as compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate

IMMIGRATION'S SILENT INVASION, DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
BY STEPHANY GABBARD, RN, CLNC AND FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE

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Illegals bring new disease outbreaks! Who's cooking your food? Posted on Monday, May 16 @ 12:00:03 UTC Topic: Diseases Biohazards illegal immigration

Higher disease rates attributed to influx of illegals 5/15/2005 By Angela Gonzales and Mike Sunnucks The Business Journal of Phoenix Topics: Disease, Health Care, Border Patrol, Illegal Immigration, Laws, Security, Food Preparation Arizona hospitals and doctors are worried about the resurgence of some serious infectious diseases, and some believe illegal immigrants are the cause. Read the latest headlines about illegal immigration. A rise in diseases such as whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, measles and even leprosy are creating public health concerns and could hit hospitals and health care systems already financially burdened by indigent illegals flooding emergency rooms and urgent care centers. The resurgence also is fueling conservative calls for tougher border security and could cause problems for Arizona industries that rely on migrant workers for jobs in food services, construction, tourism and agriculture. The Maricopa County Health Department reported earlier this month a 100 percent increase in the number of cases of whooping cough (pertussis) over the past year. TB concerns grow Hospitals and health care professionals also are concerned about Mexican immigrants bringing tuberculosis with them to border states such as Arizona. "I've been in practice in Arizona for 25 years," said Dr. Tim Kuberski, president of the Arizona Infectious Disease Society. "The one disease that is most often associated with undocumented aliens is tuberculosis because there is a resurgence in the number of cases of TB." The federal government reports that while TB is on the decline nationally, Hispanics are the most-likely ethnic group to have the disease, and high TB rates in Mexican border areas are a big concern. Recent federal reports found that Mexican border regions have high rates of infectious diseases and that half of U.S. TB cases are from immigrants. TB rates in U.S. border regions, including Arizona, are "roughly double the national rate, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The department reports the TB rate for Mexican border areas is greater than the Mexican national rate. Greg Padilla, chief executive of Maryvale Hospital Medical Center, agreed. "Typically, TB shows up in a lot of border cities," he said. Limited health care access, lack of vaccinations, migratory population movements and poor living conditions all encourage the spread of TB and limit its treatment in border areas. There were 14,500 TB cases in the U.S. last year. Mexico has 16,000 cases annually, with one quarter coming from border areas. The U.S. has a population of 296 million; Mexico 106 million persons. Dr. Fritz Bredeek, an infectious disease specialist with El Rio Special Immunology Associates in Tucson, said tuberculosis is his biggest concern when it comes to people crossing the border illegally and bringing their diseases into the U.S. "tuberculosis is a contagious disease brought in from any poor country because TB is in countries with a poor health care structure, whether that is in Mexico or Eastern Europe or Asia or Africa," Bredeek said. "So that's certainly an infectious disease we do see." Health care worries Increased diseases are cause for obvious public health worries, but they also require hospitals and health care systems to dedicate more resources from an already strained system. Hospitals and the state and federal government often have to foot the bill for treating migrants, many of whom are indigent and have no health care coverage. Worries about immigrants bringing infectious diseases into the country are prompting conservative calls to tighten up the U.S./Mexican border to stem the wave of migrants. "Americans should be told that diseases long eradicated in this country -- tuberculosis, leprosy, polio, for example -- and other extremely contagious diseases have been linked directly to illegals," said Scottsdale Congressman J.D. Hayworth. "For example, in 40 years, only 900 persons were afflicted by leprosy in the U.S.; in the past three years, more than 7,000 cases have been presented." There also are worries that illegal immigrants from Asia, particularly China, are bringing rare and infectious disease into the Western U.S. Hayworth, a Republican, said the problem highlights the need for tougher border controls and immigration law enforcement. "This emerging crisis exposes the upside-down thinking of federal immigration policy," he said. "While legal immigrants must undergo health screening prior to entering the U.S., illegal immigrants far more likely to be carrying contagious diseases are crawling under that safeguard and going undetected until they infect extraordinary numbers of American residents." Rusty Childress, a Valley car dealer and a big backer of tougher immigration controls, worries about the spread of disease because of the prevalence of migrant labor in the food-service industry. "This is one of the cheap thrills of cheap labor," said Childress. "As you may have noticed, many immigrants, legal or otherwise, are employed -- if they are at all -- as cooks, dishwashers, waiters and food handlers. And it's a fact that Hepatitis A, B, and C show up in fast food environments." Steve Chucri, president of the Arizona Restaurant Association, said food-service companies and restaurants follow county health codes and some do brief health screenings for new hires to make sure they are not spreading some diseases when handling food. Churci said restaurants do not usually require formal doctor's notes or physicals for prospective employees. He said state law prohibits employers from asking about medical conditions as a condition for employment, but some restaurants will ask employees after they are hired about health issues. Vaccinations may help Kathleen Howard, a registered nurse and infection-control specialist at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, said she is seeing a fair amount of disease, especially measles, coming in from other countries. Howard and other health care professionals are concerned about the lack of vaccinations among immigrant populations. "We see that from people who have come in and are not vaccinated," Howard said. "It puts our population at risk who also may not have been vaccinated." A study that came out this week in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine found that there is an increasing number of parents who choose not to vaccinate their school-age children because they believe the medicine will cause harm. When people entering the U.S. bring diseases with them, American children who are not vaccinated are at a greater risk of getting diseases for which there are preventive measures available, Howard said. "When you have children who have not been vaccinated, they can pass measles, mumps and rubella quickly," Howard said. "Even polio would be a risk for a child who was not vaccinated." In the study, 69 percent of the parents of the 277 children with vaccination exemptions said they made that choice because of concerns that shots might cause harm. Dr. Fred Scott, medical director of Maryvale Hospital in Phoenix, said the chances are overwhelming that a child could have very serious problems if the diseases are contracted because of a failure to immunize. "If you're going to play the odds, the odds are in favor of surviving childhood with the immunizations as opposed to not getting immunizations," Scott said. But he is not so sure the rise in TB can be attributed to Mexican nationals crossing the border illegally. "It's related more to socioeconomic classes -- people who live in very close contact with one another," Scott said. Tuberculosis spreads from coughing droplets onto another person. A persistent cough is accompanied by fever and chills. "While there is no vaccine for TB, patients can be treated with anti-TB medications, said Dr. Ngozi Osondu, an infectious-disease specialist at Maryvale Hospital. Kuberski, who also practices at John C. Lincoln Health Network, said there is a law in Arizona that prohibits hospitals from discharging a patient until that patient is free of infectious TB. "What the fine politicians have done is shifted the burden of paying for these undocumented aliens to the hospitals," Kuberski said. "They get their two weeks of anti-TB therapy and they're discharged. My tax dollars are paying for them to take care of this illegal alien, and obviously the doctors don't get paid, either." Kuberski said he takes care of lots of undocumented patients. "It's just part of being a doctor in Phoenix," he said. http://www.alipac.us/article408.html

