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Inside the Muslim Student Association Conference, Part 3

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Untitled-3-450x336By Mark Tapson:

In Part 1 of this series on the recent 15th Annual Muslim Student Association (MSA) West Conference, which I attended at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I gave a general overview of the conference’s pro-Palestinian activism, its promotion of a sense of victimization at the mercy of an Islamophobic society and university system, its urgent appeal to political activism that goes hand-in-hand with its emphasis on strengthening one’s Muslim faith and community, and its support from top Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. Part 2 focused on the biggest names who had been invited to speak there, radicals like Siraj Wahhaj, Edina Lekovich and Taher Herzallah of the infamous Irvine 11. Let’s look at some of the lesser-known speakers there whose presentations were even more political.

Ali Mir, Director of Muslim Student Life at the University of Southern California, whose bio was not included in the conference program booklet, lectured the crowd about “white privilege” in a session called “Perennial Spring,” probably intended to echo the disastrous “Arab Spring.” Mir identified cultural and economic “imperialism” as the basis of American foreign policy, and urged students to get politically involved in “social justice”: “As Muslims, we demonstrate our Islamic principles by working to empower all marginalized people, regardless of their faith,” reads his session description. Really? Like the marginalized Christians in Egypt and Nigeria and elsewhere where Muslim fundamentalists are slaughtering them openly? Like the marginalized Jews in Europe and elsewhere who are suffering increased violent persecution at the hands of Muslims? Mir neglected to address that contradiction.

As an example of how the organized Muslim students can effect meaningful change on campus, Mir told the audience that “your friend and mine, David Horowitz” delivered a talk at the University of Southern California three years ago in which “he said stupid things.” He didn’t specify what they were, but the plan he encouraged among his fellow students at that time was to “write down every racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic thing Horowitz said” and force the university to issue a statement denouncing him afterward – which Mir said it did, to the applause of his uncritical audience.

That’s not quite the whole story. In fact, David Horowitz was invited by the USC College Republicans to come on campus and protest an Islamic hadith which appeared on an official USC website, calling for the genocide of Jews. His speech was attacked in advance by Students for Justice in Palestine and the USC Progressive Alliance, who made up quotes and attributed them to Horowitz to paint him as an Islamophobe and a racist. Nonetheless, Horowitz was allowed to speak at USC on November 4, 2009.

Later, the USC Vice President of Student Affairs, Michael Jackson, published an open letter in the campus newspaper, attacking the College Republicans for inviting Horowitz. He claimed that Horowitz’s presence “led members of our community, our Muslim students, to feel threatened, unsafe, and betrayed.” This letter was also sent to every official USC student, faculty, and staff email address and was published as an ad in the Daily Trojan, which Jackson controlled. Horowitz responded with a rebuttal, which the Trojan ultimately and reluctantly printed.

In his MSA West conference presentation, Mir didn’t offer specifics about objectionable Horowitz statements. He didn’t need to; it was enough for him to simply use unsubstantiated, demonizing labels: “racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic.” Because for radicals like Mir (and his allies in the unholy alliance of the left and Muslim fundamentalists), those labels suppress debate and misrepresent the substance and philosophy of their opponents like Horowitz.

Mir went on to condemn the atheist anti-Islam writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “as much an extremist as Osama bin Laden,” because of her assertion that Muslims would be better off converting to Christianity. That’s right – he considers Hirsi Ali as much of an extremist as the man who ordered the World Trade Center massacre and other acts of terrorism. The man who was the living inspiration for violent jihadists worldwide. No student in the auditorium raised an objection.

Read more at Front Page

Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.

Inside the Muslim Student Association Conference, Part 2

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newlogo-450x297By Mark Tapson:

To read Part I, click here. 

In the previous installment of this short series on the recent 15th Annual Muslim Student Association (MSA) West Conference, which I attended at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I gave a general overview of the conference. The article summarized its pro-Palestinian political agenda, its preoccupation with hyping the threat of Islamophobia, its appeal to political activism in addition to its emphasis on strengthening one’s Muslim faith and community, and its support from some of the most influential Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. Now let’s look at some of the principal individual speakers involved and their messages.

Edina Lekovic

Edina Lekovic

The conference featured a range of professors, imams, businesspeople, media representatives, linguists, and even engineers. The biggest names were Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Edina Lekovich, Director of Policy and Programming for MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Lekovich, a prominent Islamic face in the mainstream media, has claimed in the past that Muslims are everywhere being slaughtered by “Zionists,” and she edited a UCLA Muslim student paper that cast doubt on Holocaust claims and praised Ayatollah Khomeini and bin Laden as freedom fighters. At the UCSB conference her topic was “Beyond the Muslim Bubble,” which emphasized the very innocuous-sounding aim of “integrating ourselves into American society” to “build bridges with non-Muslims”: “We weren’t made to sit on the sidelines and not play an active role in society.”

