Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation of Ashland, Oregon
The [Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation] in Oregon seems to still be in biz because nothing's been found to indicate it needs closing or because the Feds want it to stay operational for whatever reason.
No, it's not what we could call "still in biz." Pete called, more below. Then our resident armchair fantasizer says:
The US government does want that Al Haramain group "to stay operational."
Well, they might, and it would not surprise me to learn that BlackJade knows what the US government says it wants, but it's really much too late and the US government knows that.
This Thread is about the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Oregon. This article is entirely about the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Oregon, and what it did and where it did it, and is entirely on-topic in this Thread. This is factual information known to me from my own personal experience in Ashland, Oregon, with my muslim brother Pete Seda, the founder-director of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Incorporated, an Oregon non-profit corporation in Ashland, and elsewhere related to the work the Foundation performed throughout its entire existence. This is not second-hand information gleaned from media hype and Google. It is first-hand reporting of facts to which I can ~ and might ~ testify.
It also illuminates the Bush-Ashcroft "War on Terror" against Americans. Every fruitless "investigation" of muslim organizations in America for the last twenty years has the same characteristics as this one: they are unfounded witch hunts resting solely on guilt by association and instigated by deliberate false allegations made by Israeli loyalists.
Pete called me out of the blue last Thursday. He had not had time to receive the message I left for him with his answering service, nor has he replied to my emails (he never has in twenty years ~ I don't think he even sees email), but the phone rang and there he was. In Dubai. His family is with him. He has always called me like this, right out of the blue. I'm waiting now for an eMail that probably won't ever get written, he's like that.
Interesting story. First, the Ashland operation ... have to take a little on-topic side trip here ... the Foundation was for its entire existence a religious library endowment ministry throughout America's entire prison system.
Every organizational activity that deals with muslims in America's prisons is investigated and continuously and directly monitored by both federal and State agencies for as long as it has any contact whatsoever with any prison or anyone in or released from prison. There are no exceptions to this policy, established personally by J. Edgar Hoover. It is a matter of national security by definition.
I knew that when I first posted to this Thread. I decided to not mention it to see whether our "expert researcher" would come up with it. That didn't happen, the fantasy has more substance than reality for some people.
In order to understand the Foundation and why I know so much about it, it is necessary to know a little bit about America's prisons, which was the entire focus of the Foundation's mission as spelled out in its Articles of Incorporation as "the purpose of the corporation." This is a requirement of my native Oregon's non-profit corporation laws, that what the corporation will do has to be spelled out in explicit terms. I personally wrote the Articles of Incorporation for two religious non-profit corporations currently registered with the Secretary of State of Oregon, I know these laws.
Pete has never been in jail. So he doesn't know what goes on in American prisons. I had to tell him about it, particularly with respect to muslims ~ since the brothers and I essentially wrote the book on it back in the early Seventies (I could type and speak "bureaucratese" or I'd have been out of the loop ~ a sort of reverse "white skin privilege"). It might even be possible to locate a copy of "Islam In The Wilderness ~ America's Captive Muslims" or "Islam as a Total Social System Rehabilitation and Treatment Program" somewhere other than on my bookshelves, but they're still largely definitive. Plenty of copies of the latter can be found in federal prison system offices, but no one here could get to them.
The Saudis have another book on it, written essentially in offices of the Islamic Society of North America on the basis of their "model community" in Pennsylvania's Graterford prison and their weird ideas about Americans. It's all smileys and tokenism, but that's another story.
In terms of indigenous American muslims with no connection to the ambitions of Arabs in America, we wrote the book that has been used for policy guidance wherever American penologists have custody of any muslims. It details the actual demands of shari'ah Law that Islam makes on captive muslims and what American law requires prison administrators to actually allow in prisons. Penitentiary administrators love it, they use it to tell young hothead extremists that they can't organize armed collective defense of muslims in prison ~ which they go ahead and do anyway, of course.
We wrote it after we had established treaties among in-prison gangs and groups giving us nearly-complete control over the prison population of the brand-new maximum security Southern Ohio Correction Facility at Lucasville, Ohio, in 1972, just after it opened and before the Security staff murdered one of their own to take control away from us. Check news accounts of what the courts finally called the Lucasville Guard Riot, they're full of calculated lies.