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A Ticking Time Bomb: Diseases that Cross American Borders

by John W. Whitehead
12/13/2004

As an American, I have always been inspired by the fact that my country welcomes those who seek refuge. And as long as our government officials maintain our borders and ensure that those coming from other countries are screened in order to protect those who legally live here, the concept of welcoming immigrants is a noble one.

However, something has gone awry. Indeed, illegal immigration into the U.S. has become an immense problem and a clear and present danger. Documented illegal immigration has more than doubled in the last decade. It has grown, by conservative counts, from 3.5 million in 1990 to 8 million in 2000. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that at least 13 million individuals will immigrate to the U.S. in this decade.

If the illegal immigrants in America were simply the huddled masses that the Statue of Liberty welcomes, then there would be little concern over illegal immigration. But it is much more complicated than that. The fact is that the United States is being assaulted by a global criminal network. While some of those crossing over American borders may genuinely be seeking better lives for themselves and their families, there are also, unfortunately, those crossing over whose motives are more sinister, who charge thousands of dollars for transporting illegal immigrants, who traffic young girls into America to be used in sexual prostitution and who prey on children for sex.

More alarming is the Center for Immigration Studies’ conclusion that lax immigration enforcement was partially responsible for the terrorist attacks within the U.S., and that such slack immigration policies may lead to more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear. Indeed, Time magazine recently reported that there may be plans to “smuggle nuclear weapons to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the U.S.” This may be inevitable, in that thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens will continue to settle in the U.S., many from countries that seem to export terrorists.

Efforts to protect American borders, especially at the Mexican line, have increasingly become lax over the last several presidential administrations. The Bush Administration, for example, has been lax on its stewardship of the southern border because of its close relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox. There is the sad, continuing story, writes George Putnam (Newsmax.com), “particularly in those states that border Mexico, where there is a steady, silent, pervasive invasion of the United States by an unarmed army carrying an assembly line of diseases into the heart of America.” Further details can be found in a report entitled “Immigration’s Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences” where the authors state: “The invasion of illegal aliens pouring over the borders of the United States is taking an ominous turn. They are not alone! Their bodies may carry Hepatitis A, B & C, tuberculosis, leprosy and Chagas Disease. Chagas is a nasty parasitic bug common in Latin America where 18 million people are infected and 50,000 deaths occur annually.”

Illegal aliens, by avoiding health screenings at U.S. borders, carry TB, the most serious being MDR, a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis with a higher death rate than cancer. According to the New York Academy of Sciences, Update, January 2002, “TB bacteria readily fly through the air, as when an afflicted person coughs. It’s estimated that each victim will infect 10, 20 or more people—in whom the disease will likely remain latent, creating the potential ‘time bomb’ effect.”

