Media Lies About Sears Terrorists's Islamic Roots

Sweetness & Light ^ | June 25, 2006 | N/A

[Sam Hill]

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Dad: Sears Tower suspect under spell of man

June 25, 2006

BY FRANK MAIN Crime Reporter

The father of the former Chicagoan accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower remembers his son, Narseal Batiste, coming under the spell of a man who wore a black robe and walked with a black staff.

“We went to dinner with this old guy in Chicago about six years ago,” said the Rev. Narcisse Batiste, a nondenominational Christian pastor. “He was teaching Narseal the Holy Quran bible. He said, ‘Dad, I would like to study this, and he is teaching me.’ I think the old guy has probably misdirected him or gave him bad advice.”

The identity of the man is a mystery.

But an acquaintance of Narseal Batiste told the Miami Herald that Batiste and his six co-defendants followed the religious teachings of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

Religion experts were puzzled, saying the group is not known for advocating violence.

They also noted that Narseal Batiste allegedly referred to his group as an “Islamic army,” yet the Moorish Science Temple of America does not follow an orthodox Islamic theology.

‘They are not Muslims’

Aminah Beverly McCloud, professor of Islamic studies at DePaul University, said the theology of the Moorish Science Temple of America is a “kind of re-appropriation of Christianity.”

“They are not Muslims,” she said. “They trace their black heritage to Morocco. This is not an Islamic faith. Over half their book, The Holy Quran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, is devoted to the life and works of Jesus.”

Willie Bey, divine minister of the Moorish Science Temple of America No. 1 at 3810 S. Wabash, said he was surprised when the group was mentioned in connection with the alleged terror plot in Miami.

“I heard these brothers were using our name,” said Bey, who wore a medallion bearing the word “Justice” and a red star and crescent on his neck. “I have no idea who these people are. We are law-abiders, not lawbreakers. This is home. We are not fighting against the U.S.A.”

In the past, others have identified themselves as members of the Moorish Science Temple of America when they did not share the group’s ideals, Bey said.

For instance, in the late 1970s, Jeff Fort, the head of the El Rukn street gang in Chicago, reportedly founded the Moorish Science Temple of America, El Rukn Tribe, hoping such an affiliation would deter law enforcement. Fort is now serving a 75-year sentence for murder.

Narseal Batiste, 32, and his co-defendants were charged in Miami with working with a government informant they thought was a member of the al-Qaida terror network to blow up Sears Tower and government buildings in the Miami area.

But the men did not have explosives and were not close to carrying out their plan, which Batiste allegedly described as killing “all the devils we can,” prosecutors said.

Narseal Batiste grew up in Chicago but moved back and forth between here and Louisiana after his parents moved there in 2000 to found a church, the Morning Star Worship Center, in their native town of Marksville, La. He is married with four children.

‘He is definitely out of his mind’

Narcisse Batiste said he last saw his son after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon — when they shared their disgust at the loss of life. He said he has not spoken to his son since.

“I want to ask my son if he could have possibly did something like they are saying he did,” said Narcisse Batiste, 72. “It’s not in him, unless someone led him on the wrong path.”

In Chicago, Narseal Batiste had attended a Catholic elementary school and Brother Rice High School — and he won awards for his photography, his father said.

Narcisse Batiste said his son later drove a Federal Express truck during the day and rode CTA buses at night as a volunteer member of the Guardian Angels.

“He was on the right path,” he said. “My son needs psychiatric treatment. He is definitely out of his mind. He was not raised that way.”

Note this claim by the University of DePaul's Islamic "expert":

Aminah Beverly McCloud, professor of Islamic studies at DePaul University, said the theology of the Moorish Science Temple of America is a “kind of re-appropriation of Christianity.”

“They are not Muslims,” she said. “They trace their black heritage to Morocco. This is not an Islamic faith. Over half their book, The Holy Quran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, is devoted to the life and works of Jesus.”

Maybe Ms. McCloud should look at how Jesus is presented in the Moorish Science “Koran.” He is presented as a prophet of Allah:

The Holy Koran of The Moorish Science Temple of America

CHAPTER X

Jesus Spake on the Unity of Allah and Man to the Hindus

1. Benares is the sacred city of the Brahms, and in Benares Jesus taught; Udraka was His host.

2. Udraka made a feast in honour of his guests, and many high born Hindu priests and scribes were there.

3. And Jesus said to them, with much delight “I speak to you concerning life–the brotherhood of life.

4. The universal Allah is one, yet He is more than one; all things are one.

5. By the sweet breath of Allah all life is bound in one; so if you touch a fiber of a living thing you send a thrill from the center to the outer bounds of life.