Siraj Wahhhaj

Siraj Wahhhaj

Siraj Wahhaj, the imam of the Al-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn, spoke at two main sessions at the conference: “Messengers of the Messenger,” about committing oneself to carrying forth the message of Muhammad today, and “Cultivating Our Own Spring,” about “actualizing our potential” to create a concrete foundation and strategy for the future. Both of his presentations were very vague and rambling. In the program booklet’s biography of Wahhaj, it wasn’t mentioned that he had been named as a possible co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and had invited the infamous Blind Sheikh to address his congregation several times. It neglects to point out that he advocates replacing the U.S. government with an Islamic caliphate, and has supported violent jihad. “You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do,” Wahhaj said in 1991. “You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.” A few years later he stated that “In time, democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing, and the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”

The cagey Wahhaj and Lekovich said nothing so controversial in the course of their MSA West conference sessions, however. After all, in addition to avoiding exposing their radical message to outsiders like myself, they are also keen to seduce into the Brotherhood fold any naïve Muslim students who might be in attendance. But the mere presence of Wahhaj and Lekovich, as well as the involvement of Brotherhood legacy groups, as I mentioned, confirm the radical underpinnings of the MSA West conference.

Read more at Front Page

 

Inside the Muslim Student Association Conference, Part 1

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msaBy :

Last weekend I attended the 15th Annual Muslim Student Association (MSA) West Conference at the University of California campus in the beautiful seaside town of Santa Barbara. A thousand Muslim students flocked to the school for a packed three-day weekend of speaker sessions and workshops on spiritual tools, campus activism, and “institution building,” all with the supervision and support of the American branches of the subversive Muslim Brotherhood.

The MSA is a fifty-year-old Muslim Brotherhood affiliate with chapters on many hundreds of college campuses (check out this report on the MSA from Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism). The Brotherhood, as I’m sure all FrontPage Mag readers know, is devoted to the elimination of Western civilization. They don’t officially exist in the United States, but of course they have operated here for many decades in the guise of powerful, well-funded legacy groups, the most prominent of which were intimately involved in the MSA West Conference.

The thrust of the annual conference, as its welcome letter stated, was “to inspire, empower, and provide attendees with a tangible plan” – “action items… to improve their personal lives, their MSAs, and their communities at large” – and to link spirituality and activism: “Spirituality is the foundation, providing roots for activism; activism is actualized when produced by a sound spiritual community.” “We weren’t made to sit on the sidelines and not play an active role in society,” reads the description of a workshop led by Edina Lekovic, Communications Director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Toward that end, the MSA hosted nearly 1000 Muslim students, according to its website, for the intense conference. I can attest to the fact that the 860-seat Campbell Hall auditorium, where the main sessions of the conference took place, was always almost entirely full for the main sessions, with more young women than young men in the strictly segregated audience. Speaking of the young women: by my estimate, more than 90% of them were wearing the hijab.

Many of the program listings for the weekend sounded as innocuous and self-actualizing as a Deepak Chopra seminar: “Unlock Your Potential,” one was titled. “Rebirth of the Spiritual Warrior” was another. “Blueprint from the Divine.” “Finding the One.” “Green Your Deen.” Even “Time and Stress Management.” And indeed, there was much lecturing from the speakers about purely spiritual matters: how to be a better Muslim, how to more closely model one’s behavior after the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his companions (whom one speaker, Maryam Amirebrahimi, referred to as “the Prophet’s homeboys and homegirls”), how to redefine masculinity and womanhood, how to deal with campus temptations like drinking and gender relations, etc.

There were also, however, quite a few workshops and talks with an overtly political slant.

Read more at Front Page

 

UC Irvine’s ‘Islam Awareness Week’: A CAIR Convention

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Picture-61-450x308By Arnold Ahlert

The Muslim Student Union (MSU) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is holding its 2013 “Islam Awareness Week 2013” from January 22-25. Although the program is billed as one “dedicated to encouraging dialogue, dispelling misconceptions, and bringing thought-provoking content to the entire campus community on topics related to Islam,” it is little more than another link in the historical chain of Islamist-influenced events that the MSU has sponsored over several years. The disturbing list of speakers on this year’s roster says volumes about the MSU’s pernicious influence on campus and its Muslim Brotherhood origins.

Speaking about freedom of speech will be Hussam Ayloush. Ayloush is the head of the Southern California chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot and an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case where five defendants were convicted of financing terrorism. In October 2000, Ayloush was a guest speaker at an event where the president of the UCLA branch of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) led a crowd of demonstrators in chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” in front of the Israeli consulate. Ayloush was soliciting funds for the HLF at the time.

