Unqualified Offerings

And its name is “Narseal Batiste,” and it’s invisible to Google (as of Saturday morning), as is his group, the so-called “Seas of David.” Marisa Taylor and Leslie Clark of Knight Ridder write

A man identifying himself as Brother Corey said in an interview with CNN that he belonged to the group, called the Seas of David. He denied the group was involved in terrorism and described the Seas of David as a religious organization.

The group apparently did little to inspire fear in the Liberty City neighborhood where they took up residence.

A close family friend and a distance cousin of Stanley Grant Phanor described the leader of the group, Narseal Batiste, as a “Moses-like figure” who would roam the streets in a cape or bathrobe, toting a crooked wooden cane and looking for young men to join his group.

Sylvain Plantin, 30, said Batiste was a martial arts expert who preached an obscure religion.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that track extremist groups in the United States, said they had not heard of the Miami group.

“It must be a very new, not very established group,” Mark Pitcavage, the director of fact finding for the Ant-Defamation League. “When I heard about the arrest, I tried to find out what sort of footprints they had left and came out with a big goose egg.”

Simon of the ACLU said his organization is reserving judgment until it gets more information.

(Link via Steve in comments.)

The Miami Herald has more:

Despite early reports to the contrary, it did not appear that the men were members of mainstream Muslim communities.

A close friend of one of the defendants said Batiste’s teachings come from the Moorish Science Temple of America, an early 20th century religion that blended Christianity, Judaism and Islam with a heavy influence on self-discipline through martial arts.

The Moorish Science Temple website does not currently have an official statement on the case. Wikipedia’s entry on the organization begins

The Moorish Science Temple of America is a religion founded in the early 20th century claiming to be a sect of Islam, but having equal influences in Buddhism, Christianity, Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Taoism. Its main tenet was that African Americans were descended from the Moors and thus were originally Islamic. Its founder was Noble Drew Ali, the Prophet né Timothy Drew (1886-1929), whose disciples included Wallace Fard Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, and Elijah Muhammad, who was Fard’s successor and who later employed Malcolm X as the mouthpiece of the Nation.

The MSTA is new to me. Reading around quickly, it sounds like yet another in America’s impressive bounty of fringe religions founded by charismatic outsiders. Some are black; some are white; some get rich enough to buy respectability and some don’t. From Joseph Smith to Elijah Muhammad to David Koresh, any number of American cranks, cons and visionaries have achieved death, glory, both or, worst of all, neither.

It’s not surprising that some of these folks will gravitate toward foreigners wanting to do the United States harm. What’s interesting about the Liberty City case is that, so far, it seems the ballyhoo’d “network of Wahabist funding” played no role in radicalizing the Miami Seven.