American Muslims for Palestine

Sun, December 15, 2013 MPAC Denounces Extremism Yet Sponsors Extremist Event

MPAC President Salam al-Marayati (inset)

MPAC President Salam al-Marayati (inset)

by: 
Ryan Mauro

On Friday, the Muslim Public Affairs Council issued a Declaration Against Extremism. Only six days prior, MPAC announced it was “proud to be a cosponsor” of an Islamist conference in California run by a group with a background filled with the type of extremism MPAC purports to stand against.

MPAC is a group with Muslim Brotherhood origins and a long history of advancing the Islamist cause. It changed its tone in recent years, but the same leadership is in place. At its 12th annual conference, MPAC founder and Senior Advisor Maher Hathout said, “We don’t want to enforce Sharia anywhere” and that Sharia’s penal code is unsuitable for today’s world.

MPAC also stood out as the only major group with a Brotherhood background to support the revolution that toppled Egyptian President Morsi over the summer. The other major Muslim-American groups with Brotherhood links were silent or rallied for Morsi.

“We rejoice and celebrate the victory of the Egyptian people against the exploitation of religion to suppress the masses and rob them of their God-given freedom and dignity,” MPAC’s July 3 statement reads.

Its new “Declaration Against Extremism” is another step that makes today’s MPAC seem different than the MPAC of the past. Unfortunately, the hope that MPAC has evolved in a positive direction is undermined by its proud cosponsoring of the inaugural conference of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

The theme of the AMP event is “A Movement United” and it took place on December 7 at the South Coast Chinese Cultural Center. The movement that AMP is a part of is undeniably Islamist.

Shortly before the MPAC-sponsored event, AMP held a large conference on Thanksgiving Weekend in Illinois. The speaker roster consisted largely of vocal Islamists, including supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. This was not new for AMP: Last year’s conference had at least 13 Islamist speakers.

The December 7 event was also sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. Another sponsor was the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors say was “founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”

One of the speakers was Hatem Bazian, the chairman of AMP. In 2004, he urged Muslims to carry out an “intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here.” He encouraged the audience to be inspired by the “uprising in Iraq” (referring to the insurgency against U.S. forces) and the “intifada in Palestine.”

In June 2012, Bazian echoed anti-American propaganda that the U.S. is essentially a force for evil in the world.

“The United States wants India to balance China, because if there is conflict with China, we always like that the darker people fight our war and the more these people die is better for the officers because racism can be manifested across many sectors,” he was quoted by Kashmir Media Service as saying.

He is also a co-founder and Academic Services Chair of Zaytuna College, an institution that has Imam Zaid Shakir as one of its leaders. His record of extremism is lengthy. At a conference earlier this year, Shakir preached that Sharia-based governance is superior to the U.S. Constitution because it would deny equality to non-Muslims.

Bazian teaches his view of the U.S. as a force for evil to his students at Zaytuna. Video from a lecture he gave on September 17, 2012 shows him telling students that the “military-industrial complex” has created an “Islamophobic production industry” in order to justify the murdering of Muslims:

“Those who are working on Islamophobia, they believe that the more hatred we have of Muslims in here [America], the more that we have reflexive hatred of Muslims abroad, thus authorizing or making the need for military action and the death and destruction more palatable to us without having to think we are actually killing humans.”

The mantra is similar to one made by MPAC President Salam al-Marayati at a church in May. He talked about a “cottage industry” that is a subset of a “larger machine” including special interests and the military-industrial complex.

Al-Marayati painted MPAC’s critics as being part of an anti-Muslim, bloodthirsty, money-hungry conspiracy. He said they “want more contracts for more weapons to countries that only use these weapons against their own people or against civilians.”

He did state that there is a need for reform in the Muslim world and that there is an ideological struggle happening, but he blamed Islamic terrorism on America’s role in the world instead of the Islamist ideology.

“When a superpower is aiding and abetting oppression and there are grievances, and people react in a violent way, they [Americans] look at the violence and they say it is not time to deal with the grievances,” he said.

Actions speak louder than words. The Declaration Against Extremism has some strong words, but the action of sponsoring an American Muslims for Palestine conference is more telling.

 

Ryan Mauro is the ClarionProject.org’s National Security Analyst, a fellow with the Clarion Project and is frequently interviewed on top-tier TV stations as an expert on counterterrorism and Islamic extremism.

