This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3419
April 8, 2008
CAIR, Georgetown University, John Esposito And Keith Ellison Participate In Bin Talal Wahhabist Puppet Show
By William Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz
April 8, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Dutifully participating in a plan for stealth jihad set forth by the Muslim Brotherhood, on April 3 radical Islamists accompanied by a coterie of Muslim apologists conducted another in an ongoing series of events designed to portray the religion most often associated with terror as a benign player in contemporary American politics.
The event was called "Islam in American Politics" and was held at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., one of three buildings that comprise the U.S. House of Representatives, a venue no-doubt calculated to provide additional stature to the event and its participants.
In attendance were Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Saudi funded Hamas mouthpiece, the Council on American Islamic Relations' [CAIR] recently named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation's largest terror prosecution, former Pakistani ambassador to the UK, Akbar Ahmed, Muslim apologist extraordinaire John Esposito, founding director of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal's 20 million dollar monument to Muslim religious imperialism, Georgetown University's Center For Muslim-Christian Understanding and Congressman Keith Ellison [D-MN] CAIR's first U.S. Representative.
Additionally represented were Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners ministries and magazine, and Ari Gordon, assistant director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
The event was "moderated" by Washpost reporterette, Sally Quinn and co-sponsored by Georgetown U and the Saudi funded World Economic Forum and signified the launch of a nationwide da'wa exercise entitled, "Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue."
As is always the case in these conferences, the entire event was an exercise in duplicity, calculated to present a group of radical Muslims as moderates.
Let us examine some of the participants:
Nihad Awad is the Executive Director of CAIR; he previously worked for the Islamic Association for Palestine, the United States public relations arm of Hamas. On a now removed page from the CAIR website, Awad stated:
"...After the Gulf War was over, I was offered a job with the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) as their public relations director...In this effort I worked closely with IAP president Omar Ahmad..."In evidence presented during the Holy Land Foundation federal terror prosecution Awad was further implicated as a Hamas operative.An exhibit found in the home of Abdelhaleem Al-Ashqar [Executive Director of the Al-Aqsa Educational Fund, a suspected Hamas funding operation] detailed sessions which were to take place at a seminal 1993 meeting of Hamas sympathizers called "the Philadelphia meeting" which was wiretapped by the FBI authorized by a FISA court proceeding. Under the politics and media session, "Nihad" was scheduled to give a presentation. FBI Special Agent Lara Burns testified on Thursday August 2, 2007 at the Holy Land Foundation trial, that the "Nihad" listed in previous transcripts of FBI wiretaps of the Philadelphia conference was Nihad Awad.
Additional evidence that IAP was Hamas was provided by an August 14, 2001 Immigration and Naturalization Services report which states that IAP's work consisted of:
"publishing and distributing HAMAS communiqués printed on IAP letterhead, as well as other written documentation to include the HAMAS charter and glory records [a list of terrorist attacks that HAMAS had carried out against Israeli civilians], which are tributes to HAMAS' violent 'successes.'"
The report went on to detail that the IAP received nearly $500,000 in funding, provided to it by Mousa Abu Marzook, a key Hamas leader and founder of the Holy Land Foundation who is now believed to be living in Syria.
Keith Ellison [D-MN, aka Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison Muhammad] is the first Muslim member of Congress.
Prior to his being "cleaned-up" for the national spotlight, Ellison was a member of Louis Farrakhan's rabidly anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. His election to congress was in part funded by the Council on American Islamic Relations who held fundraisers on his behalf and, true to form, he refused to take the oath of office on a Bible but instead was sworn in on a Qu'ran.
Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal, a shadow sponsor [operating behind his Georgetown University facade] of the DC conference, is one of the Saudi kingdom's top Wahhabist money-men. He has donated over $40 million to Harvard University and to Georgetown University to endow Islamic centers with the hope of further legitimizing the Saudi's radical Sunni Muslim ideology.
Knowing Talal's background, then New York Mayor Giuliani rejected the Prince's offer of $10 million to the city after 9/11.
As CNN stated at the time, "the prince suggested U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks."
In addition to Talal's inability to blame the terrorists for September 11, he has a record of financially supporting suicide bombing, having given $27 million to the Saudi Committee for the Support of the al-Quds Intifada through his Kingdom Holding Company . As the London Times stated in April of 2002, "The committee will continue to provide direct assistance to the families of Palestinian martyrs and those wounded while resisting the occupation."