To make matters worse, in excess of 7,000 new cases of leprosy have been diagnosed in the U.S. in the past three years. As the “Silent Invasion” report concludes, “illegal alien immigrants from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and up through Mexico have fueled the resurgence into the United States.”

Chagas, called the kissing bug disease because the parasite favors the face as a route of infection, comes in acute and chronic forms, which can damage your heart and intestines. This parasite now threatens our blood supply, yet no means to test the blood is currently available. Ironically, the public health community has been aware of this danger for years. “Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected,” writes Donald G. McNeil, Jr. in the New York Times (November 18, 2003), “and there is no effective treatment for them. After a decade, 10 to 30 percent of them will die when their hearts or intestines, weakened by the disease, explode.” Three people received Chagas infected organs in 2001, the first such cases ever reported in the United States. Two of those three died. Moreover, “Dengue Fever, reports of polio, and now, the first case of malaria in Texas trickle into the United States as the invasion of illegal aliens increases in numbers.”

Undiagnosed disease due to uncontrolled illegal immigration is not merely confined to the border states. This health care crisis spreads daily across the nation. In 2002, Northern Virginia reported a 17% increase in tuberculosis cases. Prince William County alone reported a staggering 188% increase over the previous year. Health officials link immigrants to this outbreak and credit them with introducing the drug resistant strains. And in Queens, N.Y., the health department found that “immigrants” made up 81% of new TB cases in 2001.

What does this mean for American citizens? As the “Silent Invasion” report concludes: “It means your children are at risk when attending school or going to the movies. It means that when a classmate from a foreign country sneezes or coughs, your child may be at risk for any number of diseases. If you eat at a fast food restaurant, a person infected with hepatitis could prepare your food. If you need a blood transfusion, the blood could be infected with Chagas Disease.”

While we are engaged in far-away wars costing billions of dollars, America is simultaneously engaged in an ominous battle at our borders, which are as porous as they were at 9/11. Even the recently passed intelligence bill offers little hope for a solution. Will it take an epidemic to force our President and Congress to act? Or will it take another terrorist attack on American shores to get the attention of the federal bureaucrats who have been charged with protecting American citizens?

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=313
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By Martin Brass
Soldier of Fortune Magazine

Illegals Face a Gauntlet of Doom: The Border Patrol Faces Dopers, Terrorists, and the Desperate Victims of Coyotes.

The 2,100 mile southern border of the U.S., with its treacherous mountain ranges, canyons, rivers and deserts, has become an uncontrollable stretch of violence, death, rape and exploitation.

Over a decade ago, SOF rode with Border Patrol Agents in Arizona when the situation already seemed out of hand. One of those agents, now retired, recently contacted SOF with a disturbing and frustrated update, reflecting the deterioration of the Mexico-United States border.

"In my career, spanning three decades, many of my friends and partners were killed on duty, enforcing immigration laws, and are listed on our honor rolls. Their deaths, and devotion to duty, are beyond politicians' ability to understand, it seems, and are without meaning. This past year the Patrol has arrested a million illegals, with twelve to fourteen million in country, home free. Mexican military incursions, escorting narcotics, are commonplace. Rival alien smuggling organizations thrive in Arizona, and politicians pander, and grovel to Mexico's demands, in a time of war."

Vulture-like smugglers, drug gangs, entrepreneurs, and corrupt officials cash in on human smuggling into the United States, which has become a multi-billion dollar business.

Refugees from Mexico, and worldwide, come by foot, across blistering hot sand, and are then crammed into trucks and trailers. They wade through the New River, the most polluted river in the United States, to avoid immigration agents. They swim through raw sewage, slaughterhouse remains, and pesticide runoff. They are stuffed in suitcases. Hundreds have died in the Rio Grande.

The more fortunate ones take the faster route, buying their own tickets in Mexico for around $200. Others are flown in by coyotes, and trafficked throughout the United States. Mexicana, the Mexican stateowned airline, opened a direct flight several years ago from Oaxaca to Hermosillo, with a stop in Mexico City. With three flights a day, Mexicana station manager Jorge Carrillos estimates that half of 290 daily passengers are heading for the United States.

Three other airlines, originating in Vera Cruz and Chiapas, fly illegal immigrants (mojados) to the United States. Migrants tell of being assaulted, robbed or overcharged because they are thought to be carrying lots of money," says the Arizona Daily Star.

CNN reports that in the year 2000, during one of many illegal immigration crackdowns at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, and at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, within just a few hours, one hundred INS agents apprehended a hundred illegals being smuggled to Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and the East Coast.

