Muslim Hamlet Blames Sept. 11 for New Scrutiny

Above the snow line in the mountains east of Fresno is a small Muslim community called Baladullah--mostly African American families escaping big city problems.

Since Sept. 11, its 100 or so residents have faced a problem they might never have predicted. They are caught in a two-front war their tough-minded leader is waging--for economic survival and the right to live in peace.

Khadijah Ghafur, who helped found Baladullah six years ago, heads a chain of charter schools based 60 miles away in the flatlands. The Fresno school board revoked the charter of her Gateway Academy schools last month, and Ghafur is determined to keep them running.

Officials say they annulled the charter largely because the schools had serious financial problems. Ghafur, who was fighting civil rights battles at the age of 14 during the 1960s, says racism and anti-Muslim hysteria are the real reasons.

Almost immediately after Sept. 11, local attention was drawn to Baladullah and the Gateway schools.

The Baladullah property includes a firing range and an old landing strip for private planes. Neighbors reported hearing gunshots from time to time. The local media pounced. Some hinted strongly that Baladullah might be a terrorist camp.

The news accounts scared some of Baladullah’s neighbors. So residents held an open house and answered questions from the eight or so people who attended. Still, one night a pickup truck full of white men roared into the camp, its occupants shouting racist threats.

In response to complaints from neighbors and the media attention, the FBI began interviewing Baladullah residents about activity there.

Gateway schools, meanwhile, were already the subject of scrutiny by local authorities who had been looking into the academy before Sept. 11. They said Gateway was deeply in debt, failed to keep adequate records and allowed the teaching of religion in two of its 11 branches, located in Fresno and other California cities.

As school officials intensified their probe, state authorities launched a fraud investigation.

On Jan. 10 the Anti-Defamation League weighed in, calling the charter school outrageous and citing media reports linking it to “an Islamic terrorist group.”

Ghafur says the Jan. 16 charter revocation that shut off state money, and the increased interest in Baladullah, stem from anti-Muslim sentiments. “We have absolutely no involvement in any terrorist activity,” she said.

“Everything just went haywire after 9/11,” Ghafur said. “Islam is on trial, and we as Americans are on trial as we deal with it. This is not the American way.”

Land Once Belonged to Synanon Program

California 245 snakes into the mountains near Sequoia National Forest. Just a mile past the tiny community of Badger is Baladullah. A sign above the gate calls it Allah’s City. Another nearby advertises U-Haul rentals.

Most residents here came from inner cities and are scraping by. Some commute daily to jobs in nearby Visalia. Others are trying to grow olive trees and raise chickens. Trailers are the only housing.

The 440-acre parcel was once part of a 3,400-acre property owned by Synanon, the communal drug rehabilitation program that achieved notoriety for acts and threats of violence in the late 1970s and has since closed.

Doug Hurt, a Visalia attorney, was a member of Synanon. He says he has handled a lot of legal work for Baladullah and Ghafur for free because he feels they have been victimized since Sept. 11.

“This is a poor group of folks in the mountains escaping the inner-city problems of drugs and violence,” Hurt said.

“They are very nice, peaceful, law-abiding citizens. I have taken my wife and kids up there for picnics, and we have always had fun there.”

Even before Sept 11, Baladullah had drawn law enforcement scrutiny. A 20-year-old man from New York who had stayed briefly at the Muslim retreat was arrested in the fatal shooting of a Fresno County deputy sheriff.

Then came Sept. 11.

“In the middle of all the controversy over the shooting, we had 9/11,” Hurt said. “It was like throwing kerosene on a bonfire.”

“The media started doing stories painting Baladullah as a terrorist camp,” Hurt said. “But they didn’t report the landing strip is covered under with weeds and the firing range was built by Synanon long ago. They shoot at the same old tin cans we used to shoot at.”

He has talked with one FBI agent looking into Baladullah, Hurt said. He said the agent told him federal officials don’t view the place as any kind of terrorist threat.

“It’s so eerily similar to what happened to Synanon,” Hurt said.

“The media up here won’t let it go.”

A Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman in Tulare County, where Baladullah is located, said officials have no reason to believe the community poses any kind of terrorist or criminal threat.

Ghafur says she met with the FBI at her own invitation shortly after Sept. 11. The FBI declined to comment on its interest in Baladullah.

Many Teachers Are Working Without Pay

Gay Taylor is a teacher at the Dakota Learning Center, one of the four schools in Fresno run by the Gateway Academy. Before Gateway’s charter was revoked, she was getting paychecks. But lately she has been working for free.

So have most of the teachers at Gateway schools. Many of the students were the kind who get lost in public schools. Charter schools save a lot of them, Taylor said.

