september
22, 2005
From the Jihad in Your Backyard Department ...
From the "jihad in your backyard" department comes this: a 28-year-old Muslim man named Ali Asad Chandia--who's charged with aiding not one, but two terrorist groups--was released on bond yesterday by a U.S. district court in Alexandria, Virginia. Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan set the following conditions for Chandia's release, which prosecutors rightly opposed: A) He'll stay with his wife at his home in College Park. Maryland, and will be electronically tracked by a GPS bracelet. B) His mother will put up her home in Gaithersburg, Maryland as collateral. How touching.
Chandia’s arraignment is scheduled for Friday in Alexandria. Incidentally, he graduated from the oddly named University of Maryland University College with a bachelor’s degree in information systems management last May. He also attended Montgomery (MD) College from fall 1995 to spring 2000, and served as president of the school's Muslims Students Association (MSA) for two years. I've written about the radical Islamist roots of the MSA in the past.
At the time of his arrest, Chandia was working as a third-grade teacher at Al-Huda School in College Park--it's a Muslim institution that, according to the University of Maryland's Diamondback Online, "instructs students from kindergarten through eighth grade in Arabic and the Koran." Why, I guess it would be "intolerant" to have them instructed in the English language and Judeo-Christian values, which are the bedrocks upon which America was built. If the bulk of an American school's curriculum revolves around teaching Arabic and the Koran, perhaps it should find a new home...like Pakistan. By the way, I'm still waiting for a Christian Bible school to open in the Islamic paradises of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But back to our good pal Ali Asad Chandia. Why should he still be sitting in a jail cell, rather than sitting at home free on bond, canoodling with his wife as he awaits arraignment? Try the severity of the charges against him. Chandia is accused of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Al-Qaeda-linked, Pakistani terrorist group which spends the bulk of its time fighting Indian troops in the disputed Kashmir region. Chandia also stands accused of serving as a "personal assistant" to Ali al-Timimi, the so-called spiritual leader of the notorious "Virginia Jihad" network. This was a group of aspiring Islamic holy warriors that trained for jihad against the United States by playing paintball games in the Virginia woods. Several of them have been convicted, including al-Timimi, who is serving a life sentence. In short, they were a nasty bunch. And most of them lived in Virginia and Maryland, in the leafy, affluent suburbs of Washington, D.C., within spitting distance of the White House and U.S. Capitol. Not a very comforting thought.
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