Thu, November 15, 2012 Illinois Islamist Conference 'Educates' Next Generation

by: 
Ryan Mauro

American Muslims for Palestine has added four more Islamists to their lineup of speakers for their conference near Chicago on November 22-25 (not to be confused with the another Islamist conference,  the 11th annual convention of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America in Chicago on December 22-25).

The program for the event also reflects an Islamist agenda, including a session that legitimizes Palestinian terrorism. And most disturbingly, there’s a session about how to teach these beliefs to children.

AMP recently condemned Israeli strikes on terrorist targets in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and demanded an end to U.S. foreign aid to Israel, but did not even mention the more than 200 rockets and missiles that Hamas has fired at Israeli cities since November 10.

The original lineup included at least nine Islamists that RadicalIslam.org reported earlier in our article Brotherhood/Hamas-Linked Activist in Illinois for Extremist Event.

The additional four are as follows:

Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who unsuccessfully sought the Egyptian presidency. He wanted the constitution to have Sharia and its principles as the main source of legislation, though he said this may not include its criminal law. Fotouh was a Muslim Brotherhood member since the early 1970’s, serving in a senior leadership capacity from 1987 to 2009 in the Guidance Bureau. His membership was suspended when he ran for president against the Brotherhood’s wishes. At the time, the Brotherhood said it would not seek the presidency but later reversed course and won.

Abdelfattah Mourou
Abdelfattah Mourou is a co-founder of the Islamist Al-Nahda political party of Tunisia. Another founder is Rachid Ghannouchi, a supporter of Hamas with a history of very extreme preaching.

Imam Zaid Shakir
Imam Zaid Shakir is no stranger to readers of RadicalIslam.org. We’ve documented his ongoing extremist preaching. He says that Hezbollah’s bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 was not a terrorist attack, writes anti-American poems and told the New York Times in 2006 that “he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law.” In one lecture, he legitimized a potential hijacking of airplanes transporting U.S. soldiers.

Shiekh Mohammad al-Hanooti
Shiekh Mohammad al-Hanooti was President of the Islamic Association of Palestine from 1978 to 1990, an organization that was a Muslim Brotherhood front that rallied support for Hamas. The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports that he attended a secret meeting of Brotherhood and Hamas supporters in Philadelphia in 1993 that was wiretapped by the FBI. Al-Hanooti was named a “possible unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and also was an imam at two other prominent mosques linked to Hamas and the Brotherhood: The Islamic Center of Passaic County (1990 to 1995) and Dar al-Hijrah (1995 to 1999).

The recently published AMP program shows numerous Islamist themes. One session claims that the Arab Spring was inspired by “decades of Palestinian resistance.” Critics of the Islamist network in America are attacked in a session about “Islamophobia.”

The conference also ridicules U.S. counter-terrorism efforts and blasts “U.S. policies that are working to reduce Palestinians as a people, both physically and morally.” The program claims “solidarity work for Palestine is being criminalized more every day,” a reference to the prosecution of Muslim activists like Sami al-Arian and the five Holy Land Foundation officials for their involvement with Palestinian terrorist groups.

One session, titled, “The dialectic of occupation and right of resistance,” sounds like it will be a legitimization of terrorism disguised as an intellectual discourse. It will feature activists engaged in “peaceful resistance” and experts who will “put this into context of the greater picture of the internationally guaranteed right to resist occupation.”

Developing interfaith alliances is a focus of the AMP conference. As mentioned in our original report, Reverend Donald Wagner of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding will be a featured speaker. The conference program states, “It makes sense to join forces to fight the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

(The Islamists are making inroads into the Christian community. The Islamist-allied EMEU put on a "24-Hour Middle East Leadership Briefing" on November 8-9 at Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center.)

Another session, dedicated to teaching these Islamist beliefs to young children, is titled “Nurturing our kids with faith and Palestine.” It says that, “It is our religious duty to make sure our children understand the importance of Palestine in our faith and why, as Muslims, we must work to help bring justice to Palestine.”

Considering the extremist preaching of the event’s speakers, this is especially disturbing. The AMP’s agenda includes making sure the Islamist struggle is continued by the next generation.

The AMP's conference is being held (Nov 22-25) at the Oak Brook Hills Marriott Resort in Oak Brook, IL. Americans who want to contact the hotel to express their opinions regarding its hosting of this conference can do so at the following telephone 1-630-850-5555 or fax 1-630-850-5569.

Ryan Mauro is RadicalIslam.org's National Security Analyst and a fellow with the Clarion Fund. He is the founder of WorldThreats.com and is frequently interviewed on Fox News.

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