“The key word is nurture,” Taylor said. “We are involved in their lives. These kids need a lot of attention. We have foster kids here, a lot of kids who would fall though the cracks if it wasn’t for us.

“Most of the parents are keeping their children in the Gateway schools,” she said, “volunteering to fix hot lunches and help around the schools where possible.”

“We are trying to keep our family,” said Tammy Williams, who has three children at the Dakota school, a low-slung cluster of comfortable classrooms on an old church property.

Marie Davis, another parent, said her ninth-grade son has been much happier and doing better in school since enrolling at Dakota. She feels the decision to remove the school charter was political.

“They make it look like this is a black Muslim school, but it isn’t,” said Davis, who is white and Christian. “The kids here are of all races. And we will fight until there’s no breath left to keep this school open.”

According to Jill Marmolejo, a spokeswoman for the Fresno school board, Gateway received more than $1 million from the state to operate its schools last year, but spent $2.5 million, falling heavily into debt.

“There was also a serious enrollment over-projection,” Marmolejo added. “They had 242 students last year, but projected 1,200. First week in January, they submitted under 300 students. They were opening and closing centers, not telling us.”

Officials say it became impossible to track Gateway’s attendance accurately. Gateway had 11 schools in the state at one point, the four in Fresno and others in cities from Oakland to Compton.

But it severed ties with some of them in recent months.

Overall state funding, about $4,600 per student, is based on verifiable attendance figures. Gateway now reports about 500 students.

Finally, Gateway failed to comply with state law in fingerprinting new employees, Marmolejo said.

“In California, you have to be fingerprinted to work in a school,” Marmolejo said. “They listed a total of 162 employees at all the schools, and 88 did not have fingerprints. They got negative reports on two people and hired them anyway.

“I think the school board wanted to give them 30 days to straighten things out,” Marmolejo said. “But they argued it was all our fault. They were defiant to the end.”

Lawsuit Filed Against Fresno School Board

Gateway officials see their best chance for restoring the charter in a federal lawsuit filed against the Fresno school board.

“Charter schools fill a void public schools don’t. Their motto is no kid left behind,” said Frank Muna, the lawyer who filed the suit. “I don’t think they are getting fair treatment here. If it was a school run by whites, the school board would have bent over backward to let them fix up their problems.”

That is not true, Fresno officials say. Marmolejo said Gateway officials are trying to paint themselves as victims when they aren’t.

“That federal lawsuit is totally without merit,” Marmolejo said. “It’s ridiculous to try to make the Fresno schools appear racist. We have 101 different languages in our schools, and students of every race. We took action against Gateway because of serious problems, not for any other reason.”

The Anti-Defamation League didn’t mince words in its Jan. 10 letter to the state Education Department:

“There are indications that this school is linked to an Islamic terrorist group and that the school has violated the 1st Amendment by teaching religion in this state-funded school,” wrote Jonathan Bernstein, regional director for the ADL in San Francisco.

He cited local news reports linking Ghafur to a group called Muslims of the Americas, which Bernstein described as an Islamic extremist group.

That organization, Bernstein wrote, is linked to another group called Al Fuqua. And that Islamic sect “seeks to purify Islam through violence,” the letter said.

Bernstein added, “We urge you to investigate these allegations seriously, and to immediately suspend funding to Gateway schools.”

Leader Describes 1960s Civil Rights Protests

Ghafur said she believes the letter was part of a larger effort to discredit Muslims in the United States.

“There is a Zionist smear campaign against us,” she said. Muslims of the Americas “were at ground zero after the attacks, helping the rescue effort.”

Ghafur was born and raised in Selma, Ala., she said. At 14 she was arrested during a civil rights demonstration there. Police used dogs, water hoses and tear gas on the demonstrators.

“I was one of 29 teenage girls thrown into a cell with only toilet water to drink,” she said.

In an interview at the Gateway Academy’s administration office in a shabby downtown area of Fresno, Ghafur said she is associated with Muslims of the Americas, but not Al Fuqua.

“Al Fuqua doesn’t even exist [anymore] that we know of,” she said. “It was a criminal branch of Islam. I certainly had no connection to it.

“I have been followed around and my life has been threatened since Sept. 11,” she said. “I was leaving the Fresno school district building one day and a white guy drove by and shouted [using a racial epithet], ‘I’m going to wipe you off the face of the Earth!’”

“All of it, everything that has happened, is because I am a strong Muslim woman,” Ghafur said. “We made arrangements to help Muslim women in Bosnia, and I am also concerned about the issue of Kashmir,” she said. “I have created enemies on a world and local scale.”

Gateway could have corrected its problems if the school board had given it more time, she said, adding that the financial problems were due largely to a state lag in reimbursing expenses.

Still, she said, “I know we are going to stay open one way or another. I did not drink that toilet water in Selma to come to Fresno and be abused.”