creeping
Get to know the multitude of sharia-promoting,
jihad-leveraging, anti-freedom Islamic groups that abound in the U.S.
(CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, MAS, MSA, etc) and educate your friends and elected
officials about them. via The History of MPAC – Andrew C. McCarthy – National Review Online.
Established in 1988 by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and admirers of Hezbollah,
MPAC styles itself a “moderate, inclusive and forward-thinking
organization with a history of fostering a strong Muslim American
identity, and combating terrorism and extremism.” In reality, MPAC is
yet another Islamist wolf in the “social justice” clothing of the hard
Left. Its founders include Hassan Hathout, the former MPAC president who
has described himself as “a close disciple” of Muslim Brotherhood
founder Hassan al-Banna. Hathout’s brother Maher, a senior MPAC adviser,
is lavish in his praise of both Hezbollah’s “freedom fighting” and the
social-justice pioneering of Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s
National Islamic Front — the genocidal junta that gave safe haven to
al-Qaeda in the early 1990s while imposing sharia on that war-torn east
African nation.
Their Islamist sympathies aside, Marayati & Co. are
Democratic-party activists and programmatic leftists, championing
Obamacare, condemning post-9/11 national-security measures, and
demagoguing conservatives. Daniel Pipes has recounted that
Marayati was a member of the Executive Committee of the California
Democratic party and served as a Clinton delegate at the 1996 Democratic
Convention. As I outlined in The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,
such cross-pollination between Islamists and leftists is commonplace.
The anti-Islamist activist M. Zuhdi Jasser, a staunchly pro-American
Muslim, aptly describes American Islamist organizations like MPAC as
“collectivist groups.” They fall in line with the Muslim Brotherhood’s
leftist orientation, seeking to “increase the power of government
through entitlement programs, increased taxation, and restricting free
markets whenever and wherever possible.”
Marayati first came to public attention in the late Nineties, when
the Democrats’ then-leader in the House, Richard Gephardt, nominated him
to serve on the National Commission on Terrorism — a nomination that
Gephardt later withdrew when it emerged that Marayati had spoken
sympathetically of violent jihad. In 1993, for example, Marayati had
proclaimed, “When Patrick Henry said, ‘Give me liberty or give me
death,’ that statement epitomized jihad.” Equally absurdly, he later
analogized Islamic terrorists to “American freedom fighters hundreds of
years ago [who] were also regarded as terrorists by the British.”
Obviously, as Pipes observed, Marayati’s intent was “to render jihad and
terrorism acceptable to Americans.”
While Democrats had hoped to raise Marayati’s profile, the exposition
of his track record raised too many questions about his judgment. That
problem intensified as the record became better known. In 1996, for
instance, a Palestinian terrorist named Muhammad Hamida plowed his car
into a crowded Jerusalem bus stop, killing one Israeli and injuring 23
others as he screamed “Allahu Akbar!” He was shot on the scene,
before he could do any more harm. Immediately afterwards, while mum on
the jihadist’s atrocity, Marayati demanded that the shooters of the
jihadist be extradited to the United States to face trial on “terrorism
charges” for this “provocative act.”
Meanwhile, in a 1999 PBS interview,
Marayati portrayed Hezbollah attacks as “legitimate resistance” — a
position that dovetailed perfectly with the sentiments of MPAC’s
founders. In fact, in a position paper published around the same time, MPAC minimized Hezbollah’s
murder of 241 U.S. military personnel in the 1983 terrorist suicide
bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon: “This attack, for all the
pain it caused, was not in a strict sense a terrorist operation. It was a
military operation, producing no civilian casualties — exactly the kind
of attack that Americans might have lauded had it been directed against
Washington’s enemies.”
Nevertheless, Marayati and his wife, Laila al-Marayati (founder of the “Muslim Women’s League”), remained Clinton
favorites. Mrs. Marayati served on the Clinton State Department’s
advisory committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, was appointed by
President Clinton to the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom, and was tapped by Hillary Clinton to join the then–first lady’s
delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women. The Marayatis,
moreover, helped Mrs. Clinton organize the original White House Iftaar
dinner in 1996. The event, marking the end of Ramadan, has since become
an annual gala to which invitations are coveted by bipartisan Beltway
luminaries. In 2009, at the first Iftaar dinner held by the Obama White
House, which is more unabashedly Leftist than its Clintonian
predecessor, Salam al-Marayati was called on to close the program.
“Ramadan,” he told the revelers, “is a time of preparation to work for social justice.”
MPAC manages the dual roles of “leading Islamist” and “government’s
favorite Muslims” because it has mastered the Brotherhood’s Janus face:
It condemns “terrorism” before non-Muslim audiences, but neglects to
explain that it does not consider “resistance” against those who
“persecute Muslims” to be “terrorism.” It also works feverishly to
defend actual terrorists and their financiers, ensuring that discerning
Islamists know exactly where MPAC stands.
For example, while Marayati was out defending Hezbollah and pointing
the accusatory 9/11 finger at Israel, MPAC hired Edina Lekovic to be its
“communications director.” For years, Ms. Lekovic had been affiliated
with al-Talib (“the Student”), a Muslim Students Association newspaper at UCLA. As I’ve noted before, the Muslim Students Association is the first building block in Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. During Lekovic’s affiliation, al-Talib
published, to take just one example, a “Spirit of the Jihad” issue in
July 1999 — less than a year after al-Qaeda bombed the American
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In it, al-Talib exhorted
Muslims to “defend our brother” Osama bin Laden, who was praised as a
“great Mujahid” and “a freedom fighter who has forsaken wealth and power
to fight in Allah’s cause and speak out against oppressors.”
