of bomb-making recipes and the aid of hundreds of organizations, has yet to produce a single nuclear bomb.

It is not the means we lack to win this war. It is only the will.

-- CAV

PS: A reader emailed me with this interesting tidbit:

Via Michelle Malkin comes this:

A man who fatally shot himself in his University City condominium during a standoff with San Diego police was identified Saturday as a 29-year-old student.

An autopsy is scheduled tomorrow on the body of Khaled Yasufi, medical examiner Investigator Sal Rodriguez said.

Let' see ... 8700 Costa Verde is here. [Near this intersection was an apartment] where the Paleswinean flag was hanging from a balcony [for months after] the Arafish died.... And I got a look at this crowd. Right out of (pre-911) Central Casting.

Oh, and what is conveniently located nearby?

Updates

Today: Added PS.