Unfortunate Pilgrims

The flood of humans includes many other than Mexican (OTM). Apprehensions of OTMs have increased 42 percent according to Border Patrol spokesperson Rene' Noriega. Migrants come from El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and the Middle East. Most illegal aliens pay their trafficker, from $1,500, up to $50,000 for their journeys.

A Border Patrol agent confirmed, to Warriors for the Truth, that nine Yemenis attempting to enter the United States after 9-11, "can't get a coyote to transport them, and they are offering $30,000 per person with no takers."

"The further the smuggling route, the higher the fee. Smugglers often guarantee success for the high prices they charge, promising to give passage back into the United States to those who are apprehended in route and sent back. Some keep that promise while other smugglers let the customers die in a box car or in the trunk or under the hood of a car," says veteran Border Patrol official J. William Carter.

Illegal immigration busts have doubled this year in Arizona. Two thousand and thirty-eight are being apprehended daily. Yuma agents have captured more than 43,000 this year, a one-third increase over last year.

Witnesses express their outrage and disgust at the destruction left behind by the endless parade of illegal migrants.

Take a border town in Arizona, Whetstone, near the "epicenter of an invasion of contraband and humanity that is unrivaled throughout the western world. Trails are worn into the earth by tens of thousands of human travelers. Landowner fences are either cut by illegal migrants and their smugglers, or bent over and torn down completely.

"So heavy is the illegal smuggling traffic in some parts of Whetstone, Arizona 'suburbs' that local residents have constructed roadblocks made of scrub brush and branches. The smell in many areas is overwhelming, especially in the heat of the summer. The amount of refuse is astounding," says wnd.com.

Elsewhere, in the backcountry, "the foot traffic is so heavy it has the ambience of a garbage dump and smells like an outdoor privy. In places, the land is littered a foot deep with bottles, cans, disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, panties, clothes, backpacks, human feces, used toilet paper, pharmacy bottles and syringes," reports Warriors for the Truth.

Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences

"This is a sad, continuing story, particularly in those states that border on Mexico, where we witness a steady, silent, pervasive invasion of the United States by an unarmed army carrying an assembly line of diseases into the heart of America," George Putnam reports in Newsmax.com. He cites "Immigration's Silent Invasion, Deadly Consequences", researched by a registered nurse and a former U.S. Army Medical Service Corps officer. The research presents a "frightening study of how the hordes" of illegals invading our nation have reintroduced tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox and Chagas disease. Chagas, a parasite, kills 50,000 annually and has infected 18 million people in Latin America. It damages the heart and intestines and may infect through blood transfusions.

"The most serious is multi-drugresistant TB, spread through the air by an infected person. Each TB patient is said to infect ten to twenty others. More than 7,000 new cases of leprosy have been diagnosed in the U.S. in the past three years. The Queens, NY Health Department diagnosed eightyone TB cases among illegals, and concluded that foreigners have an eightfold higher incidence of TB, and that two-thirds of imported cases come from Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam," reports Newsmax.

"The Dying Season" began in the deserts in the spring of 2003, just as it does every spring, when eighteen Mexicans and Central Americans were found by Native Americans of the Tohono O'odham Nation on their reservation in Southern Arizona," their report concludes.

"The pilgrims begin their journeys, or return to the United States, after holidays in January, February and March, when the Border Patrol prepares for the biggest influx.

"They drown, they die of the desert heat, they die of hypothermia" Miguel Reyes, a protection officer for Mexico's foreign ministry in south Texas told Reuters.

"There is a belief that if you cross in the desert that the snakes will not cross the railroad tracks" Reyes said. Six Mexican immigrants who believed that sleeping on railroad tracks would protect them from poisonous snakes were crushed by a freight train near Norias TX in 1998. Their mangled bodies, smashed with cans of beans and tortillas, were unidentifiable.

The tales are endless.

Thirteen immigrants nearly suffocated in a sweltering 140 degrees inside a boxcar in San Antonio TX before they could struggle out. The rotting bodies of seven of them were found under a tree a week later.

Smugglers hire truck drivers to smuggle their human cargos over the border, and from state to state. A passerby on U.S. Highway 77, outside of Victoria TX, called the police to report a hand, waving a bandana out of a hole in the back of a white 18-wheeler, in 2003. "A flood of human beings" spilled out, said U.S. Attorney Michael Shelby. Eighteen out of 100 Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans were asphyxiated in a trailer abandoned by three traffickers. The trailer was registered to Tyron Williams of Schenectady, NY, who was later arrested.

Lone Coyotes and Syndicates

Felipe de Jesus Preciado Coronado, head of Mexico's National Immigration Institute told the Washington Post that the government has identified at least 57 organized smuggling bands. Jim Chaparro, head of the anti-smuggling office at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS - abolished in March, 2003 and incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security - said that the small and informal smuggling business has evolved into a powerful web of "literally hundreds of syndicates, some at a low level and some at the kingpin level… Gangs are ripping off aliens from other smugglers and holding aliens captive until they sell them to a buyer." Drug smugglers have turned to alien smuggling.