At another Muslim Student Association event in 2006, Ayloush contended that any attempt to shut down Hamas-linked charities that were funding Palestinians was ”an attempt at genocide.” In 2009, angered by FBI attempts to surveil Muslims for possible ties to radicalism, he declared that “our mosques,” “our Koran,” and “our youth who they try to racialize” are “off limits.”  On September 12, 2012, when “the blame video” meme was being used to explain the attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, Ayloush didn’t wait for any confirmation of the facts before tweeting, ”Extremist Jews produce hateful film, extremist Christians promote it. Extremist Muslims riot and kill. The whole world will suffer.” Moreover, the man who will speak about freedom of speech supported the power grab by Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, and the country’s new constitution that prohibits “insults” to “religious prophets.”

Speaking on the topic of “Jihad: the Struggle For Peace” is Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, the former president of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, and an organization, like the MSA, with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2000, Siddiqi claimed that Jerusalem is land “that belongs to Muslims,” further warning Americans that if they “remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.” In June 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story about Siddiqi’s views on homosexuality, during which he revealed that “Islam is totally against homosexuality.” And while he doesn’t condone violence against gays and lesbians, he reportedly supported countries whose laws make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.

During a 2006 sermon, Siddiqi added his voice to those Muslims who promote free speech limits concerning Islam. “We do not force others to believe in Prophet Muhammad the way we believe in him; but they should not insult us and humiliate us by abusing his name, his personality and character in public,” he said. As for the so-called jihadist struggle for peace, Siddiqi had a slightly different take on the subject, tape recorded around 17 years ago. He said he could see Jihad’s impact “in the Intifada movement in Palestine,” where “in a few years we will be celebrating with each other the victory of Islam in Palestine…celebrating the coming of the Masjid al-Aqsa under the Islamic rule…and the whole land of Palestine insh’allah and the establishment of the Islamic State throughout that area.”

Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, will be addressing women’s rights in Islam. She is associated with several MSAs through MSA West “an umbrella organization comprised of Muslim Student Associations (MSAs), representing Muslim students and their organizations from campuses across the West Coast,” according to its website. Her communications on Twitter have referred to “apartheid Israel,” claimed American troops “are engaged in terrorism,” and characterized Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) congressional hearings on Muslim extremism as a “witch hunt.” She also claims to “find inspiration” in Sami Al-Arian, convicted of conspiracy for his involvement in funding the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan was barred from entering the United States for six years due to his ties to a charity that supported Hamas.

Billloo is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and a big fan Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government. Two Tweets from June 2012 sum up her feeling towards Israel. “Zionism IS racism,” she posted on June 4.  “[Apartheid] Israel commits war crimes as a hobby,” she posted a week later.

None of this is even remotely surprising. UCI’s MSU, founded in 1992, is notorious for its overt promotion of the Islamist agenda and anti-Semitism over the years. Its radically pro-Palestinian efforts came to prominence during the Second Intifada, when MSU members began wearing “Freedom Fighter” t-shirts on campus, a slogan that changed to “UC Intifada” as the group grew more confident of its place at the university. MSU members walk around campus wearing green armbands to signal solidarity with Hamas, and each year at graduation they don green stoles with the Arabic word shahada (“martyr”) on them–as a tribute to Islamist suicide bombers.

In the early 2000s, a series of anti-Semitic speakers were invited to campus. These included radical Imams Muhammad al-Asi, who in 2001 spoke of a ”psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings,” and Abdel Malik-Ali, who proposed a “one state solution” in 2002, delivered a speech entitled “America under Siege: The Zionist Hidden Agenda” in 2004, and called Zionism “a mixture, a fusion of the concept of white supremacy and the chosen people” in 2005.

In 2006, the MSU organized “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” a four-day hate fest where Israel was compared to Nazi Germany, and the keynote speaker, Holocaust-denier Norman Finkelstein, called the Jewish State the world’s worst human-rights violator. In 2007, the MSU featured “Israel: Apartheid Resurrected” week, followed by “Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust” in 2008, and an event in 2009 featuring extreme left-wing UK politician George Galloway, after which an eight month investigation was initiated by the university to determine if the MSU knowingly raised funds for Hamas, a federal felony. University officials eventually relented, despite acknowledging the fund-raising activities, claiming they couldn’t determine whether they were “negligent, reckless or intentional.”

Read more at Front Page

Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.

Huma Abedin, Islamist Connections and Willful Blindness

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Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and New York Times bestselling author who put the Blind Sheik behind bars in the first World Trade Center bombing.  He is the author of Willful Blindness and, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

FP: Hi Andy, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

You are carefully following the controversy over Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and her ties to Islamic supremacism. Give us an update on your findings. Walid Shoebat has discovered something quit startling lately, yes?

McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie, it’s a pleasure to be back.

You’re right, Walid Shoebat – who has done essential research in this area – did indeed come up with an eye-opening discovery. He has detailed it here, and I wrote about it here. It is an Arabic document that outlines the Saudi government’s efforts to propagate the Kingdom’s fundamentalist version of Islam and sharia (Islam’s legal system and framework for society). The document is called The Efforts of the Servant of the Two Holy Places, King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, to Support the Muslim Minorities. Walid has described it as a “manifesto.”