The other sponsor of the event was the World Economic Forum [WEF], a Saudi funded and controlled organization. The directors of the group are the usual suspects, the omnipresent Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal, along with Prince Turki Faisal Al Saud, whose Center for Research and Islamic Studies could more aptly be dubbed "Da'wa Inc."
Akbar Ahmed who was a panel member at the event, has an undeserved reputation as a moderate Muslim, however his associations and statements indicate otherwise.
For example, in a January 2008 interview with the Globalist magazine [http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=6737] Ahmed stresses his opposition to U.S. military operations to destroy Taliban leaders in Pakistan's tribal areas, all the while romanticizing the area which is infested with mujahideen fighters, "I hear about plans for U.S. air strikes and special operations and I am speechless. Hasn't the Bush Administration learned anything from history? Don't U.S. policymakers read anything at all? It seems they don't have any memory at all."
Throughout the interview Ahmed infers that America was itself responsible for 9/11, "But the Americans just walked away...[from Afghanistan]...that was the fatal error. When the United States walked away they left a vacuum...In that vacuum, we saw the emergence of the Taliban. In that anarchy and chaos, emerged Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the stage was set for 9/11."
On May 29, 2001, the International Institute of Islamic Thought [IIT] held a special program at its headquarters in Herndon, Virginia to honor Akbar Ahmed following his appointment as Ibn Khaldun Chair and Professor of Islamic Studies, at the School of International Services, American University.
This recognition of Ahmed was tainted as the IIIT has for a long time been recognized as an organization with extremist views and has been linked to terrorism.
For example, the offices of the IIIT were raided by U.S. Treasury agents as part of Operation Green Quest, an effort to defund terrorism. The offices of IIT's directors have undergone similar scrutiny.
Additionally, the organization reportedly made a donation to the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation of Ashland, Oregon, a designated terrorist funding organization. A Treasury Dept. investigation found that branch of al-Haramain engaged in tax fraud, money laundering, supporting Chechen mujahideen affiliated with al Qaeda, and had a direct link Osama bin-Laden." In fact, many of al-Haramain's offices around the world have been closed for supporting terrorism.
In the early 1990s IIIT donated at least $50,000 to a think tank run by Sami al-Arian, the World Islamic and Study Enterprise [WISE], that served as a front group for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Al Arian, an admitted terrorist, is currently in custody and awaiting deportation.
John Esposito, is perhaps America's most well known Muslim apologist. He chairs the above noted Georgetown University's Center For Muslim-Christian Understanding, a creation of Saudi Wahhabist bin-Talal.
As Daniel Pipes notes [http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/762] in an August 18, 2007 speech, "Georgetown University professor John Esposito spoke in Dallas for a Council on American-Islamic Relations fundraiser intending, as he put it, "to show solidarity not only with the Holy Land Fund [sic, Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR." The event at the Renaissance Dallas Hotel took place as the Holy Land Foundation trial was underway, day-by-day implicating CAIR ever more clearly with Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization. Esposito's speech stands out for its cringingly pro-Islamist sentiments ("Sami Al-Arian's a very good friend of mine")."
With the radical nature of many of its participants in such full view, the April 3, "Islam in American Politics," must be understood as a sham undertaking, intended only to deceive the public. It's part of what is becoming the most effective and therefore dangerous leading edge of Islamism, the stealth jihad, a carefully crafted plan set forth by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1991, designed to destroy America and the West from within.
This plan was developed by the Muslim Brotherhood. It was first revealed in a document which was seized in a raid in Virginia 15 years ago at the residence of some of the Holy Land Foundation defendants, and which serves today as a key piece of evidence in that ongoing case.
That document refers to what the Brotherhood calls the "Civilization Jihadist Process," a strategy for advancing Shar'ia in a manner not overtly conflictive with Western freedoms.
Understanding that our enemies have embarked upon this kind of a strategy places an extremely high burden of judgment upon those whose activities bring them into contact with organizations whose ultimate loyalty is questionable.
Governmental entities, law enforcement, religious institutions and leaders are being actively targeted as part of the execution of this campaign of stealth jihad by the Islamists.