6. And when you crush beneath your foot the meanest worm, you shake the throne of Allah, and cause the sword of life to tremble in its sheath.

7. The bird sings out its song for men, and men vibrate in unison to help it sing.

8. The ant constructs her home, the bee its sheltering comb, the spider weaves her web and flowers breath to them a spirit in their sweet perfume that gives them strength to toil.

9. Now, men and birds and beasts and creeping things are deities, made flesh; and how dare men kill anything?

10. It is cruelty that makes the world awry, when men have learned that when they harm a living thing, they harm themselves, they surely will not kill, nor cause a thing that Allah has made to suffer pain.”

11. A lawyer said: “I pray to Jesus, tell who is this Allah you speak about; where are His priests, His temples and His shrines?”

12. And Jesus said: “The Allah I speak about is everywhere; He cannot be compassed with walls, nor hedged about with bounds of any kind.

13. All people worship Allah, the One; but all the people see Him not alike.

14. This universal Allah is wisdom, will and love.

15. All men see not the Triune Allah. One sees Him as Allah of might; another as Allah of thought; another as Allah of love.

16. A man’s ideal is his God, and so, as man unfolds, his God unfolds. Man’s God today, tomorrow is not God.

17. The nations of the earth see Allah from different points of view, and so He does not seem the same to every one.

18. Man names the part of Allah he sees, and this to him is all of Allah; and every nation sees a part of Allah, and every nation has a name for Allah.

19. You Brahmans call Him Parabrahm; in Egypt he is Thoth; and Zeus is His name in Greece, Jehovah is His Hebrew name; but everywhere He is the causeless cause, the rootless root from which all things have grown.

20. When men are afraid of Allah and take Him for a foe, they dress up other men in fancy garbs and call them priests.

21. And charge them to restrain the wrath of Allah by prayers and when they fail to win His favour by their prayers, to buy Him off with sacrifice of animals or birds.

22. When man sees Allah as one with him, as Father Allah, he needs no middle man, no priest to intercede.

23. He goes straight up to Him and says, ‘My Father God, Allah!’ and then he lays his hand in Allah’s own hand, and all is well.

24. And this is Allah. You are, each one, a priest, just for yourself; and sacrifice of blood Allah does not want.

25. Just give your life in sacrificial service to all of life, and Allah is pleased.”

26. When Jesus had thus said He stood aside; the people were amazed, but strove among themselves.

27. Some said: “He is inspired by Holy Brahm” and others said: “He is insane”; and others said: “He is obsessed; he speaks as devils speak.”

28. But Jesus tarried not. Among the guests was one, a tiller of the soil, a generous soul, a seeker after truth, who loved the words that Jesus spoke, and Jesus went with him and in his home abode.

Here is how the "Koran" sums up the principles of Moorish Science:

THE END OF TIME AND THE FULFILLING OF THE PROPHESIES

1. The last Prophet in these days is Noble Drew Ali, who was prepared divinely in due time by Allah to redeem men from their sinful ways; and to warn them of the great wrath which is sure to come upon the earth.

2. John the Baptist was the forerunner of Jesus in those days, to warn and stir up the nation and prepare them to receive the divine creed which was to be taught by Jesus.

3. In these modern days there came a forerunner of Jesus, who was divinely prepared by the great God-Allah and his name is Marcus Garvey, who did teach and warn the nations of the earth to prepare to meet the coming Prophet; who was to bring the true and divine Creed of Islam, and his name is Noble Drew Ali who was prepared and sent to this earth by Allah, to teach the old time religion and the everlasting gospel to the sons of men. That every nation shall and must worship under their own vine and fig tree, and return to their own and be one with their Father God-Allah.

4. The Moorish Science Temple of America is a lawfully chartered and incorporated organization. Any subordinate Temple that desires to receive a charter; the prophet has them to issue to every state throughout the United States, etc.

5. That the world may hear and know the truth, that among the descendants of Africa there is still much wisdom to be learned in these days for the redemption of the sons of men under Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice.

6. We, as a clean and pure nation descended from the inhabitants of Africa, do not desire to amalgamate or marry into the families of the pale skin nations of Europe. Neither serve the gods of their religion, because our forefathers are the true and divine founders of the first religious creed, for the redemption and salvation of mankind on earth.

7. Therefore we are returning the Church and Christianity back to the European Nations, as it was prepared by their forefathers for their earthly salvation.