It bears on the present controversy because Huma Abedin served for a dozen years as the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, publication of which was the main business of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Both the institute and the journal were founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a wealthy and influential Saudi academic who became a financier of the al Qaeda terror network as well as the secretary-general of Muslim World League – one of the most significant joint ventures of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi government in terms of spreading Islamic supremacist ideology. Naseef recruited Huma Abedin’s parents to run the journal when it started in the late seventies, and it has been an Abedin family venture since that time, with Naseef remaining closely involved.

FP: Why “Muslim Minority Affairs”?

McCarthy: Well, that’s really the salience of Walid’s latest find. From the Saudi and Brotherhood perspective, “Muslim Minority Affairs” is not merely a title for an institute or a journal. It is a strategy and a jurisprudence of building the global Islamist movement by integrating into the West, resisting assimilation, establishing enclaves of Islamic supremacism, and pressuring host governments both to accommodate what become growing Muslim demands and to indulge the rule of sharia in these enclaves – which sets a precedent that facilitates the gradual incorporation of sharia elements in the law and culture of the host country.

This design, of course, has to be considered in context with what else we know about the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been brazen about its intention to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe” by dawa – the aggressive form of proselytism that pressures non-Muslim societies to adopt sharia incrementally. And in the Brotherhood’s private communications, as I explain in The Grand Jihad, it has described its work in America as a “grand jihad” or a “civilization jihad” to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.”

As I outlined in a speech at the National Press Club about two weeks ago, the overarching Saudi/Brotherhood design, coupled with Naseef’s key involvement and the substance of what one reads in the journal (a subject on which Andrew Bostom has done important work), underscores that the direct link between Ms. Abedin and Naseef is very troubling. Indeed, the intimate connection of the Abedin family with Naseef, their ties to such other Brotherhood luminaries as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, and the connections not only to the Brotherhood but to organizations that have been formally designated as facilitators of terrorism, powerfully demonstrates that the five conservative members of the House of Representatives were absolutely right to raise concerns about Islamist influence in our government.

FP: So one would think that a lot of people owe Michelle Bachmann an apology, including the media. Where is the apology?

McCarthy: Congresswoman Bachmann knows Washington well enough not to be holding her breath waiting for an apology. What is really stunning and demoralizing to me, though, is that only five members of Congress – five out of 535 if you count both chambers – have had the conscientiousness and courage to stand up and be counted on this. We have an obvious national security problem, and it goes way beyond Huma Abedin. We not only have several people with significant Islamist ties being consulted by our government on foreign and domestic policy, including counterterrorism policy. We are simultaneously seeing American policy shift dramatically in a direction that favors the Muslim Brotherhood, an avowed, incorrigible enemy of America and the West. Yet, we can’t even get one percent of our elected federal representatives to raise an eyebrow? I’ll tell you what. I speak to a lot of people around the country, and a lot more than one percent of them are worried about what’s happening.

FP: Share with us a bit about Huma’s involvement with the MSA and what that signifies.

McCarthy: Yes, that’s disturbing, too. In 19997, Ms. Abedin was on the executive board of the Muslim Students Association at George Washington University in Washington – while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and while she was an assistant editor at Naseef’s journal. The Muslim Students Association is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure – an infrastructure that the Brotherhood has quite intentionally constructed for the purpose of executing the “Muslim Minority Affairs” strategy of giving like-minded Muslims the space and fortitude to resist assimilation and demand accommodation. As I explained in The Grand Jihad, this strategy is also aptly described as “voluntary apartheid,” and one of its most influential proponents in Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist.

The Brotherhood started the MSA in the early sixties and there are now hundreds of chapters at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. Of course, thousands of students have been involved in these organizations. Many of them join for innocuous social reasons – to make friends with people of similar cultural background, etc. You have to be careful about over-generalizing: not everyone who is or ever has been part of a MSA chapter harbors sympathies for the Brotherhood and its ideology. Indeed, some MSA chapters – especially the ones that are not formally connected to the national organization (I should perhaps say the “continental” organization, since Canada is included) – reflect the debates about reform that are extraordinarily important and very much a part of Islam in the West.

Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that, as a whole, the MSA is a bastion of the Brotherhood’s brand of Islamic supremacism and that, as night follows day, the MSA has an alarming track record of its alumni going on not only to Islamist activism but even to violent jihad. Patrick Poole’s account here is a real eye-opener. And he makes the important point that many of the MSA members who’ve gotten involved in jihadism had leadership positions in their chapters. That is, the more immersed a young Muslim becomes in this Brotherhood enterprise, the more likely it is that he or she will become a committed agent in terms of aggressively spreading Islamist ideology.

The GWU chapter in which Ms. Abedin served on the executive board has a history worth noting here. Its chaplain in 2001 was Anwar al-Awlaki, the now notorious al Qaeda figure who was, back then, ministering to some of the 9/11 hijackers.

