Eideard

Members of a Scarborough mosque have expressed shock and disbelief that their “nice” and “humble” religious leader has been charged with a string of sexual assaults. Mohammad Masroor, the imam at the Baitul Mukarram Islamic Society…faces 13 charges involving sexual offences and death threats relating to five alleged victims…

Det. Const. Karen Armstrong said Masroor used his position of leadership “to his advantage.” She said Masroor, who teaches in the mosque as well as in private homes, knew the alleged victims…

“The victims are both male and female,” Armstrong said. “We believe there are other victims as (the accused) has lived and worked worldwide.”

Masroor taught in Florida, Michigan and Bangladesh before coming to Canada, according to police. He has also lived and taught in Germany, France, Hungary, Singapore and Sri Lanka but police said the investigation is not limited to those areas…

Members of the mosque were especially upset that the allegations come during the holy month of Ramadan…

Yes, I think he’s actually a Romulan pretending to be a Vulcan.

Thanks, James

Abraham Mashal

Abe Mashal, a 31-year-old dog trainer from St. Charles, says FBI agents told him he ended up on the government’s no-fly list because he exchanged e-mails with a Muslim cleric they were monitoring.

The topic: How to raise his children in an interfaith household.

Mashal said he has never had any links to terror or terrorists and is a “patriotic,” honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran.

He found out he’d been flagged last April, when he tried to board a flight to Spokane, Wash., to train dogs for a client. Since then, his family members and friends have been questioned, and he said he has lost business because he isn’t allowed to fly.

Mashal is one of 17 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in June by the American Civil Liberties Union over the list.

FBI agents questioned him at Midway Airport, then at his home. Finally, he was summoned to a hotel in Schaumburg, where more FBI agents told him he’d been placed on the no-fly list because of an e-mail he had sent to an imam — a Muslim cleric — whom they’d been watching.

Mashal said he had sought the imam’s advice about raising children in a mixed-religion household. Mashal is Muslim; his wife is Christian.

He said the agents offered to get him off the list — if he would become an undercover informant at mosques. He refused and said he feels he was being blackmailed.

The FBI conducts their activities on behalf of Freedom and the American Way the same way they always have. Like gangsters with a license to steal, extort and blackmail.

Sanctioning someone’s lifestyle and livelihood must be in Chapter 1 of the Handbook of Sleazy Practices issued to unprincipled intel operatives worldwide. Pretending to defend our Bill of Rights is exactly what it is – a pretense, a ruse.

Jaziri at his family home in Tunisia after being deported from Canada
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California inside the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents.

Said Jaziri, the former Imam of a Muslim congregation in Montreal, was hidden inside a car driven by a San Diego-area man who was pulled over by U.S. Border Patrol agents near an Indian casino east of San Diego. Jaziri allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling group $5,000 to get him across the border near Tecate, saying he wanted to be taken to a “safe place anywhere in the U.S.”

The arrest marks the unexpected resurfacing of the 43-year-old cleric, whose protracted legal battle to avoid deportation drew headlines in Canada. A Tunisian immigrant, Jaziri was deported for failing to disclose a criminal conviction in France while applying for refugee status in the mid-1990s.

But Jaziri’s supporters said he was targeted for his fundamentalist views: Jaziri backed Sharia law for Canadian Muslims and led protests over the publication of the prophet Muhammad cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2006.

Jaziri is being held as a material witness in the criminal case against the BMW’s driver, Kenneth Robert Lawler, who has been charged with immigrant smuggling. He is at the San Luis Detention Facility near Yuma, Ariz., according to his attorney, Wayne Charles Mayer. His bond has been set at $25,000…

According to the court documents, a Mexican foot guide led Jaziri and a Mexican immigrant over the fence near Tecate and he trekked overnight through the rugged back country, to a road where drivers frequently pick up immigrants for smuggling runs into San Diego.

Border Patrol agents, alerted by fire fighters who saw the immigrants get in the trunk, pulled the car over near the Golden Acorn Casino, about 50 miles east of San Diego. He told agents that his journey to the border had been a long one. He took a flight from Africa to Europe, then to Central America and Chetumal, Mexico, on the Mexico-Belize border, where he took a bus to Tijuana.

Guess he took his bankbook with him when he was deported from Canada.