8. While we, the Moorish Americans are returning to Islam, which was founded by our forefathers for our earthly and divine salvation.

9. The covenant of the great God-Allah: “Honor they father and they mother that thy days may be longer upon the earth land, which the Lord thy God, Allah hath given thee!”

10. Come all ye Asiatics of America and hear the truth about your nationality and birthrights, because you are not negroes. Learn of your forefathers ancient and divine Creed. That you will learn to love instead of hate.

11. We are trying to uplift fallen humanity. Come and link yourselves with the families of nations. We honor all the true and divine prophets.

But who are you going to believe?

Their own words or the religion experts?

[Sam Hill]

Related Articles:

• Media Portrays Sears "Plotters" As Harmless Cranks
• CAIR: Don't Call Miami Terrorists "Muslims"
• Sears Plotters "Had Given Their Lives To Allah"

[Sam Hill]

A "mMustn't offend the Muslims" ping.

[Purdue Pete]

bttt

[BooksForTheRight.com]

What's the use? They have two kinds of protection: pigmentation and non-Christian fanatacism. They will never be held accountable for their actions by the left.

[Jeff Gordon]

A Quran Huggger by any other name is still a Mohammedan.

[sgtbono2002]

The Devil appears in many forms . Calling himself Allah and pretending to be an associate of Christ shouldnt surprise anyone.

[glorgau]

So, they're sort of like Mormon Muslims, they are Muslims like Mormons are Christians. i.e. close, but sort of some fantasized middle ground.

[SandRat]

One more instance of the media refusing to do their homework and leaving the heavy-lifting real investigative journalism to the Pajamahadien of FR.

[Sam Hill]

They outright reject Christianity in favor of what they imagine to be Islam.

Not quite the way they are being represented in the media.

And as for Moorish Science being so peaceful, one of its adherents, Dr. Rashid, is currently serving 35 years in Colorado's Supermax prison for plotting to blow up bridges, tunnels and landmarks around NYC:

Media Portrays Sears “Plotters” As Harmless Cranks | Sweetness & Light
http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/media-portrays-sears-plotters-a-harmless-crackpots

[ASOC]

Interesting -
"Marcus Garvey, who did teach and warn the nations of the earth to prepare to meet the coming Prophet; who was to bring the true and divine Creed of Islam, and his name is Noble Drew Ali"

So, Marcus and Drew were running a scam to make a living in the early 20s? This 'teaching' has mutated to killing folks? What was the story on these guys during the 'long hot summer' of the 60s?

Maybe they are not Mooslums 'cause the head inman doesn't get a cut of the take?

I suspect more will evolve (no pun) during the trials. Be even more interesting to see how far off the reservation these cats have strayed.....

[Boundless]

Legacy Media can spin this however they want, but a clear
message was sent to domestic wannabee jihadis: you can't
trust anyone upstream, downstream or right beside you.
- the moneyman may be a plant
- the weapons man may be a plant
- the trainer may be a plant
- the planner may be a plant
- your operations are leaving an evidenciary trail
that the FBI is already collating

[Mo1]

Sooooooooo the Chicago Sun-Times is trying to tell us these terrorists who planned to destroy several buildings and kill innocent americans are the good kind of Muslims??

[Enchante]

"While we, the Moorish Americans are returning to Islam, which was founded by our forefathers for our earthly and divine salvation."

All we needed to know about these nutjobs - so they may not be from a 'mainstream' Islamic jihadist sect, they are merely from a racist offshoot Islamic jihadist sect..... it's still all jihad-inspired terrorism.

[kcvl]

Serving as the Director of the Islamic World Studies Program is Aminah Beverly McCloud, a follower of Louis Farrakhan who helped DePaul launch the department in response to what she believes is mass ignorance among Americans about the general Islamic world. McCloud has contended “that Islam was the core of civilization and a worldwide religion is absent from undergraduate study. The only thing talked about worldwide is Muslim terrorists.” Although McCloud insists that she seeks to teach students about facets of Islam removed from fundamentalist militancy, McCloud’s connections to, and use of books in favor of, Islamic extremism prove otherwise.

More...

McCloud is also a speaker with The Muslim Students Association (MSA), which was established in 1963, has 150 chapters at Universities throughout North America, and is a key lobbying organization for the Wahhabi sect of Islam. In recent years, the MSA has solicited donations for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001, because the organization was giving financial support to the terrorist group Hamas. The MSA also maintains strong ties to the Virginia-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), established in 1972 and directed from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The WAMY's Virginia offices have been a central target of the U.S. government's post-9/11 investigation of Islamist groups suspected of funding terrorism.