Futhermore, at Walid Shoebat’s website, Ben Barrack has pointed out that Mohamed Omeish was also a chaplain at GWU’s MSA chapter. He headed the International Islamic Relief Organization, which has been tied to the funding of al Qaeda. Omeish’s brother, Esam, headed the Muslim American Society, which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s quasi-official branch in the United States. (The Brotherhood has many affiliated organizations in which members participate, but the MAS was actually formed to be the Brotherhood’s formal presence here – although many Brothers have been ambivalent about whether a formal presence was needed or desirable.)

The Omeish brothers were closely associated with Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was once regarded as Washington’s model Muslim moderate by many of the same bipartisan Beltway elites who’ve taken shots at Michele Bachmann and her four conservative colleagues. Of course, Alamoudi is now serving a lengthy jail sentence, and we’ve learned that he was a major financial backer of al Qaeda and Hamas. As Paul Sperry has recounted at Frontpage, it was Esam Omeish who brought Awlaki in to be the imam at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia (I’ve written about that mosque, in The Grand Jihad and in this column). Awlaki and Mohammed Omeish overlapped for a time as chaplains and advisers to the MSA chapter at GWU. And as Ben Barrack points out, citing this Fox News report, Secretary of State Clinton – with Ms. Abedin as one of her top advisers – somehow managed to invite Esam Omeish to participate in a conference call the State Department organized for the purpose of discussing relations between our government and the Muslim community. By then, as I recount in The Grand Jihad, Esam Omeish was a fairly notorious figure in Washington: He had had to resign from a Virginia immigration panel to which he’d been appointed by the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, because videos surfaced in which he had praised the Palestinians for resorting to “the jihad way” so that “Palestine” could be “liberated.”

On that score, it is worth noting that Esam Omeish, like many Islamists of the Brotherhood stripe, is also a hard Left political activist – again, see Paul Sperry’s article on Omeish, which begins with him speaking at a Cindy Sheehan antiwar rally. The alliance between Islamists and Leftists is one of the major themes of my aforementioned book, The Grand Jihad.

FP: Share with us what you know and think about the overall Brotherhood influence on our government and our society’s willful blindness about it.

McCarthy: I think our society is becoming increasingly less willfully blind about it, which is one of its major disconnects with Washington.

As far as the federal government is concerned, it is worth remembering why we have a legal concept known as “conscious avoidance” or “willful blindness” (the latter, as you’ve been kind enough to mention, is the title of my first book, a memoir of the Blind Sheikh investigation). When people irresponsibly put their head in the sand, when they go out of their way to avoid, or at least pretend to avoid, knowledge of facts that bear critically upon their actions, the law no longer accepts their claims of ignorance – they are held accountable. If someone you have every reason to know is involved in the drug business pays you to transport a package across town to someone else you have every reason to know is involved in the drug business, you don’t get off the hook by claiming, “Well, gee, I never looked inside the package, I didn’t there was heroin in it.” That is the stage we are at with government officials.

Read more at Front Page

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Egyptian prez Morsi became Muslim Brotherhood member in US

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By Patrick Poole at PJ Tatler:

Tucked inside an Associated Press profile of new Egyptian president Mohamed Mosri’s wife, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, this past weekend is this little nugget:

Less than two years after she married Morsi, she joined him in Los Angeles, where he was studying for a doctorate in engineering at the University of Southern California.

Two of their five children—four boys and girl—were born in the United States, making them U.S. citizens. She said the two have not returned, though, since they left as children.

While in California she worked as an Arabic-English translator for Muslim Americans, and the young couple became involved in charity projects. It was then that they joined the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

More likely than not, they joined the Muslim Brotherhood through the Muslim Student Association (MSA), which was the mothership of all Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the United States. He attended USC from 1978-1982, and he later taught as an assistant professor at Cal State-Northridge for three years before returning to Egypt.

As the Middle East Quarterly has noted, prior to the 9/11 attacks, the MSA officially supported three charities: the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and Benevolence International Foundation. All three were closed by federal authorities and designated global terrorist organizations by the US Treasury Department.

Additionally, here at PJ Media I revealed the extensive ties of MSA leaders with terrorism.

Morsi would not be alone in joining the Ikhwan thru involvement in the MSA. In December 2003, former MSA leader Mustafa Saied described in detail to the Wall Street Journal how he was recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood thru the MSA at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

As I reported here exclusively in February 2011, the MSA pledge of allegiance made at MSA meeting and conferences is an adaptation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s creed: “Allah is our goal. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

But the admission by Morsi’s wife that they joined the Muslim Brotherhood here runs directly counter the claims of Suhail Khan made at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) when he asserted that there was no Muslim Brotherhood in the US:

 

Might Suhail’s false denials have anything to do with the fact that his father, Mahboob Khan, was national MSA vice president in 1980, was a founder and president of the Islamic Society of Southern California at the time Morsi was studying at USC, and was a longtime Muslim Brotherhood activist? What does he say now?

