Beheadings, Bombings, and New York’s Little Bangladesh

(Daniel Greenfield’s article from The FRONTPAGE MAG on January 16, 2014.)

Mohammed Siddiquee the Bnegali-Muslim beheader.

Walk along Church Avenue and turn east onto McDonald Avenue and you will see where the old standards of working class Brooklyn, aging homes with faded American flags and loose siding, surly bars tucked into the shadows of street corners and the last video stores hanging on to a dying industry give way to mosques and grocery stores selling goat meat.

Mosques grow like mushrooms in basements, cell phone stores offer easy ways to wire money back to Bangladesh and old men glare at interlopers, especially if they are infidel women.

This is where Mohammed Siddiquee settled a dispute the old-fashioned way by beheading his landlord.

Mohammed wasn’t the first man in Brooklyn to use violence to settle a rental dispute, but beheadings are more traditional in his native Bangladesh than in Brooklyn, though over in neighboring Queens, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, Bangladesh’s most wanted war criminal, heads up the local Islamic Circle of North America, whose Islamist thugs beheaded poets and buried professors in mass graves.

Convicted Bangladeshi war-criminal Ashrafuzzaman Khan of ICNA is hiding in NYC's Little Bangladesh.

Here in Kensington, where the alphabet streets that march across Brooklyn down to the ocean begin, the bars retreat along with the alphabet from those areas marked by the crescent and the angry glare. And there is another one like it at the other end of the alphabet where the Atlantic Ocean terminates the letters at Avenue Z bookending the Brooklyn alphabet with angry old men and phone cards for Bangladesh.

These spots aren’t no-go zones yet. There aren’t enough young men with too much welfare and time on their hands who have learned that the police will back off when they burn enough things and councilmen will visit to get their side of the story.

That generation will grow up being neither one thing nor the other, ricocheting from American pop culture to the Koran, from parties with the infidels to mosque study sessions until they explode from the contradictions the way that the Tsarnaevs (The Boston Marathon Bomber Brothers), who huffed pot and the Koran in equal proportions, did.

It isn’t the old men who plant bombs near 8-year-olds. It isn’t the young women laughing with their friends outside a pizza parlor, knowing that in a year or two they will have to go back home for an arranged marriage. It is the young men who call themselves Freddy or Mo at the local high school or community college, who drink and do drugs and who all their American friends swear aren’t serious about religion, until they suddenly become fatally serious.

For now the Bangladeshi settlements in Brooklyn are quiet places where the tenements and shops close off the streets into small private worlds with their own justice systems, feuds and secrets.

“I feel like I’m living in my own country,” the editor of one of the Bangladeshi newspapers in New York, said. “You don’t have to learn English to live here. That’s a great thing!”

More than 400 Bangladeshis have become the traffic police
agents for New York City Council.

Overhead may be the same sky, but Little Bangladesh has been cut off from Brooklyn and attached to a country thousands of miles away. Immigrants step off a plane from Bangladesh at JFK airport, get into a taxi driven by a Bangladeshi playing Bengali pop tapes and step out into a small slice of Bangladesh on McDonald Avenue.

And when the infidels of Brooklyn wander into their territory, they are glared at as the foreign intruders that they are.

After Mohammed beheaded his landlord Mahmud, he rushed to JFK to catch a flight. It was natural for him to think that having settled matters in the traditional fashion; he could fly away without considering what lay in the intervening spaces of the American Dar al-Harb between the Dar al-Islam of Avenue C and the Dar al-Islam of Bangladesh.

For the Mohammeds of Brooklyn, the infidels are the empty air between the rungs of a ladder that their foot passes through without noticing. They are little aware of the other Brooklyn that they are pushing aside, the great stretches of the working middle class, the little homes where police officers and firefighters once lived together with teachers and clerks, where plumbers walked to work and bus drivers got on, where the thousands of small businesses from diners to pharmacies turned the grassy stretches of land into neighborhoods.

Bugs Bunny was born here with his Flatbush accent along with a million real workers, soldiers, sailors, inventors, engineers, bums and salesmen who won wars, broke cases, sobbed in bars and brought dinner home to their families. And now, like so much of the urban working class, they are being swept away by time and tide, not from the familiar shores of Coney Island, but by the murkier waters of the Karnaphuli River and the strange world that its tides bring to Brooklyn.

The city has always had its micro communities; Chinatown at the bottom of Manhattan and Little Tokyo near NYU, Little Brazil off Times Square and Koreatown a block up from the Empire State Building.  The Russians have their stretch of Brighton Beach with its tea rooms and fur coats and Little Italy’s butcher shops, bakeries and rows of restaurants are still hanging on.

But Islam is not just a culture and the cultures who carry its baggage with them to the old worlds and the new are not toting it along like another ethnic food, a dialect or a national holiday.

In Chinatown, Buddhist temples and protestant churches sit side by side and in Latino neighborhoods, Adventist storefront churches and massive Catholic edifices co-exist; along with them can be found synagogues, Hindu and Zoroastrian temples and the whole dizzying array of religious diversity of a port city defined by its swells and tides of immigrants.

