The Muslim Student Union: Where “Community,” “Prayer,” and Jew-Hatred Come Together

John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com

If one were to judge the Muslim Student Union (MSU) of the University of California at Irvine (UCI) solely on the basis of its self-description and its stated mission, one would have no inkling of the volcano of Jew-hatred that animates this organization. Founded in 1992 by a small group of Muslim students who “desired to establish an Islamic presence on campus,” MSU says it aims to provide a “community” or “family” atmosphere for Muslims enrolled at UCI, and to build “an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members.” Toward these ends, MSU offers “daily congregational prayers, daily free iftars [the evening meal for breaking the daily fast] during Ramadan that serve over a hundred Muslims, over eight weekly classes, a quarterly magazine Alkalima, coalition building with other clubs on campus, and a gateway to the larger Muslim community …” MSU also provides career advice and a study/tutoring program to help Muslims at UCI.

It all sounds very, very nice.

What the Muslim Student Union does not mention in its literature, however, is that its members commonly wear green armbands during the events it sponsors, to signal their allegiance to the terrorist group Hamas. Nor is there any mention of the fact that MSU has displayed posters on the UCI campus that equate the Star of David with the Nazi Swastika.

MSU’s promotional literature is similarly silent about a February 2001 event where the organization hosted the radical cleric Muhammad al-Asi, who told his UCI audience: “The Zionist-Israeli lobby ... is taking the United States government and the United States people to the abyss. We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

It should be noted that MSU was not the least bit unaware of Mr. al-Asi’s radical views when it invited him to speak on campus. Al-Asi’s Jew-hatred had been widely known for many years. Indeed as early as 1981, he was removed as Imam of the Washington, DC Islamic Center at the request of several Middle Eastern governments that were troubled by his pro-Khomeini rhetoric. Al-Asi also has close ties to Ahmed Huber, the neo-Nazi Swiss convert to Islam who once lauded Khomeini as the “living continuation of Adolf Hitler.” And advocating an “Islamic World Order,” al-Asi holds that the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out by Israeli Mossad agents seeking to “criminalize Muslims.”

MSU’s alliance with al-Asi is hardly what one would expect from an organization that “enhances good, discourages bad.” But in fact, this alliance represents only the tip of a very large iceberg.

In 2002, a sign posted on the UCI campus by MSU stated: “Israelis Love to Kill Innocent Children.” That same year, MSU sponsored a speech by the radical Oakland imam, Abdel Malik-Ali, who said: “Israel wants Palestinians to have their own state. It’s beyond that now. No. That’s off the table. One state. Majority rules. Us. The Muslims.”

A favorite guest speaker of MSU, Malik-Ali is an African-American convert to Islam, a former Nation of Islam member, and a longtime supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. His more infamous remarks include the claim that Jews staged the 9/11 attacks “to give an excuse to wage war against Muslims around the world”; that “[t]he wars against Iraq [Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom] were manufactured by the Jews in America to avert attention from the two [Palestinian] Intifadahs”; and that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a “pretty good guy.”

On February 26, 2004, MSU again brought Malik-Ali to the UCI campus to deliver a speech titled “America under Siege: The Zionist Hidden Agenda.” According to UCI’s student newspaper: “[Malik-Ali] implied that Zionism is a mixture of ‘chosen people-ness and white supremacy’; that the Iraqi war is in the process of ‘Israelization’; that the Zionists had the ‘Congress, the media and the FBI in their back pocket’; that the downfall of former Democratic [presidential] front-runner Howard Dean was due to the Zionists; and that the Mossad [Israel’s intelligence agency] would have assassinated Al Gore if he was elected [in 2000] just to bring Joe Lieberman (his Jewish vice-president) to power.”

In the spring of 2004, MSU and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) co-sponsored their fourth annual “Zionism Awareness Week,” during which both groups again wore green armbands to signal their support for Hamas.

In June 2004, MSU asked UCI’s graduating Muslim students to wear green sashes inscribed with the word “shahada,” the Arabic word for the “martyrdom” of a suicide bomber, to their graduation ceremony. Two dozen students complied with this MSU request.