 

Jamal Badawi: Enduring Link to ISNA’s Radical Past

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IPT News: 

For an organization that has tried to distance itself from its Muslim Brotherhood roots, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) continues to rely on a Muslim Brotherhood official as a key speaker at many of its events.

Jamal Badawi is scheduled to speak during three sessions at ISNA’s East Regional Conference in Tampa this weekend. Among them, “Understanding Shari’ah: Sacred Principles in Striving for the Human Development.”

Badawi, a member at large on ISNA’s governing board, is deeply rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American infrastructure, records show. He is listed on the first page of a 1992 telephone directory of Brotherhood members. He also was founding member of the Muslim American Society (MAS), identified as the Brotherhood’s U.S. arm in a 2004 Chicago Tribune story.

“Everyone knows that MAS is the Muslim Brotherhood,” Abdurrahman Alamoudi testified in a Virginia courtroom last month. Alamoudi, once the nation’s most influential Muslim political figure, acknowledges his own Brotherhood involvement.

Brotherhood members also created ISNA in 1981 as an outgrowth of the Muslim Students’ Association.

The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has surged to power in recent Egyptian elections and has a global Islamic state, or Caliphate, as its ultimate goal. Its American arm cited an educational program Badawi ran in 1991 as a foundation for “dawa,” or proselytizing, in America. That same document described the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Badawi’s comments over the years show he views Islam as superior to democracy and that he defends violent jihad, including suicide bombings, as a form of martyrdom. Such statements, in addition to his Brotherhood connections, make it difficult for ISNA to claim that it has shed its radical past and MB ties.

During a February 2009 speech on “Understanding Jihad and Martyrdom,” at the Chebucto Mosque in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Badawi explained that Gaza-based terrorists were fighting a jihad and that those who were killed were martyrs. He railed against those who criticized the terrorists or cooperated with the Israelis, saying that it was an ‘excess’ by more moderate Muslims to come out against their brothers fighting the Jewish state.

“One of those form of excesses is that noble mujahideen, those who strive in the path of Allah, who are really worthy of the term Shuhadaa – martyrs – have been attacked or accused [of being terrorists], not only by their enemies, but by those who are amongst the people who are included in the broader description of the Ummah,” he said.

“They [moderate Muslims] made this accusation, but they did not even stop at accusations, they did cooperate with the enemies of humanity, to kill their own brothers and sisters,” he added, stating that those that fought against Muslims were “sub-contracting, on behalf of the usurpers of Muslims’ land, right, and heritage.”

Badawi also explained that the Western media was guilty of hypocrisy when it referred to Gaza “martyrs” fighting the Israelis, as terrorists.

“In the Western world, however, we find that the media, which is both misled and misleading, and those who are behind that media, they continued also to falsify and distort this noble concept of martyrdom, equating it with what they call terrorism, fanaticism, violence, and so on,” he said.

The Western media readily agrees that someone who “or prefers death in defense of some value, of some cause,” that is a good thing. However, “when that choice is that of a Muslim, and he chooses death rather than weakness, rather than accepting aggression and selling their rights, no, no, no, that doesn’t apply here,” he said.

Badawi spoke again in support of Palestinian terror a year later.

“But there is one form of combative jihad that is permissible only for self-defense against unprovoked aggression or to resist severe oppression, such as people being driven from their homes like the Palestinians and dispossessed,” he said in a March 2010 speech posted to the Islamonline.net website.

In June 2006, he led an Islamonline.net dialogue session called “Martyrdom in Islam: Let’s Discuss it.” In it, he compared suicide bombers fighting oppression to “freedom fighters” fighting the Nazis or the Japanese kamikazes fighting the Americans. At a 1999 Muslim student conference held at the University of Maryland, Badawi said that “resistance” was really an act of heroism. “So when an act of heroism like that is required to save others it is self-sacrifice you cannot really call it suicide. What Islam condemns is suicide in the negative sense. That’s my understanding.”

He likened Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers to the French resistance against the Nazis and urged people not to wilt in the face of criticism of such violence.

“But what makes me really surprised is the intimidation in the media and by politicians that you people, not Arabs, not Muslims even, who know of this hypocrisy are not speaking up for fear of being branded as oh supporters of terrorism,” he said at the University of Maryland conference. This is childish. This is childish. This we should not support terrorism by victimizing the innocent people but we should support freedom fighters anywhere who have been wronged.”

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Muslim Students Association Organizing in High Schools

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The Muslim Brotherhood linked, Hamas supporting Muslim Students Association has been organizing in high schools across the nation. The Muslim Interscholastic Tournament  (MIST) has been holding regional competitions since 2002. Through this highly organized extracurricular activity modeled after the traditional regional sports and academic competitions the MSA is able to conduct a vigorous Islamic Dawah (proselytizing) program. Student organizers are given step by step detailed instructions on how to approach their high school’s  Directors of Activities on the  Forming a High School MSA page:

“If you are in a public school, make sure that you emphasize that your MSA is an academic group and not a religious one. You are not trying to convert people to Islam, you are trying to educate people and correct stereotypes.”