[Sam Hill]

Sheesh! That is very telling, isn't it?

Once again, great digging! (I've updated the original article with this info.)

[Sam Hill]

More on “religion expert” Ms. McCloud from the NYT:

An Islamic Scholar With the Dual Role of Activist

January 17, 2004

By FELICIA R. LEE

CHICAGO - Aminah McCloud exchanged a hearty “Assalamu alaikum” (”Peace be upon you”) with the two smiling young men guarding the entrance to Muhammad University, which, despite its name, is a private school for children on the South Side of Chicago run by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

A heavyset woman in a black leather jacket and black wire-framed glasses, her graying hair squashed under a black wool hat, the 56-year-old Ms. McCloud has been a frequent visitor to the quiet, orderly school in the last eight years. She has volunteered as an academic consultant and has stopped by most recently as a researcher, gathering material for her forthcoming books on the Nation of Islam and black American Muslims.

As she walked the halls, the principal, a tiny woman swathed in an elegant head scarf and long skirt, as well as other teachers greeted her warmly, like a visiting dignitary.

Ms. McCloud, a professor of Islamic studies at De Paul University here who helped establish an archive for American Muslims there 10 years ago, has been gaining national prominence since 9/11 for talking about Islam in America. She has been quoted in newspapers from The Chicago Tribune to The Los Angeles Times, sparred with television talk hosts like Bill Maher and Bill O’Reilly and been featured on a PBS special on Islam in America.

Yet even more than her news media appearances, Ms. McCloud is known for being an energetic activist among American Muslims. She is a fixture at any number of community meetings and a board member of the American Muslim Council and of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She is also proud of the legal work she has done as a consultant for cases of capital murder, divorce and wrongful death in which Islam is an issue.

Many Islamic scholars have been called upon by community groups and the news media to explain or even defend Islam, and Ms. McCloud’s double role as activist and academic raises old questions about how to mix scholarship and social struggle. Scholars in disciplines like women’s studies and black studies have argued about such dual allegiances and about whether it is possible to avoid scholarship that has what Henry Louis Gates Jr. once referred to as a “thumb on the scale.”

“Scholars of Islam are in a special position, especially after 9/11 but even before 9/11,” said Ali Asani, a professor of Indo-Muslim languages and culture at Harvard. On one hand there is such overwhelming “ignorance about Islam in the public sphere,” he said, that scholars are often called upon for very basic public education. On the other hand, he said, their objectivity is sometimes challenged by those who fear they might be cultural cheerleaders.

“One of the contentions Muslim scholars have had for years is that it was taught largely by non-Muslim scholars,” Mr. Asani said. “I was asked point-blank at a major university if, as a Muslim, I would be objective about Muslims. The irony is that I was asked by a Jewish man who taught Jewish studies.”

As for Ms. McCloud, she has “done some remarkable work” in her studies unraveling the complexities of blacks and Islam, Mr. Asani said. She is very much in the tradition of scholar-activists, he said. But she really sticks out in the field, he said, because she is African-American and a woman.

Over breakfast at a South Side pancake house, Ms. McCloud complained that “the onus put on Muslims is not put on any other group.” She acknowledged that “there is always the tendency to want to defend the religion, but we fight that tendency to report what is out there.”

In Ms. McCloud’s view, most Americans don’t understand how politically and socially diverse American Muslims are. She said the government estimated that 46 percent of the country’s six million Muslims are black. There is often tension between African-Americans and other ethnic groups that practice Islam, she said. And African-American Muslims often experience friction with non-Muslim African-Americans, most of whom are Christian. Ms. McCloud said pointedly: “After 9/11, white Protestant churches invited Muslims in to speak. African-American churches did not.”

“The media has always largely determined who speaks for Islam, so they focus on immigrants,” she said. “I set out to give an indigenous voice to Islam in America.” With a book on Muslim immigrants due out soon and contracts to produce three more books this year, including one on Muslim women, that voice could get a much larger hearing.

“African-Americans always lament going to an immigrant mosque and being told how to pray or being ignored,” Ms. McCloud said, which is why she works to improve relations among various Muslim communities who often get caught up in the old debate about whose version of the religion is most authentic.

Ali Mirkiani, a member of the Chicago-area Muslim-Catholic Dialogue Group, which meets monthly, said, “She is getting people to talk and to see similarities as well as differences, to talk about the image of Islam.” He added that “she is overwhelmed by the immigrant Muslim community relying on her.”