Bangladeshi Islamists burning US Flag in Dhaka.

Bangladesh is more than 90 percent Muslim. Hindus are being attacked in the streets of its cities by Islamist mobs because Islam does not co-exist. The other religions of the city do not demand that everyone join them or acknowledge their supremacy and pay them protection money for the right to exist.

Islam does.

Its immigration is also a Jihad, a form of supremacist manifest destiny to colonize the Dar al-Harb and subdue it to the will of a dead prophet with sheer numbers or sheer force.

The number of Bangladeshis in New York has increased by 20 percent in only four years to an estimated 74,000. And those numbers don’t take into account the unofficial Mohammeds living in basements while nursing their murderous grudges.

Jamaica, Queens is becoming the center of the Bangladeshi presence in New York. Another Mohammed, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, lived here in a low rise development of indistinguishable buildings crammed together and studded with satellite dishes so the dwellers could watch the television programs of their home countries, and plotted the mass murder of Americans.

“We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,” he said in a video recorded before his planned attack.  His modest goal, in his own words, was to “destroy America” and quoted “Sheikh Osama” to justify the killing of American women and children.

Mohammed described the United States as the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war, the territory yet to be conquered by the armies of Islam, and said that the only permissible reason for a Muslim to move to the United States was to conquer it by missionary work or by armed terror.

“I just want something big. Something very big,” Mohammed said, “make one step ahead, for the Muslims . . . that will make us one step closer to run the whole world.”

At this hour no one in Little Korea, Little Italy, Little Brazil, Brighton Beach or Koreatown is plotting to destroy America so that his religion can rule the world. That is what sets the Little Bangladeshes, Little Pakistans, Little Mogadishus and Little Egypts apart from every other immigrant group whose dreams for the future are not overshadowed by the iron dream of Islam.

Cops Eye Tenant in Stabbing Death of Landlord

Decapitated Bangladeshi landlord Mahuddin Mahmud.

A Brooklyn landlord was found in his office nearly decapitated and police are eyeing one of his tenants as a person of interest in what investigators believe is a robbery gone bad, authorities said.

Mahuddin Mahmud’s wife and brother made the grisly discovery Tuesday around 12:30 a.m. when they went looking for him after he didn’t come home from work, police sources said.

The 57-year-old, who came to the US from Bangladesh, owned Dual Enterprises on McDonald Avenue and kept an office in the basement of the Kensington building — the same building where he also rents out a basement apartment, police said.

His face had burns marks on it and his head was almost severed, cops said. The victim’s brother Hanif Mahmood,50, said he was allegedly the victim of a robbery.

“My brother had a money exchange, check cashing, and gold business. He had a jewellery store with a big locker and they took everything. There was a combination and a key so I don’t know how they took it,” he said.

“Maybe $20,000 worth taken. It was in the safe and the safe was open,” he added.

Sources said that the father of four had called police for help around 8 p.m. Monday but when cops showed up they didn’t check the basement. Instead they questioned tenants on the second floor, who told cops that they did not call 911.

“We are also basically conducting a full range of interviews with other people in the building to determine whether there were threats made against the victim in the past from known individuals,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said. “We’re effectively trying to recreate what might have prompted a very significant injury to the individual during the course of this homicide.”

“He was a good person he never had any problems with anybody,” the victim’s son Humayun Rahman said. “This is the shocking part why someone killed him.”

Police want to talk to MD Rasel Siddiqui, 27, who lives in the basement apartment, applied for a taxi license and immigrated from Bangladesh, is a person of interest, law enforcement sources said.

Cops Bust Fleeing-tenant at JFK after Landlord Killed

Beheader Bangladeshi tenant Mohammed Siddiquee.

“Yes, I did it!” That’s what alleged killer Mohammed Siddiquee told reporters this afternoon as he was led from a Brooklyn precinct in handcuffs this afternoon — charged with murdering his Brooklyn landlord.

Siddiquee, 27, had hoped to fly out of Kennedy Airport and make a clean getaway after buying a $1,200 one-way ticket to Kuwait, where he planned on catching a second flight to Bangladesh, police said.

But cops intercepted him at JFK about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and took him into custody. “I killed someone today,” Siddiquee blurted out when he was arrested at the airport, according to sources. He told cops in a video confession that his landlord constantly humiliated and teased him.

The madman pulled a knife on Mahuddin Mahmud, 57, during a dispute in the landlord’s basement office on McDonald Avenue near Avenue C in Kensington about 8 p.m. Monday, police said.

The victim’s wife and brother made the grisly discovery around 12:15 a.m. Tuesday when they decided to check up on him, and alerted authorities, who quickly focused on the suspect.

Siddiquee was charged with murder and criminal possession of a weapon, police said. Cops also said the suspect had debit cards with available balances of more than $24,000 on them that they believe he had taken from the victim’s safe.

Related posts at following links:
Bangladeshi Islamist War-criminals Hiding in New York City
Bangladeshis Built Careers in New York Traffic (Parking Ticket Fines)