Persistence: You may experience some reluctance from the faculty and the administration when starting your MSA. That’s why your core group should be persistent. They shouldn’t quit after the first bump in the road. If you come up against any reluctance, emphasize that your MSA is for anyone interested in learning and clearing misconceptions about Islam. This may facilitate school approval.

If you have children in high school you may want to check to see if their school has an MSA club. You can go to the school website and look at their clubs and activities page.

Thomas Edison High School is a public school located in Alexandria Virginia. The MSA is listed as a special interest club on the clubs & activities page website. Contact information for the Director of Student Activities can be found on this website.

Thomas A. Edison High School Muslim Student Association (MSA) 2009 slide show:

At 6:16 in the following video the title “Quran & Science” appears with a picture of the Quran and then a projection screen showing a history lesson:

CBN exposes how the MSA serves as a terror factory inside campuses across North America:

Key Reports on MSA:

Muslim Students and the Jihad Against the NYPD

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by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page: 

Last year several Hellfire missiles finally put an end to Anwar Al-Awlaki, a leading Al-Qaeda figure who had been involved in several terrorist attacks carried out against the United States, including the Times Square Bomber and the Underwear Bomber. It has even been alleged that Al-Awlaki may have had pre-existing knowledge of the attacks of September 11.

Before all that though, Anwar Al-Awlaki had been the president of the Muslim Students Association at Colorado State University, home of the Rams and the future leader of external operations for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Awlaki’s path from MSA president to terrorist kingpin was a traditional one for MSA presidents.

While some campus groups are known for having members that go on to excel in business or science, Muslim Students Association members become leaders in a very particular and bloody field. The record shows that the terrorist leaders of tomorrow are the MSA members of today. And if you were going to recruit future leaders of Al-Qaeda, a good place to start would be at your local MSA chapter.

Wael Hamza Jalaidan, a co-founder of Al-Qaeda, had been the president of the MSA at the University of Arizona. The former MSA president at Columbia College went on to serve as Al-Qaeda’s procurement agent in the United States. The MSA president at the University of South Alabama became the spokesman for the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia.

This is only a sliver of the complete record of the MSA’s terrorist involvement, some of which can be found in the recent Freedom Center pamphlet, “Muslim Hate Groups on Campus.” A recent Freedom Center ad listing some of the MSA’s terrorist kingpins elicited outrage from the MSA, but not a single fact based rebuttal. How could it when some of the most high profile terrorist raids and prosecutions involved MSA presidents and even MSA co-founders?

All that makes the current media furor over NYPD monitoring of MSA students so much more dishonest. A white supremacist or radical environmentalist organization with a similar track record would be routinely monitored in the same way and any complaints would be shelved. But the media insists on treating the MSA as if it were somehow special. As if it were above the law.

The Associated Press’ run of hostile stories on NYPD surveillance is in sharp contrast to its post-September 11 coverage. Ten years ago the AP was singing a different tune in a story reporting on FBI monitoring of the MSA and its involvement in fundraising for terrorist front group charities, including Benevolence International, an Al-Qaeda front. This time around there is no mention of Benevolence International or terrorist involvements and readers are left to assume that the NYPD is irrationally profiling Muslims.

George Vinson, an FBI veteran who served as California’s Homeland Security Advisor under two governors, said at the time, “Shame on law enforcement if we didn’t do this.” Now law enforcement is being shamed for doing it.

The NYPD, which is on the front line of the war on terror, stands watch over a city that has been hammered by Muslim terrorism like no other place in America, is being victimized in a smear campaign by Muslim groups, the media and politicians pandering to the jihad vote. It is being assailed by politicians from New Jersey to Chicago who have one hand out at mosque fundraisers while the other points a stern finger at the NYPD for doing its job.

To understand why the NYPD does what it does, we have to look at the results achieved. Last year the NYPD arrested an Al-Qaeda sympathizer who was planning to murder members of the armed forces returning from abroad, and it took down Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who wanted to blow up an entire synagogue and kill as many Jews as possible. It did this before they struck, not afterwards, thanks to its undercover operatives.

NYPD undercover operatives infiltrate Muslim watering holes, listening to the chatter and monitoring anyone who seems eager to spill some infidel blood. And then they get their man.

The NYPD has 1200 men and an annual budget of 330 million dollars focused on defeating terrorists. While the Obama era FBI has put a greater focus on “corporate fraud,” “financial institution fraud” and “health care fraud,” infiltrating “online pharmacies“ and “nursing homes,” the NYPD is still vigilant because it’s their city.