Besides the books and her community work, Ms. McCloud teaches seven courses each year and is busy with a proposal to create an Islamic world studies interdisciplinary major for undergraduates at De Paul, the largest Catholic university in the nation. She writes at night, she said, from about 9:30 to morning prayer, usually around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and then sleeps four hours.

One of her books will focus on the Nation of Islam. Ms. McCloud has spent a great deal of time with Mr. Farrakhan and finds him an intelligent, charismatic man. She believes the public view of him as a social and religious leader is distorted because of the focus on his incendiary statements.

“He has been talking abut inequities and injustices among black Americans for a long time,” Ms. McCloud said. “To distill his views down to one sentence to what he utters about Jews is an utter negation of what he has done, in the same way that no one has written off Thomas Jefferson because he raped a slave woman.”

One major question, she said, is in what direction the Nation will take its brand of Islam. The Nation has always been evolving, she noted, from its inception during the segregated 1930’s to the prominent stage it occupied in the 60’s, when Malcolm X dominated, to this new century.

Now, she argues, it has been moving toward traditional Islam while still focusing on using Islamic law to raise the status of blacks in society.

But most black Muslims are not members of Mr. Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, she stressed. She has found at least five groups that call themselves the Nation of Islam, with different leaders and different focuses. Most of the communities seem to be in big cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Some have descendants of original Nation members, others are young adults who joined in the last 10 to 15 years. Some were attracted by spiritual and philosophical concerns, others by the message of social uplift.

As for Ms. McCloud, she was a freshman at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1966 when she first met large numbers of African Muslims and was attracted to their spiritual and political vitality. She became a Muslim, too, coming from a family background of no particular religious affiliation.

“Muslims saw the issues of race in global terms, and they let me know that American racism and separatism were also a kind of apartheid,” she recalled. “From my perspective as a young adult, the tactics used by the civil rights movement were wrong. You don’t put women and children out to fight white men with dogs. The goal of being a citizen should not be to get people to let you eat in their restaurant.”

She moved to Philadelphia and worked as a pharmacist, but after repeated holdups at gunpoint where she worked, her nerves were raw. She was reminded by a Muslim friend of the paucity of Muslim scholars. Although she was the divorced mother of three young children, she went back to school at Temple University and majored in Islamic studies, finishing her doctorate in 1993. “I did it as a commitment to the community,” she said. She is now married to Frederick Thaufeer al-Deen, a former federal prison chaplain,

In her case, says Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, the combination of activism and scholarship complement each other: “She was one of the first people to designate Islamic studies in America as a discipline and to introduce it as a field of study in the academy.”

Ms. McCloud said she hoped her work showed that “Islam in America is here to stay.” She added, “They can assault the leaders, they can call everyone a terrorist, they can restrict people’s movements, but Americans as a whole will not tolerate that.”

http://www.racematters.org/aminahmccloud.htm

[Redleg Duke]

Notice how those Aftican Americans put on such a pathetic, "why me?" expression for their mugshots?

[ladyinred]

8. While we, the Moorish Americans are returning to Islam, which was founded by our forefathers for our earthly and divine salvation.

Not Muslim huh? And Hillary is a hawk too.

[Anti-Bubba182]

Moorish Science Temple of America

"..Virtually every religion has some sort of memorable origin story, something that explains why this particular religion is so much superior to all of the other options available to today's discriminating consumer.

Some stories are more memorable than others. Case in point: The Moorish Science Temple of America, which surpasses even Scientology and Thelema in sheer weirdness.

Moorish Science was established in 1913 by a man who was born with the name Timothy Drew. Moorish Science may have the distinction of being the only religion ever to be founded in Newark, NJ. Similar to Christian Science, Moorish Science has nothing to do with science, although it does have a lot to do with Moorishness...[snip].."

These people would be funny if they were not radicalized malignant racists. Their leaders are a bunch of hustlers, for power, money, women, whatever. Their cult is tolerated under the the mistaken notion that compensatory racism should be permitted to the so called underclasses and minorities.

It is no accident that prisons are an important recruiting ground for them. It is no surprise that their hatred of whites would translate to a hatred of the country.

[Sam Hill]

"It is no accident that prisons are an important recruiting ground for them. It is no surprise that their hatred of whites would translate to a hatred of the country."

Well, it's news to our watchdog press and their religion experts.

Or rather, they pretend not to know this.