At a February 2005 MSU-organized event held in the center quad at UC Irvine, guest speaker Abdel Malik-Ali told his audience of some 150 mostly Muslim listeners: “Zionism is a mixture, a fusion of the concept of white supremacy and the chosen people.” He complained about Zionist domination of the American media, Zionist complicity in America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Zionists’ inclination to recount the horrors of the Holocaust “when you accuse them of their Nazi behavior.” “One state. Majority rule,” he said. “Check that out. Us. The Muslims.”

At a March 2006 panel discussion at UC Irvine, MSU led as many as 1,000 Muslim students in a protest against the decision of the event’s sponsors to publicly display some “offensive” Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, cartoons that had recently set off massive demonstrations and riots throughout the Muslim world. Donning their customary green, pro-Hamas armbands, MSU members initiated the protest by kneeling on their green prayer mats and reciting an Arabic prayer. When a crowd of counter-protesters sang “God Bless America,” the Muslim students responded with chants of: “Hey Republicans Stop the Hate! All You Do Is Instigate,” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho! The Prophet’s Cartoons Have Got to Go!”

MSU organized a May 2006 “Holocaust in the Holy Land” event featuring four days of anti-Israel lectures and presentations that portrayed the Jewish State as the modern-day incarnation of Nazi Germany. The event was keynoted by the Holocaust-denier Norman Finkelstein, whose speech, titled “Obstacles to Peace: Israelis or Palestinians,” identified Israel as the world’s worst violator of human rights. Adjacent to a mock Israeli “apartheid” wall which they had erected in the center of the UCI campus, MSU students distributed fliers titled “Exploiting the Holocaust to Justify Genocide,” and bearing a quote from Finkelstein himself: “The Holocaust has become the ideological justification for the oppression of the Palestinian people.” Other guest speakers at the week’s festivities included Abdel Malik-Ali; Muhammad al-Asi, whose speech was titled “Hamas: The People’s Choice”; and Rabbi David Weiss of Neturei Karta (an ultra-orthodox, PLO-tied Jewish group that opposes Israel’s existence), whose speech was called “Zionism Hijacking Judaism.”

Abdel Malik-Ali was the featured speaker at an October 5, 2006 MSU event, where he told a crowd of some 200 cheering students: “They [Jews] think they are superman, but we, the Muslims, are kryptonite. They [Jews] know that their days are numbered.”

In May 2007, MSU sponsored an “Israel: Apartheid Resurrected” week which featured a series of speeches and demonstrations condemning the State of Israel. On May 17, MSU’s longtime favorite -- Abdel Malik-Ali -- delivered a lecture titled “UC Intifada: How you can help Palestine,” wherein he informed UCI’s Muslim students (who again wore green armbands as well as T-shirts reading “UC Intifada” and “Freedom Fighter”) that no other form of death is as honorable as that of the martyr who dies while trying to kill Jews. Refusing to recognize Israel’s existence, Malik-Ali referred to that country not by its name, but only as the “Zionist Apartheid State.”

In 2007, a UC Irvine student blogger identifying herself as “OC Apostate” (she had recently left the Muslim faith in which she was raised) was forced to shut down her blog (wherein she criticized Islam’s intolerance), for fear that members of the campus MSU would harm her family in retribution for her apostasy. She explained:

“I started a blog as way to express myself. Word finally got around that it was me [who was the author] and my family got threats that if I didn’t shut up something might happen. I didn’t want them to suffer for something I had done. So I deleted everything. … They [Muslim students] saw me with my hair out [of the hijab]. They knew who I was. The reaction was a lot of gossip and speculation about my upbringing. Women who I didn’t know gave me dirty looks. … I don’t underestimate them. … The notion of a traitor in your own community is the worse thing that could possibly happen. There is no room for ex-Muslims in a Muslim society. The punishment for being an apostate is death.”