For the first year at Lucasville there was not one murder or homosexual assault against even one inmate, there were no thefts by inmates from inmates, and there were no assaults against the mini-skirted women walking around inside the penitentiary among the convicts. Nearly every convict was armed with razor-sharp cold steel knives openly manufactured in front of the guards in the prison's industrial sheet metal shops ~ I carried two on one occasion. One violator of the universally-agreed treaty laws was hospitalized twice, there was no other violence at all. The guards were completely superfluous and there were no "gladiator" fights to keep the administrators entertained.
The first murder, of a guard, not an inmate, was directly set up by the guard's brothers in brown shirts, who gave a pistol to a convict they knew would kill him, and the second was also a guard, blown away by another guard with a shotgun while they were trying to take the pistol back. The "riot" had been set up by the guards using parole promises to the neo-Nazi wannabes and the brand-new "Jewish Community" made up of five guys who never saw the inside of a synagogue in their lives.
Another story. America's prison systems, warehouses of the damned, supplying communities with mayhem from coast to coast.
Pete, of course, had never heard of any of this stuff because he just up and decided one day to provide Islamic literature to some Oregon prisoners. And he got Saudi help with the literature.
This grew into essentially a national library endowment, spreading planeloads of Saudi-published Islamic literature throughout America's entire prison system. Pete sent the libraries to anyone who could manage to get a letter out the gates, which essentially required obtaining postage. A side-by-side Arabic-English translation of the Qur'an, a "summarized" Sahih Bukhari with Arabic texts, several other books, all hardbound in a zipper case designed for the collection. Some of this was literature that I would not, myself, have anything to do with but this was Pete's project, and there was a lot of good in it.
But prison populations produce few muslims. Within six months after release, most "prison muslims" aren't. The physical mortality rates are high, the recidivism rates are very low ~ too low to sustain the prison industry's revolving-door cash cow, so that wins no points with them. But three percent continuing to practice Islam for a year after release from prison was considered a runaway success rate the last time I obtained numbers from America's consultative community.
Moreover, the libraries themselves often never made it through the gates into the prisons ~ prison administrations would limit the number of books a convict could possess, reject anything that didn't look to them like a sacred text, require that libraries be kept in the prison's facilities for religious groups and not allow them into individual hands, exclude something because it had Arabic in it that they couldn't read, and confiscate books as "contraband" whenever they were in the possession of someone who did not have an official record showing that they had received them from the mail office. All that went into the dumpster.
And convicts found out they could get that nice thin paper, so good for rolling joints, by sending out one letter. I helped Pete develop a questionnaire to screen requests, and showed him how to identify prisons where particular procedures had to be followed to get one book into one hand or a library into the hands of a community. That was ten or fifteen years ago.
But that's all done now. The last batch of prison letters is awaiting the last batch of library shipments, the Saudis have decided that they are no longer interested in supporting the Ashland Foundation's prison library ministry. Which is not a surprise.
After 9/11, the indigenous American muslims who were with Pete at the Foundation ~ who also worked for his "Urban Forrester Certified Arborist ~ Since 1977, Licensed, Bonded and Insured" business ~ got shaky. They cut off their beards, put on their ties, and disappeared back into The American Dream, Comfort Division. When he told me, I said "Alhamdulillah! [Praise God!] That's just what you needed!" and it took him a few seconds to tumble. That's the best thing I've seen coming from the 9/11 atrocities, although Americans are discovering Islam to be their religion four times as often as before 9/11 ~ and they're obviously not intimidated by Ashcroft's frantic search for ghosts. And my beloved brother is no longer a den mother for a bunch of punk white boys.
Meanwhile, Ashland's Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation is a pile of files in a lawyer's office and in the FBI offices. There's nothing there any more.
So Ashcroft can have a ball spinning Wild West tales all he wants. And the "US Government" can want "that Al-Haramain group to stay operational" all day long, and the attorney will keep answering the telephone, the answering service will keep taking messages, the "Send me a copy" page on the website will be "Under Development" until the prepaid-for-years balance at the ISP runs out, The Arborist will sit quietly on Siskiyou Boulevard, and that last shipment of libraries will get put in the mail for prison administrators to throw in the dumpster ...
... but that's all she wrote, Folks. There was never anything there and now there's even less.
That's what you find out when you get off the keyboard and start getting real information instead of what Ashcroft and Company make the media spin.
"Read all about it" I guess means Google. It sure doesn't mean "Find facts."