In characteristic MPAC style, when called by terrorism researcher Steven Emerson on her work for al-Talib,
Ms. Lekovic first totally denied having any association with the
publication and accused Emerson of mudslinging. Soon, though, she
grudgingly conceded that she might have “briefly worked” at al-Talib,
but insisted that Emerson had distorted her views and associated her
with “sentiments that I in no way support, and that are antithetical to
the work I do day in and day out in the service of my community and my
country.”
So Emerson’s organization, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, undertook to scrutinize her claims. IPT found that Lekovic’s “brief” affiliation with al-Talib had actually spanned nearly five years, from late 1997 through mid-2002. In fact, during much of that time, she had been al-Talib’s
managing editor — a position she proudly listed in her bio in late 2001
for the program distributed at an MPAC conference, “The Rising Voice of
Moderate Muslims.” The IPT’s examination further showed that she had
been listed as an editor in al-Talib editions that featured
articles suggesting that the horror of the Holocaust had been
exaggerated and that Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) had been
tortured in federal prison, where he was serving a life sentence
because, according to al-Talib, he had been “falsely accused” of involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
In October 2000, MPAC hosted a rally in Washington’s Lafayette Park
at which Abdurahman Alamoudi — then regarded in Washington as another
“moderate” Muslim leader — was featured as a speaker. To often raucous
applause, Alamoudi asserted, “I have been labeled by the media in New
York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody supports Hamas here? [Crowd
cheers responsively] . . . Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are ALL
supporters of Hamas. Allahu Akhbar! I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah!”
A few weeks later, MPAC co-sponsored another anti-Israel rally, organized by its then–political director, Mahdi Bray. As detailed in an IPT profile of MPAC, the rally’s master of ceremonies led protesters in an Arabic chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad saya’ud!”
— meaning, “Oh Jews, remember Khaybar; the army of Mohammed is
returning!” Especially popular with Hamas supporters, this chant alludes
to a seventh-century massacre and expulsion by Muslims of a Jewish
tribe in Khaybar, a town in what today is Saudi Arabia.
As the rally proceeded, Bray played the tambourine as one of the
speakers sang with the crowd, “al-Aqsa [mosque, in Jerusalem] is calling
us, ‘Let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones in the face of the
Jews!’” A prominent Hamas operative, Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar, took the
podium to argue that Muslims had “exclusive rights over Jersualem” that
were “not subject to negotiation.” Ashqar was later sentenced to eleven
years’ imprisonment for obstructing a grand-jury investigation of Hamas.
Mohammed al-Asi, an open Hezbollah supporter who also spoke at the
rally, urged that speakers “should be concentrating on militarizing the
Muslim public. . . . Rhetoric is not going to liberate al-Quds
[Jerusalem] and al-Aqsa [mosque]. Only carrying arms will do this task!”
Posters calling for “Death to Israel” and equating the Star of David
with the Nazi swastika were openly displayed at the rally, and the crowd
burned the Israeli flag while marching from the White House to the
State Department.
Besides campaigning for the government to de-list Hezbollah and Hamas
from the list of formally designated terrorist organizations, MPAC
regularly gets its pom-poms out for individual terrorists. That is,
while winking about how much it abhors “terrorism,” MPAC tirelessly
insists that the government’s efforts to prevent and punish terrorism
are a scam — camouflage for a neo-McCarthyite, “Islamophobic”
persecution of Muslims.
…
MPAC’s energetic support of al-Arian is typical. As the IPT profile
demonstrates, it has consistently lambasted investigations of
individuals and organizations involved in violent jihad and terrorist
financing. It publicly sympathized, for example, with (a) Alamoudi, who
was eventually convicted for his complicity in a Libyan plot to murder a
Saudi royal (after which it emerged that he was a major fundraiser not
only for the Hamas terrorist organization but for al-Qaeda); (b) the
Holy Land Foundation, five of whose officers were later convicted in the
Justice Department’s most significant terrorism-financing prosecution
ever for transferring millions of dollars to Hamas; (c) Infocom and
members of the Elashi family, who were eventually convicted for trading
with enemy nations and, in the case of the Elashis, for supporting
Hamas; (d) the Benevolence International Foundation, which was
designated as a terrorism financier by the Treasury Department (its
leader, Enaam Arnaout, ultimately pled guilty to racketeering charges,
conceding that BIF had diverted charitable contributions to violent
jihad); and (e) Rafil Dhafir, whose prosecution Marayati called a
“sham,” but who was later convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison
for transferring funds to Iraq. On it goes.
…
By the way, did I mention that the Obama State Department uses Salam
al-Marayati as an emissary? Yeah, in 2010, Secretary of State Clinton’s
minions invited him to
lecture diplomats in Paris and Geneva on religious liberty, free speech,
and “Islamophobia.” The Bush State Department, too — they invited Marayati
to Foggy Bottom in 2002, where he championed Rachid Ghannouchi, the
head of Tunisia’s Muslim Brotherhood party. What lunatics these House
conservatives are to intimate that we might have the wrong people
shaping government policy.
Read it all at NRO.
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