Prices for transport have increased dramatically, partially to pay for high-tech equipment. Encrypted radios, cell phones, and the internet, used for warning of patrolling U.S. agents have replaced the flashlights that were once used to cross the Rio Grande.

Those that charge the most offer computer generated fake documents, or stolen visas and passports. Migrants from Asia and Europe pay far more than Mexicans -- upwards of $50,000 to get in U.S.

"The flow of illegals has become much more organized, and that has opened the opportunity for these groups to market their services to non-Mexicans," Armand Peschard Sverdrup, director of the Mexico project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Post.

Arrests of coyotes have been publicized for years. A cursory examination of the records of Office of the United States District of Arizona alone reveals numerous arrests monthly this year.

Four Smugglers were arrested after a four-month investigation of the Raul Green and Jose Humberto Marquez human trafficking organization in February 2004. Cesar Balderas-Grandos, a Mexican citizen was convicted of trafficking after a U.S. Border Patrol agent saw the knees and elbows of humans bouncing in the bed of his truck.

Grandos refused to stop. He was arrested after a multi- Border Patrol unit high-speed chase. Eleven undocumented aliens were in the bed of the truck and fourteen in the cab of the truck. The defendant had previously been deported from the United States.

Jose Guadalupe Chairez-Jauragui was indicted in February for smuggling 65 illegal aliens. A canine, conducting a routine sniff around his trailer, made the alert. Border Patrol agents had to remove pallets stacked in the back of the trailer and found the smothering aliens. Also in February Alonso Ruiz Avila was indicted in Arizona for transporting 50 aliens in a Freightliner tractor-trailer. The aliens were stowed behind crates of citrus.

Maria Christina Baez and Laura Gastelum were arrested for smuggling five children. The women were paid $50 for each child and were to turn the children over to a stranger. They did not even know who the children were.

In March, Breton Rodriguez, an illegal alien, attacked a Border Patrol agent, and grabbed the agent's Beretta from his holster. The gun discharged, striking the agent in the groin.

Push Here, Pop There

El Paso TX, and San Diego CA, were the two busiest gateways in illegal immigration crossings. The crackdown began. Operation Hold-the-Line was initiated in El Paso in 1992, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego in 1994, and Operation Rio Grande was established in 1997 in the McAllen sector in South Texas. In that program, agents at the border were tripled.

Operation Hold-the-Line strategy included installing fences, and the use of sophisticated technology, including monitoring devices. The San Diego border had become violent, and Border Agents were struggling to control the "chaos" and anarchy" in the nightly riots. Mexicans across the border threw rocks at them and fired shots, then dash across en masse in "banzai runs."

"The Border Patrol has absolutely no jurisdiction over the Mexican side of the border. The Mexicans can stand there and taunt the Patrol, and there's nothing we can do, until they cross into the United States," Carter confirmed.

Operation Gatekeeper more than doubled Border Patrol Agents and vehicles at the fourteen-mile San Diego border, installed lighting, infrared scopes, underground sensors and Computer IDENT system to track illegal immigrants.

"Due to efforts in the nineties, entries into the United States decreased, The flow of illegal aliens at those fortified borders where additional agents were placed, such as San Diego CA and El Paso TX, apprehensions decreased significantly.

"During that time the Clinton Administration, and Attorney General Janet Reno, were very supportive of the Border Patrol. They went to Congress with the numbers, and asked to increase our resources. They had no choice but to approve. In 1972, there were 2,250 agents. When I left two years ago there were over 10,000 agents," Carter told us.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they will go east or west of El Paso, and through the rougher routes and rugged terrain, knowing they were taking a greater risk.

"Lots of things have to be considered to create an effective barrier. There are the natural barriers. You have the Rio Grande. In Del Rio, TX, you open up the dam and they can't get across. Rugged mountain terrain makes it impossible to cross. Big Ben country is very rugged country. Marfa, Alpine, Presidio, the Rio Grande, and the high canyons are desolate, hot and miserable. Natural barriers there slow down illegal immigrants," Carter said.

"Most Americans are opposed to any kind of fence. Remember, we knocked down the Berlin wall. The original barriers in San Diego consisted of landing mats (pierced-steel planking), metal that was welded together and buried a couple of feet in the ground, leaning towards Mexico. It was pretty successful.

"Then the Mexicans started to butt holes in it. You can drive down and see the three layers of fencing that were put up in San Diego for border control.

"When the fence was built in San Diego, the border patrol had to develop a strategy. Push the balloon here, it pops up there. From San Diego to Tucson, all the way down the bor- der, a strategy had to be developed in such a way that the flow could be controlled." Carter continued.

Migrants were diverted into dangerous territories, many getting lost.