Nor can the NYPD confine itself to the five boroughs. The September 11 hijackers were outside NYPD jurisdiction until they entered New York airspace. The World Trade Center bombers came out of Jersey City. Local is good enough for small scale terrorist attacks, but the first sign of a large scale terrorist attack orchestrated out of Boston or across the river in New Jersey may be the rising flames and smoke over a New York landmark.

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Why Muslim Student Group Concerned the NYPD

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IPT News
February 24, 2012

The Muslim community expressed its outrage this week over a New York Police Department surveillance report from 2006 that the Associated Press reported on Monday. The report disclosed that the NYPD monitored Muslim Students Association (MSA) chapters in the Northeast. The outrage, centered on the perceived violation of privacy, is based on an incorrect presumption that law enforcement had no cause for concern with the MSA.

The organization’s history with radical dogma, convicted terrorists and radicalized alumni tell a different story.

NYPD officials visited websites and forums of different MSAs and noted the posted information, all of which was in the public domain. No one hacked into any email accounts or sites as part of the surveillance. A separate story reports that an undercover officer attended a rafting trip with more than a dozen MSA members.

But NYPD officials say critics are off base when they claim the department did something wrong.

“There is no constitutional prohibition against a police department collecting information,” city senior counsel Peter Farrell told reporters Thursday.

“What’s unconstitutional is if they then use that information to chill someone’s First Amendment rights or to impose harm on them.”

The AP report chronicles different events that some MSAs held and speakers that chapters hosted on campus and provides some lists of event attendees. The surveillance was intended to track any potential radical speakers or behaviors of the different chapters or individual members.

The report lists six different incidents of monitoring in 2006 at the University of Buffalo, New York University, and Rutgers University. It also lists 12 other MSAs that were tracked, but did not provide “significant information posted to their web sites, forums, blogs and groups.”

“Some of the most dangerous Western Al Qaeda-linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at universities in MSAs,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said as an explanation for the surveillance. “We were focused on radicalization and/or recruitment, specifically by groups like Al Muhajiroun, Islamic Thinkers Society, Revolution Muslim and others.”

Criticism of the NYPD surveillance has been swift.

“We believe that the NYPD clearly overstepped its boundaries when it began spying on average American Muslim college students who were simply taking whitewater rafting trips or innocently participating in school activities at their college or university campus,” said MSA National President Zahir Latheef.

“University officials may be the last line of defense for Muslim students whose rights were apparently violated by the clearly unconstitutional — and possibly illegal — tactics used by the NYPD,” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper said. “The NYPD continues to act as if it is somehow above the law that governs all other individuals and institutions.”

Cyrus McGoldrick of CAIR- NY said, “It’s very clear that this is not about police work this is about monitoring people based on ideology.”

“They’re just going out and casting a wide net around a whole community, so they’re criminalizing in a way a whole community based on their religion,” said CAIR-Connecticut Director Mongi Dhaouadi.

The Rutgers MSA called on the community to “openly condemn the clear violations of the NYPD, who conducted illegitimate profiling outside of their jurisdiction and breached the constitutional rights of an individual.”

Leaders Found Trouble

The NYPD has a duty to protect New York City from terrorist attacks. And MSA leaders and members have been convicted of terrorist activities and plots.

The list is extensive, but among the MSA alumni who went on to terrorist involvement are:

  • Anwar al-Awlaki, an influential American-born al-Qaida cleric who recruited a series of homegrown jihadists before being killed by a U.S. drone strike;
  • Aafia Siddiqui, convicted of attempted murder and assault on U.S. officers and employees in Afghanistan;
  • Zachary Chesser, convicted of attempting to provide material support to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab and soliciting attacks on “South Park” producers for an episode in which the prophet Muhammad was shown in a bear suit;
  • Jesse Morton, convicted with Chesser of threatening the South Park producers with murder;
  • Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for treason and material support to al-Qaida;
  • Waheed Zaman, who was convicted of plotting to blow up transatlantic flights;
  • Adis Medunjanin, who is awaiting trial for plotting to bomb New York subways;
  • Ramy Zamzam, who was convicted in Pakistan of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks;
  • Omar Hammami, who was indicted on charges of providing material support to al-Shabbab and is designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for his terrorist connections;
  • Muhammad Junaid Babar, who pled guilty to his support to al-Qaida; and
  • Syed Hashmi, who pled guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida.

MSA was founded in the United States in 1963 by members of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood seeks a global Islamic state and has spawned leaders of a series of Sunni terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Muslim Brotherhood motto established by founder Hassan al-Banna is, “God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”

MSA members remain faithful to Brotherhood ideology. At the closing session of the MSA West conference in January 2011 at UCLA, attendees recited a pledge, “Allah is my lord, Islam is my life, the Quran is my guide, the Sunna is my practice, Jihad is my spirit, righteousness is my character, paradise is my goal. I enjoin what is right, I forbid what is wrong, I will fight against oppression, and I will die to establish Islam.”

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