2005-09-30
more on Moodus raid
The raid on the Darul Uloom camp at Shadybrook takes on a life of its own. Locally, Josh Mrozinski at the Middletown Press interviews Rahman, the caretaker at Shadybrook who says that the amaranth grown in Moodus is to at a vegetable market from Jamaica Plains, New York City. Josh notes that "In Bangladesh a small bag of data shak can sell for five pennies, said Rahman. But in the United States that same size bag can sell for $1."
The the news accumulator website Surfwax picks it up from the Hartford Courant. Not surprisingly, neo-cons at the Free Republic start to trumpet the story, no doubt to sow seeds of doubt [pardon the pun] toward Muslims in general to an American populace largely ignorant ["Don't they worship Allah?"]about anything but the basics ["No, stoopid! The pray to the crescent and star!"].
But it's when the Bangladesh Daily News and an American-Arabic new weblog al Jazeerah [not to be confused with aljazeera television] [regrettably, thier story wasn't cached by google] choose to pick up the story that my antennae rise.
In my ignorance, I snidely opined in the comments at Jihad Watch [when the site author hinted "...take note of the name..." I'd presumed he was writing about the hamlet of Moodus. In fact, he was writing about Darul Uloom, an Islamist group referred to by Salman Rushdie as an "ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were trained."
Rushdie further notes that Darul Uloom:
The the news accumulator website Surfwax picks it up from the Hartford Courant. Not surprisingly, neo-cons at the Free Republic start to trumpet the story, no doubt to sow seeds of doubt [pardon the pun] toward Muslims in general to an American populace largely ignorant ["Don't they worship Allah?"]about anything but the basics ["No, stoopid! The pray to the crescent and star!"]. But it's when the Bangladesh Daily News and an American-Arabic new weblog al Jazeerah [not to be confused with aljazeera television] [regrettably, thier story wasn't cached by google] choose to pick up the story that my antennae rise.
In my ignorance, I snidely opined in the comments at Jihad Watch [when the site author hinted "...take note of the name..." I'd presumed he was writing about the hamlet of Moodus. In fact, he was writing about Darul Uloom, an Islamist group referred to by Salman Rushdie as an "ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were trained."
Rushdie further notes that Darul Uloom:
...teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow, puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that exists anywhere in the world today.Keeps on getting curiouser and curiouser. ¶ 01:01
and that under Darul Uloom "...a Muslim woman from a village in northern India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband because as a result of the rape she has become haram (unclean) for him. "It does not matter," a Deobandi cleric has stated, "if it was consensual or forced."
