The attempted suicide bombing at the Port Authority in New York by a Bangladeshi ISIS supporter dominated the media last week, but we can’t say we weren’t warned. All the way back in 2012, a cleric in New York from Bangladesh warned the Clarion Project about the emerging threat in New York from Bangladeshi Islamists.
Unsurprisingly, the Port Authority attacker and his family members attended radical mosques, the kind that the Bangladeshi imam warned us about.
Imam Qazi Qayyoom, a self-described “moderate and liberal Sufi-Sunni imam” who leads the Muhammadi Center in Jackson Heights of New York, first came to our attention when he joined a pro-NYPD rally to show the media that the Islamists bashing the police do not represent most Muslims.
He spoke of how Bangladeshis chose him to be the leader of the Elmhust Islamic Center in Queens, but radicals opposed his strong response to Islamism after the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001. Social and financial pressure and then physical threats forced him to leave his post in 2004. He then formed the small Muhammadi Community Center.
The pressure didn’t stop. He explained:
“I’m still facing problems from radical-minded Muslims, imams and their supporters in different ways because, in my view, more than 80% of Muslims in the USA are directly or indirectly involved with the Masjids [mosques], centers or groups backed by Jamaat-e-Islami. They are taking advantage of the freedom of religion and non-profit benefits of this country. They collect money through their organizations in the name of helping people abroad, but nobody knows where the money is going.
The problem is that sometimes our officials do not know who is who. For their fundraising purpose, they can do anything. The Muslim radicals are so smart that they do not use the name Jamaat-e-Islami but rather, a meaningful name that means something good so that the officials or Muslims can believe them as good Muslims.”
The bomber’s ties to radical mosques in Brooklyn & Jersey City
The terrorist, Akayed Ullah, attended Masjid Nur al-Islam in Kensington, Brooklyn. As mentioned elsewhere, the NYPD Intelligence Division had five people mentioned on a list of “most dangerous” terrorism suspects that were linked to the mosque, according to documents cited in a 2013 book. Ullah moved to the U.S. in 2011 and he first showed signs of terrorist intentions in 2014.
Ullah was a close associate of the imam who was forced to quit in August because of an embezzlement scandal. He “deceitfully” took control of the mosque and retained ownership, according to local Muslims in a report found by reporter Edwin Mora.
The mosque used to be funded by the Saudi government as part of its promotion of the radical Wahhabist form of Islam. The imam at that time, Gulshair Muhammad al-Shukrijumah, was under counter-terrorism surveillance and was a character witness for Rodney Hampton-El, a participant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hampton-El was also reportedly a member of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra group that now operates under the name of Muslims of the Americas.
The imam’s son, Adnan Shukrijumah, became a top al-Qaeda terrorist who was hunted as the “next Mohammed Atta” for years until he was killed in December 2014 in Pakistan.
Ullah’s brother, Ahsan, attends a radical Jersey City mosque, Masjid al-Salaam, which used to have the “Blind Sheikh” responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a guest lecturer.
The Bangladeshi teacher’s prescient warning about ‘seditious’ Islamism
Qayyoom warned about the dangerous consequences of such seditious mosques, regardless of whether they are directly advocating or facilitating specific terrorist plots on American soil.
Of those he specifically warned about were Jamaat-e-Islami, the parent organization of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Muslim Brotherhood entities known as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ullah’s family instantly went to CAIR after he tried to set off his bomb, whereupon they issued an outrageous and offensive statement bashing law enforcement.
Qayyoom said:
“These are the misguided groups backed by Jamaat-e-Islami and their allies like the Islamic Circle of North America and the Islamic Society of North America. Muslims who want real peace must reject them. They often hire newly-converted Muslims who don’t know how dangerous they are. My suggestion to all new converts is to not join these groups. Freedom of religion does not mean you should join a harmful group like them…ÂÂ
… Any Islamic religious ideas backed by Jamaat-e-Islami will not bring peace, but sedition. The whole Muslim world must reject them and come back to the real Sufi-based moderate and liberal Islam on which the Muhammadi Center was established.”ÂÂ
Indeed, the Islamic Circle of North America’s guidebooks for its members are outwardly seditious, advocating deception, infiltration of American society and all kinds of manipulations that betray its “moderate” presentation.
If only the warnings of Muslims like Qayyoom and Raheel Raza (and their non-Muslim colleagues) were listened to, instead of the Islamists who drown out their alerts with false cries of “Islamophobia.”
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