Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Troubles

Does Barack Obama have his own problem with Islam?

There seems to be at least the perception of a problem :

According to a recent Newsweek poll, 12 percent of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a practicing Muslim.

That’s one out of eight. No wonder the O-man is so desperate to keep hijab-wearing women out of his photos!

Dymphna and I have sworn off posting about The Messiah Barack Obama until after the conventions, but sometimes exceptions must be made. In this case, it’s because of the intersection between The One and the news media of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. According to Fact International:

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group said that the resignation of a recently-appointed Muslim community liaison for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is symptomatic of a nationwide effort by Islamophobes who seek to deny Muslims access to the political process.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it is “ironic” that Chicago attorney Mazen Asbahi resigned following Internet attacks on his ties to the mainstream Muslim community, an attribute that would seem to be a requirement for his position.

“Muslim-bashers play a ‘six degrees of separation’ game of guilt by association with any Muslim who dares to engage in positive social or political activism,” said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR’s Chicago chapter. “As Americans, we should not allow intolerant and agenda-driven extremists to succeed in their tactics of exclusion based on smears and mischaracterizations of leaders or institutions at the forefront of civic engagement.”

[…]

Rehab also noted Muslims’ concern over recent congressional hearings at which Islamophobic speakers, including the controversial self-described “terrorism expert” Steven Emerson, urged government officials to avoid dealing with mainstream American Muslim groups, but failed to name any credible alternatives.

Boy, this article really hit all the hot buttons of Islamophobophobia: six degrees, Muslim-bashers, smears, intolerance, Steve Emerson, and that nasty old Islamophobia — which, by the way, is scheduled to be wiped out in the OIC’s ten-year plan.

So who’s Mazen Asbahi? What’s all the fuss about?

If you look at the different news stories about Mr. Asbahi’s resignation, you’ll get different accounts of the affair. Let’s start with The Washington Post:
- - - - - - - - -

Mazen Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer who had been appointed to help Obama reach out to Muslims, stepped down on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported late last night.

The paper had inquired about his relationship with Jamal Said, who served on a board with Asbahi in 2000 that is a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust, which holds titles to mosques, Islamic centers, schools, and other real estate around the country. Said had been named in an investigation of alleged Hamas fund-raisers, which ended in a mistrial last year, the paper reported. [emphasis added]

So far we’ve got an association with a guy named Jamal Said and the North American Islamic Trust — one of the innumerable Saudi-funded charities in the USA — and an alleged association with Hamas.

For a slightly different point of view, here’s WoldNet Daily:

Mazen Asbahi became the campaign’s coordinator of outreach to Muslims on July 26, but earlier this week a report by the Internet newsletter Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report was surfaced by the Wall Street Journal that linked Asbahi to Jamal Said, a man thought by the U.S. Department of Justice to be involved in racketeering and fundraising for the Palestinian terror organization Hamas.

A pair of Detroit Free Press articles this week also revealed Asbahi spent part of the day of his appointment at a fundraiser at the home of Dr. Jukaku Tayeb, president of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. [emphasis added]

Now we can add CAIR and another name, Jukaku Tayeb, to the list.

But to stitch it all together, here’s some information from the Crime Blog of The Dallas Morning News:

…Said is one of 200-plus unindicted co-conspirators named by prosecutors in the HLF [Holy Land Foundation] case. In particular, Said was a member “of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee“ which, as the government argued last year’s trial, was formed in the 1980s and coordinated support for Hamas here.

The trust board on which Asbahi and Said served in 2000 is itself controlled by the North American Islamic Trust — also on the HLF unindicted co-conspirators list.

[…]

Said is the imam at the Bridgeview Mosque in Illinois near Chicago. The mosque has been the center of controversy for its fundamentalist bent for years, and is itself central to the HLF story.

Bridgeview is the same mosque where a man named Muhammad Salah was once a leader. He is credited with tipping off investigators to HLF’s Hamas ties after he spilled the beans to Israeli agents who detained him in 1993. The Israelis, of course, tipped off their American counterparts. [emphasis added]

Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. What the WaPo referred to delicately as an “investigation… which ended in a mistrial last year” was in fact the Holy Land Foundation trial, an enormous and mismanaged attempted prosecution against the Muslim Brotherhood “charities” that act as funding conduits in the United States for terrorist entities. CAIR, itself closely tied to the Ikhwan, spent huge amounts of time and money to interfere with the HLF case and prevent a successful prosecution.

So there are a lot fewer than six degrees of separation between Mazen Asbahi and the Muslim Brotherhood. No wonder the new revelations made the Obama campaign nervous.

Unfortunately for American Muslims, there will never be very many degrees of separation between a member of virtually any mosque congregation and radical terrorist groups. That’s because the Saudis and the NAIT control most mosque assets in the United States, train the imams, print the Korans, distribute all the apes-and-pigs promotional materials, educate the students, and lobby Congress. There’s never more than a thin gauze between any practicing Muslim and the enemies of the United States.

But that’s a fact that everyone, including both political parties and the government, would rather not talk about.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
An interesting and sobering side note on the affair can be found in this Fox News story:

Mazen Asbahi, the campaign’s volunteer national coordinator for Muslim American affairs, said he was quitting to prevent creating an appearance problem for Obama.

“In 2000, I agreed to serve as a member of the board of trustees of the Dow Jones Islamic Index Fund. 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,” Asbahi wrote in an e-mail to the campaign that was released Wednesday. [emphasis added]

The Dow Jones Islamic Index Fund.

In other words, the fund is part of Wall Street’s respectable and officially-sanctioned sharia finance.

I know a lot of people don’t object to sharia finance — “Who cares if Muslims are stupid enough to pay extortionate rates to borrow money?”

But sharia is of a piece. When the finance portion enters a community, it brings along with it the dietary rules, the segregation of the sexes, the chopping off of hands, the execution of apostates, and all the other lovely customs we’ve come to associate with Islamic law.

In a way, all the fuss about Obama is just a sideshow. The real scandal isn’t about what Barack Hussein Obama will do once he becomes President of the United States.

The real scandal is what has been done under the current administration, as well as in the previous four presidential administrations.

Sharia has come to Wall Street. Our government refuses to enforce our borders. School children in Texas pledge allegiance to the Mexican flag. Federal courts overturn popularly mandated laws to sanction illegal aliens.

And our leaders refuse to name the enemy.

Barack Hussein Obama is just the icing on the cake.


Hat tip: TB.