In many cases these organizations have been duped into working with groups whose intent is subversive. Others have been lured into the belief that talking, be it cross-cultural, inter-religious or other dialogue can never be harmful. But that ignores the calculus that is at work.
Groups such as CAIR are illegitimate as their goals entail the subversion of liberal democracy. Their outreach programs are calculated to present the face of moderation, hoping that such efforts will give them legitimacy. For example they might contact a local law enforcement organization, seeking to provide "Islamic sensitivity" instruction.
If this offer is accepted, which happens frequently, they gain in many ways:
1. They are given an opportunity to indoctrinate officers presenting Islam in the most appealing light. Many of those required to undergo such training might be completely unfamiliar with the history of Islam and will therefore take on whatever propaganda is presented as truth.
2. Such a first meeting might well lead to the establishment of a permanent liaison between the "Muslim community" as represented by CAIR and the police department, giving them long-term influence.
3. CAIR will then move on to the next target, working from the same game plan, however this time they can say, "We have been working with the FBI, or the Sacramento Police Department, or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops," so they have heightened stature and credibility, all because some well-meaning decision maker felt that talk can never hurt.
Therefore, within the context of stealth jihad, talk can hurt. As a matter of fact it can be deadly because dialogue is never the goal, it's merely an opening gambit, a Trojan horse to be wheeled out in the dead of night when the watchmen have gone home and the town is ripe for plunder. http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=cairdc4.8.08%2Ehtm
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MIM: More about Akbar Ahmed as stealth Islamist.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/009687.php
Akbar Ahmed is not to be trusted. Not one bit or whit.
In conversations with someone who, after a family tragedy, became noted for his (vain)efforts to establish a real, as opposed to phony, Muslim-Jewish dialogue, this Akbar Ahmed has denied the importance of the Hadith, dismissing their contents entirely. That of course gets him, and others, conveniently off the hook. Why? Because the Hadith (and the Sira, which he carefully refrains from mentioning)are, to Infdiels, much clearer in their expressed hatred for non-Muslims. There is nothing of the Quran's sheer incomprehension (20% of the Qur'an, Western scholars repeatedly note, is incomprehensible even to those who understand Arabic of the period -- see the remarks of Christoph Luxenberg), nor the vagueness of much of it, nor the phrases which need a gloss (an untutored Infidel, not well-versed in the meaning given to the phrase "struggle in the path of Allah," might, if he did not pay close attention, not realize that there is much more than the all-important Sura 9 to alarm him).
And in any case, Akbar Ahmed knows perfectly well that hundreds of millions of Muslims take the Hadith to heart, that all over the Islamic world the example of Muhammad in the Sira (Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil) and his sayings and doings as recorded in the Hadith, and as those Hadith have been winnowed and assigned levels of "authenticity" (based largely on studies of the isnad-chain) by the most authoritative muhaddithiin, is held up, and that the very word "Sunni" comes from "ahl al-sunnah," the "people of the Sunnah" which is to say, the Believers who follow Qur'an and Sunnah, the Sunnah consisting of the ways, the customs, the beliefs, the example, of Muhammad and the Companions. And in the same colloquy with that hapless Jewish worker for a "dialogue" with Muslims -- a grasping-at-straws effort -- Akbar Ahmad, the "Ibn Khaldun Professor," had brought to his attention the words of Ibn Khaldun on the necessity and rightness for agressive Jihad, which are included in Andrew Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad" and, two years before that, could be found by readers in Robert Spencer's "Onward Muslim Soldiers."
And what was the dismissive reaction of Akbar Ahmad, "Ibn Khaldun Professor of Islamic Studies," to being made aware of this view, so clearly expressed by Ibn Khaldun, and easily accessible to Spencer and to Bostom? It was to replay that he had never heard of such sentiments in Ibn Khaldun's writings. And then to further insist that the translation of the original must be faulty.
Translation "incorrect"? The translator of Ibn Khaldun's Maqaddima, in this case, was the tremendously learned scholar, possibly the world's expert on Ibn Khaldun, the late Franz Rosenthal. There is a good deal more to be said about Akbar Ahmad. Oh, he's amiable, he's plausible. He has a post at Brookings. He gets around. But study carefully his words, what he owns up to about Islam, and what he so craftily continues to deny...
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3419