Most recently, MSU invited Yvonne Ridley, a reporter and activist for Iranian PRESS-TV, to speak at UC Irvine on November 12, 2007. Ridley, who also writes a column for the New York-based publication Daily Muslims, is a member of the Respect Party led by British Member of Parliament George Galloway. She was formerly employed as a senior editor by Al Jazeera and helped launch that website’s English-language version in 2003.

Ridley first came to public attention in September 2001 when, while on an assignment for the Sunday Express, she was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan and was held captive for eleven days. After she was set free, Ridley studied the Koran and found it to be a “Magna Carta for women.” She converted to Islam in the summer of 2003.

In the wake of a British anti-terror raid against a Muslim house in June 2006, Ridley told a Respect Party gathering that Muslims should “boycott the police and refuse to co-operate with them in any way, shape or form.” “From today until this terrorization of the Muslim community is stopped immediately,” she elaborated, “I believe all Muslims should withdraw their support. This goes from asking the community copper for directions to passing the time of day with a beat officer. We should enforce non-co-operation.”
Ridley supports divestment from Israel, a nation she has described as “that disgusting little watchdog of America that is festering in the Middle East.” She crows that her Respect Party “is a Zionist-free party,” adding that “if there was any Zionism in the Respect Party they would be hunted down and kicked out. We have no time for Zionists.”

MSU’s aforementioned Muslim student newspaper, Alkalima, once published a special report called “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid,” which lauded Hamas and Hezbollah for nobly standing up to Israeli oppression.

On September 9, 2001, Alkalima and Al-Talib (UCLA’s Muslim magazine) co-sponsored a dinner at UC-Irvine to honor Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a.k.a. H. Rap Brown, former Minister of Justice for the Black Panthers. Al-Amin was on trial at the time for the murder of an Alabama deputy, a crime for which he would eventually be convicted. A featured guest speaker at the dinner was a Black Muslim named Imam Abdul-Alim Musa, who said the United States was “superior [to all other nations] in criminality and Nazism,” and who characterized “the American criminalizer” [sic] as “the most skillful oppressor that the world has ever known.”

In 2006 Alkalima published For Justice We Fight, a pamphlet which stated that Islamic terrorist attacks targeting civilians are entirely justified. “[T]he individual or community that participates in jihad finds itself between two blissful outcomes,” said the pamphlet, “either victory and the establishment of justice, or the reward of martyrdom and Paradise.”

This, then, is the Muslim Student Union --an organization that combines its devotion to "community," "friendship," "companionship," "prayer," and "tutoring" on the one hand, with pro-terrorist Jew-hatred on the other.

Sources:

Reut Cohen, “Student Forced to Shut Down Blog by Campus Muslims” (October 3, 2007).

Aaron Hanscom and Reut Cohen, “Exposing the UC Intifada” (June 22, 2007).

Aaron Hanscom, “UC-Intifada” (February 20, 2007).

Reut Cohen, “Attending UC Intifada” (November 10, 2006).

Cindy Carcamo and Vik Jolly, “FBI Says Muslims at UCI Aren't Monitored” (June 6, 2006).

Aaron Hanscom, “Anti-Israel Hatefest at UC Irvine” (May 22, 2006).

CAMERA, “Springtime for MSU and UC Irvine” (Spring 2006).

Aaron Hanscom, “Seeking Muslim Moderates” (March 3, 2006).

Vik Rubenfeld, “Islamists Protest Against U.S. Freedom of Speech at U.C. Irvine” (March 1, 2006).

Marc Ballon, “Jewish Students and Activists Call UC Irvine a Hotbed of Anti-Semitic Harassment” (March 11, 2005).

Joseph D'Hippolito, “UC-Irvine's Anti-Anti-Terror Rally” (February 21, 2005).

Roberta Leguizamon, “Graduation Jihad” (June 17, 2004).

Arnold Steinberg, “Jihad Comes to UC-Irvine” (June 8, 2004).

Loren Casuto, “UC-Irvine Welcomes Black Muslim Hatred” (March 8, 2004).

BBC News, “Call to Muslims over Police Help” (June 7, 2006).

John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com