The Border Patrol was forced to shift its efforts from patrolling to rescuing victims," Patty Mancha, Border Patrol spokesperson told visalaw.com. "They are spending as much time searching for victims as they are doing their regular job."

For two days in May 2001, migrants were lost during Arizona's hellish heat season. Helicopters and four-wheel-drive vehicles, searching for survivors transported eleven injured to local hospitals. Two others were found after an all-night search, but footprints showed that three others were missing.

"We intend to work this until we've made sure there is no one left out there," Border Patrol spokesman Maurice More said. Coyotes who smuggled victims through the rugged terrain of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge promised to return with water, and told the migrants to walk for "a couple of hours" to a highway. The highway was fifty miles away. Five were able to walk far enough to find agents in the scorching 115-degree heat, reports the Washington Post.

The Border Patrol got lots of grief for their role in the crackdown.

"What's causing it (the deaths of illegal immigrants) is the deadly strategy of the Border Patrol that has forced people into the most hazardous area of the desert," said the Rev. John Fife, Tucson pastor who helped build a watering station for immigrants in Arizona, the Post continues.

U.S. Rep. Tancredo (R-CO), supportive of the crackdowns, reacted after an agent was shot at by Mexicans in a humvee, five miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2001. "I cannot in good conscience stand by and watch another incursion along our border take place.

"Unless we open our eyes and recognize that what's happening along the U.S./ Mexico border is real, one of our guys is going to get killed. "As far as I am concerned, that (incursion) should be an act of war," reports the Sierra Times.

Dozens of Border Patrol Agents have died since the organization of the Agency in 1924. Twenty-one have been killed since 1992.

Dumping Ground

U.S. Border Control Chairman Edward Nelson, outraged by Mexican consuls-general and Foreign Ministry officials' criticism of Operation Rio Grande, responded angrily, "America has become a favorite dumping ground for Mexicans their own government cannot, or chooses not to, care for. These diplomats are total hypocrites. Illegal migration is not 'a natural phenomenon' as the Mexican government would have us believe. It is, instead, a serious crime and a clear violation of American sovereignty."

The Mexican government does nothing to stop illegal migration because it is in their economic interests to have millions of their citizens go to the United States, especially those with no job skills and no money, or those with serious long-term health care problems," reports Usbc.org.

"Mexico," Nelson said, "even refuses to take back Mexican criminals that have been caught and convicted in our country (see future parts of this series). These diplomats are well aware of the fact that their citizens are being exploited, robbed and even murdered by the coyotes. They are aware that many are carrying drugs into America that will wind up in the veins of American children.

"Our border patrol, which has suffered more than 200 cross border attacks recently, should worry less about being 'sensitive' and more about being bushwhacked by the drug cartels killers who now control our southern border and most immigrant traffic.

"We've been called racists, imperialists, and most recently, murderers," the Usbc.org report continues. Mexican Response

In 2001, the Mexican Government announced its plan to distribute 200,000 survival kits as part of a broader program to instruct illegals in what to expect "tips on maintaining self-esteem, and on Asian meditation techniques, to combat depression, stress and anxiety in a country they have entered illegally and without speaking the language," says the Orange County Register.

The survival kits include first aid kits, rehydration tablets, dried foods, and snake bite antidotes. U.S. officials criticized the plan as further risking the lives of the Mexicans and the Border patrol. "It gives the perception to our U.S. public that the Mexican government is encouraging people to break U.S. laws by entering the country illegally," said Hipolito Scosta, INS district director, to CNN. America's Palestinians

Glenn Spencer, host of the popular talk show American Patrol, and immigration expert, produced a video "Conquest of Aztlan" in which he warns that a radical group, self-named "America's Palestinians" declare the goal of reclaiming the American Southwest, including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Texas. The area is named "Aztlan" by Hispanic activists, or the mythical place of origin of the Aztec people, says Shop Net Daily.

H. Millard, in the Sierra Times, cites a Zogby poll, which found that 58 percent of Mexicans in the Southwest believed that the U.S. rightfully belongs to Mexico, and that 57 percent of Mexicans believe they have the right to enter the U.S. without permissions. He quotes Mario Obled, founder of the Mexican American Legal and Defense Fund (MALDEF), "California is going to be a Hispanic state, and anyone who doesn't like it should leave. They should go back to Europe."

MALDEF, according to Frosty Wooldridge, teacher, author and overpopulation specialist, reporting in the Washington Dispatch, is one of the most anti-American advocacy groups in the United States and is bent on returning Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California to Mexico as part of their 'Aztlan Reconquista.'

Three hundred more Border Patrol agents were deployed by June 1.

In spite of all these efforts, and after a four-year decline, illegal immigration from Mexico has spiked this year as several thousand migrants a day rush the border. U.S. Border Patrol told AP that detentions rose 25 percent, to 535,000, in the six months prior to March 31 compared to the year previous. Seventy-five percent are Mexican.

