We have been telling you the long and twisted tale of Somali-Americans who have been raised since very young children in the US, but who have turned into Jihadists as young men. Now comes a case going to trial in Georgia of a young man whose parents immigrated to the US, but he himself was born here and still his allegiance is to Islam and he allegedly planned a terrorist mission within the US. Hat tip: Blulitespecial.
Authorities began building a case against Ahmed and Sadequee — both U.S. citizens — after they took a bus to Toronto in March 2005 and met with at least three other targets of an FBI investigation.
While there, investigators said, Sadequee and Ahmed discussed potential terrorist targets in the U.S., including military bases and oil refineries. They also said the group discussed a way to disrupt the worldwide Global Positioning System.
A month later, the two piled in Ahmed’s pickup truck and drove to Washington to shoot footage of U.S. landmarks and other less notable sites, such as a fuel depot and a Masonic Temple in northern Virginia, authorities said.
Sadequee sent at least two of the clips to an overseas contact days after he returned, authorities said, disguising them as “jimmy’s 13th birthday party” and “volleyball contest.”
Then Sadequee, who was born in Virginia and is of Bangladeshi descent, decided to head abroad himself. Authorities said he departed for Bangladesh in August 2005, where he would get married and attempt to link up with terrorist groups overseas.
While he was abroad, he continued to communicate with Ahmed and other suspected terrorists, authorities said. One of the alleged contacts was Mirsad Bektasevic, a Balkan-born Swede who was convicted in 2007 of planning to blow up an unidentified target in Europe to force the pullout of foreign troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. [I’m wondering if Bektasevic is a Bosnian muslim taken in by “welcoming” Sweden?]
How did all the immigrants from Bangladesh get here?
The article doesn’t tell us where Ahmed’s family originated, but Sadequee’s is from Bangladesh. I didn’t think we were taking refugees from Bangladesh and sure enough I couldn’t find any mention of them in the Office or Refugee Resettlement stats, here.
I did find this report which tells us many Bangladeshis (aka Bengalis) are here illegally and in the past a large number won the infamous Diversity Visa lottery!
More recent immigration waves have brought much larger numbers of both documented and undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. Between 1982 and 1992, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization service legally admitted 28,850 Bangladeshi. From 1988 to 1993, some 6,000 Bangladeshis also won visas through a lottery. But there is also a large number of undocumented Bangladeshis living in the United States. Some estimates are as high as 150,000, with more than 50,000 living in the metropolitan New York area alone. Other large enclaves of Bangladeshis can be found in Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. In Los Angeles, the Bangladeshi community is centered in and around the downtown area, where shop and restaurant signs are often in Bengali.
That same report tells us that 85% are Muslim.
More than 85 percent of Bangladeshis follow the tenets of Islam, the state religion of Bangladesh since 1988. Most of them are of the Sunni sect with a small number of Shi’ite Muslims, mostly the descendants of Iranian immigrants. Only about ten percent of the population is Hindu; the remaining population consists of Buddhists, Christians, and followers of various other sects.
And here is an article that tells us they are working really hard NOT to assimilate (sounds like the Sadequee’s succeeded in keeping their son from becoming westernized!).
They strive to uphold their cultural values and traditions even while living in the United States. These immigrants have created ethnic communities in which they are able to form a Bengali subculture in the United States and better resist assimilation. These immigrants also strive to raise their second-generation children in traditional Bengali manner, so that they will also resist assimilation into the American culture.
Once the immigrant seeds are planted, the US government allows family members to follow and thus the numbers grow exponentially.
This page at the US Department of State website tells us that 50,000 Bangladeshis are on the list to enter the US as family members. It is the seventh largest group in a list that includes China and Mexico among the six countries above it on the list (none of those on the list above Bangladesh are Muslim countries).
Oh, I almost forgot, in my reading I learned that Bangladeshis travel back and forth to their mother country a whole lot.