Spencer: Obama’s Muslim Outreach Problem

Robert Spencer

Last Friday, Fox News -- one of the few media outlets that isn’t entirely in the Obama camp -- revealed that yet another Muslim outreach adviser for the Obama campaign has questionable ties to jihadist groups. Minha Husaini replaced Mazen Asbahi as Obama’s Muslim liaison after Asbahi resigned over revelations that groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood featured him as a speaker. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to a 1991 internal memorandum revealed during last summer’s Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, is engaged “in America [in] 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 Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” The HLF is accused of funneling charitable donations to the jihad terror group Hamas.

And now Fox has revealed that Husaini also met with groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in Virginia on September 15. Also present were members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), including the group’s co-founder and executive director, Nihad Awad.

CAIR is the notorious Islamic group that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case last year. CAIR is a spinoff of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which is listed in that same 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as part of its “grand jihad.” Several CAIR officials have been arrested and convicted on terror-related charges, and one of its founders has made Islamic supremacist statements, hoping that one day the Qur’an would be the only law of the land in America.

This shady group still enjoys mainstream media support and is routinely depicted as a neutral “civil rights” organization. No sane person will ever confuse CAIR with the NAACP, however.

Still, the fact that so few have caught on to CAIR hardly gives the Obama campaign an excuse. Also meeting with Husaini in September were Mahdi Bray, an American Muslim leader who several years ago proclaimed his support for the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah during a public rally in Washington, and a Virginia imam, Johari Abdul Malik, who declared in November 2004 that “you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America -- to being the first religion in America,” and who told Muslims in 2001 that they could “blow up bridges.”

And all this follows the debacle with Husaini’s predecessor Asbahi, who resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had once served on the Board of the Allied Asset Advisors, a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The NAIT was named in the “grand jihad” Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as an allied group, and Holy Land Foundation prosecutors recently stated that NAIT has an “intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood” and was “intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to HAMAS.”

Asbahi explained: “I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board.” However, “[S]ince concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down...to avoid distracting from Barack Obama’s message of change.” However, a few weeks after his resignation, Investor’s Business Daily reported that Asbahi had said his quitting was a “strategic decision” and that he was still “participating in campaign conference calls on Muslim outreach.” And Asbahi was also at the meeting with Husaini, Awad, Bray and Malik.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama, downplayed the meeting’s importance: “This meeting was not organized by the campaign -- our outreach staff attends many meetings in the course of each day and they accepted an invitation from community leaders to attend.” Asbahi, said LaBolt, “is not an employee of the campaign and does not speak on behalf of the campaign.” According to Fox, he said that “the campaign would not have sent a representative to the meeting had it known the list of participants.”

But this is a man who wants to be President of the United States. It is his business, and the business of the people around him, to know. With all the rumors that continue to swirl around Obama’s Muslim background -- rumors that his campaign has quashed aggressively -- one would think the Obama camp would be careful to avoid any contact with these highly questionable individuals and groups.

That it instead allows these contacts to be made again and again ought to be, in a sane world, something that mainstream reporters should be aggressively pursuing with Obama. But no one ever said it was a sane world.