"And there's no way to determine 'got-aways,'" Carter told us. "I have no idea where anybody's getting those numbers, except in unsophisticated ways-border patrol agents in the desert, working a trail of aliens, don't report 'got-aways'. Then you have those areas and trails that are not worked and no-one to detect the immigrants."

No telling how many 'got-aways' are running loose in the United States, uncounted.

Then there are the many bodies that are never found.

Dr. Martin Brass is an International Lawyer and longtime contributor to SOF.
http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,SOF_0804_Mexico,00.html
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© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker.

He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 – all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" – an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently.

The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies."

While President Bush says the U.S. needs more "cheap labor" from south of the border to do jobs Americans aren't willing to do, the case of the Silverios shows there are indeed uncalculated costs involved in the importation of such labor – public support and uninsured medical costs.

In fact, the increasing number of illegal aliens coming into the United States is forcing the closure of hospitals, spreading previously vanquished diseases and threatening to destroy America's prized health-care system, says a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

"The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences," writes Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of the report. "We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen."

According to her study, 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system.

"Anchor babies," the author writes, "born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income."

In addition, the report says, "many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease."

While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, the report estimates that at least 25 percent of those are illegal immigrants. The figure could be as high as 50 percent.

Not being insured does not mean they don't get medical care.

Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.

"Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency," says the report. "But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."

According to the report, between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals verge on closure, the author writes.

"American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies,'" says the report. "Illegal alien women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born within our borders. Anchor babies are citizens, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid: Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."

Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Because drug addiction and alcoholism are classified as diseases and disabilities, the fiscal toll on the health-care system rises.

When Linda Torres was arrested in Bakersfield, Calif., with about $8,500 in small bills in a sack, the police originally thought it was stolen money, explained the report. It was her Social Security lump sum for her disability -- heroin addiction.

"Today, legal immigrants must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residency green cards," writes Cosman, a medical lawyer, who formerly taught medical students at the City University of New York. "Illegal aliens simply cross our borders medically unexamined, hiding in their bodies any number of communicable diseases."

Many illegals entering this country have tuberculosis, according to the report.

"That disease had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin," says the report. "TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later.

TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to 'foreign born' people who have up to eight times higher incidences apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam."

Other health threats from illegals include, according to the report:

• Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or "kissing bug disease," is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. The disease also infiltrates America's blood supply. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected.
• Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico.
• Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills.
• Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants as do intestinal parasites, says the report.
• Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report includes a strong prescription for protecting the health of Americans:

• Closing America's borders with fences, high-tech security devices and troops.
• Rescinding the U.S. citizenship of "anchor babies."
• Punishing the aiding and abetting of illegal aliens as a crime.
• An end to amnesty programs.

All credit to WorldNetDaily.com

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43275
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sheikh Gilani's American Disciples
The Weekly Standard ^ | 03/18/2002 | Mira L. Boland

Posted on www. freerepublic.com  03/09/2002 8:00:33 AM PST by Pokey78

What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra's founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf's decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra's communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra's criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group's continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn't exist.



SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani's close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra's early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra's principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Lela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.



FUQRA'S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver's licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare "pledged" to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, "I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well." Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to "abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra."

Several documents described the activities and code of the "Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5," who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed "Incogs" instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed "targeting packets" on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn't yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric's mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was "a carbon copy of the handwritten plan," said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque's kitchen at night, proceeding by "the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic]," and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa's death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.



FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of "recon team," "guard team," and "hit team" roles, and a description of how "time delay" bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would "allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout." A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of "conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life." A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators' arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, "Muslims of the Americas" and Sheikh Gilani's "Quranic Open University." On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani's own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their "foremost duty" was "to wage Jihad" against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani's poems is entitled "We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun." Another exhorts, "Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say 'Victory is in the air' / The kafir's [infidel's] blood will not be spared."

Gilani's appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: "We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us."

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who's who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an "ex"-Pakistani intelligence official. 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!"

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. "Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university," he said, "they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them."



THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani's current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors' "tightening the leash" after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra's core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a "cost effective" strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy's CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay's 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra's compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers' compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made "straw purchases" of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers' compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall's arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: "Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan."

And apparently the travel isn't all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted "many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic." Pakistan, of course, isn't an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra's American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra's headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani's U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake." At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.


Mira L. Boland's articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: alfuqra; alfuqrainamerica; alfuqrainportland; alqaeda; alqaedainportland; blackmuslimterror; dannypearl; islamakazis; jamaatalfuqra; jihadinamerica; khadijahghafur; muhammadcommandos; portlandgroup; quranicopenuniv; redcross; sheikhgilani; terrorwar

Sheikh Gilani's American Disciples
The Weekly Standard ^ | 03/18/2002 | Mira L. Boland

Posted on www. freerepublic.com  03/09/2002 8:00:33 AM PST by Pokey78

What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra's founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf's decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra's communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra's criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group's continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn't exist.



SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani's close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra's early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra's principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Lela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.



FUQRA'S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver's licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare "pledged" to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, "I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well." Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to "abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra."

Several documents described the activities and code of the "Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5," who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed "Incogs" instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed "targeting packets" on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn't yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric's mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was "a carbon copy of the handwritten plan," said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque's kitchen at night, proceeding by "the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic]," and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa's death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.



FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of "recon team," "guard team," and "hit team" roles, and a description of how "time delay" bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would "allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout." A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of "conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life." A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators' arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, "Muslims of the Americas" and Sheikh Gilani's "Quranic Open University." On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani's own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their "foremost duty" was "to wage Jihad" against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani's poems is entitled "We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun." Another exhorts, "Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say 'Victory is in the air' / The kafir's [infidel's] blood will not be spared."

Gilani's appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: "We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us."

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who's who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an "ex"-Pakistani intelligence official. 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!"

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. "Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university," he said, "they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them."



THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani's current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors' "tightening the leash" after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra's core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a "cost effective" strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy's CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay's 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra's compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers' compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made "straw purchases" of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers' compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall's arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: "Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan."

And apparently the travel isn't all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted "many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic." Pakistan, of course, isn't an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra's American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra's headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani's U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake." At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.


Mira L. Boland's articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: alfuqra; alfuqrainamerica; alfuqrainportland; alqaeda; alqaedainportland; blackmuslimterror; dannypearl; islamakazis; jamaatalfuqra; jihadinamerica; khadijahghafur; muhammadcommandos; portlandgroup; quranicopenuniv; redcross; sheikhgilani; terrorwar

All Credit To Israel National News at:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/122744

Hamas Completes Gaza Takover, Fatah Men Flee to Egypt

(IsraelNN.com) Hamas continued its campaign of destroying Fatah in Gaza and killings its leading officials Wednesday.

Hamas terrorists fired mortar shells and rockets at the three remaining Fatah compounds in Gaza City – those of the PA’s Preventive Security Service, Intelligence Service and the Presidential Guard, as well as Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s main compound. By 11 AM Thursday, Hamas said it was in control of the Preventative Security compound and would be holding Friday's Islamic prayers in Abbas's former office.

 

Hamas and Fatah men took control of various rooftops throughout the city Wednesday and fired at groups of rival terrorists. The city’s mosque loudspeakers broadcast calls by Hamas for Fatah to surrender and hand in their weapons.

A Fatah headquarters in Khan Younis was blown up by a one-ton bomb inserted beneath it via a tunnel. Fatah men who fled the building handed over their arms and even their clothes to Hamas terrorists outside before being allowed to escape. Another large bomb was discovered by Fatah forces buried beneath the road used by Abbas when he travels to Gaza; he is currently in Ramallah.

In Rafiah as well, Hamas blew up the Fatah headquarters and declared it had taken over the town. Fatah was beaten so badly that Egyptian reports said 40 PA officers broke through the Gaza-Egypt border fence and fled to Sinai for safety. The Hamas-affiliated Popular Resistance Committee announced Thursday that it had taken control of the border to prevent weapons smuggling (to Fatah) and mass emigration by local Gazans.

Fatah blew up several of its own bases in central Gaza early Thursday in a bid to prevent them from falling into Hamas’s hands.

Hundreds of Fatah terrorists were seen surrendering to Hamas in Gaza Wednesday ahead of an ultimatum set by Hamas that ends Friday night. Hundreds of members of a mercenary local clan fighting for Fatah surrendered, ending a pitched two-day battle. The Bakr clan members were led to a local mosque. Hamas blew up one of the clan’s homes and women were shot dead when they tried to transport a sick girl to the hospital, according to PA reports.

During a protest by hundreds of Gazans against infighting and for uniting to fight Israel, a man was killed when Hamas terrorists opened fire on the protesters. The protest, billed as “peaceful,” was organized by Egyptian intelligence and attended by armed Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Abbas’s office hinted that he would announce an “important decision” Thursday – presumably that the mostly-cosmetic Fatah-Hamas unity government has ceased to exist.

Nearly 80 people have been killed in the most recent wave of Fatah-Hamas clashes.

For the second night in a row, Abbas and Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh issued a plea to their respective groups to stop the fighting. They were both ignored and according to PA reports, clashes actually intensified following the call.

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All Credit To Israel National News at:
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All Credit to Ralph Peters and The New York Post at:
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