Neil Munro, The Daily Caller, 10/22/12

White House visitor records show that administration officials have hosted numerous White House meetings with a series of U.S.-based Muslim political groups that have close ties to jihadi groups and push to reduce anti-terrorism investigations.

The visits were discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which compared the Obama White House’s visitor records with its database of Islamist advocacy groups.

For example, the records show that officials from the Council on American Islamic Relations have visited the White House 20 times, according to the organization’s report.

Members of CAIR were invited to the White House, even though an April 2009 FBI statement said the bureau “does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner” because of its ties to the Hamas jihadi group.

Read the White House Visitor Logs

Administration officials also invited Syrian-born Louay Safi to the White House twice in 2011, even though he had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two terrorism cases, and had been barred from Fort Hood following the 2009 jihadi attack by a Muslim U.S. Army major.

In contrast, White House officials have not invited Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona-based, American-born moderate Muslim and former Navy officer.

“We’ve never been invited and nether have any of [the 24 leaders in] our American Islamic Leadership Coalition,” Jasser told The Daily Caller.

The absence of invitations to real Muslim moderates allows White House officials to pretend that members of the well-funded, U.S.-based radical group are moderates, even when they’re linked to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, he said.

Jasser’s nonpartisan coalition includes left-wing and feminist Muslims who are frequently criticized by the groups invited to the White House, he said.

“The White House has selectively omitted genuine [Muslim] moderates and instead has picked radical Muslims to meet,” said a statement from Steve Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The closed-door White House meetings legitimize the radicals, but do not bring them into the mainstream, Emerson told TheDC.

“The American public has a right to know why the White House is meeting with Hamas front groups,” he added.

The visitor logs show that many of the Muslim advocates met with coalition-building officials in the White House, rather than with national security officials. The officials they met with include Paul Monteiro, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Amanda Brown, assistant to the then-White House director of political affairs Patrick Gaspard.

Gaspard is now the executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

The White House’s Secret Service guards do not veto invites from White House officials, but merely tell the officials if the guests will be arrested on existing charges if they arrive at the gates.

The meetings were likely intended to boost the president’s nationwide effort to bind often-rivaling constituency groups into the Democratic Party’s diversity coalition.

That disparate coalition already includes groups claiming to represent environmentalists, blue-collar workers, immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, gun-control advocates, Jews, gays, tort lawyers and many others.

In April, White House officials invited members of the National Network for Arab American Communities to a White House meeting.

“Our issues are American issues that affect our entire nation … and we will ensure that our community’s voice is at the forefront of public debates around healthcare, immigration and national security reform,” Linda Sarsour, NNAAC’s national advocacy director, said in an April press release.

Sarsour has been a White House visitor on seven different occasions. Her network includes 23 separate member associations, including the Illinois-based Arab American Action Network.

That group’s director, Hatem Abudayyeh, has been under criminal investigation at least since late 2010, when FBI agents raided his home as part of an investigation into terror-related financing.

Abudayyeh visited the White House in April 2010, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s study.

 

Muslim voters likely comprise less than one percent of the nation’s electorate. Many are in blue states, including California and Illinois, but a significant number of Muslims have settled in Michigan and Virginia, where every vote could potentially sway a close election.

Overall, 75 percent of Muslim Arab Americans support Obama, while 8 percent support Gov. Mitt Romney, according to a poll of 400 Arab Americans taken in September by the Arab American Institute.

In turn, Christian Arabs strongly favor Romney by 16 percentage points, reducing Obama’s overall support among Arab Americans to 52 percent, according to the poll.

 

In 2008, Obama won 67 percent of the Arab-American vote.

James Zogby, the Arab-American founder of the AAI, estimates there are a combined 833,000 Arab-American voters in Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

The White House’s Muslim constituency group meetings are supplemented by additional meetings outside the White House.

In June, George Selim, the White House’s director for community partnerships, told TheDC that “there is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues.”

Selim’s office was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.

The CAIR meetings were arranged even though CAIR has extensive ties to jihad groups, including Hamas — the Palestinian affiliate of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Top officials, including President Barack Obama, have participated in the Muslim outreach.

Obama has chosen to meet personally with leaders of several Muslim groups, including the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

That group’s co-founder, Iraqi-born Salem al-Marayati, visited the White House six times. He has denounced several successful convictions of jihadi terrorists, and has repeatedly called for Muslims to stop cooperation with the FBI except when it is mediated by MPAC or other Muslim groups.

The  Islamic Society of North America was declared an unindicted co-conspirator in a successful 2008 trial of a Texas-based Muslim group that smuggled funds to Hamas. In October 2011, Mohamed Magid, the Sudanese-born president of ISNA, told top Justice Department officials that “teaching people that all Muslims are a threat to the country …  is against the law and the Constitution.”

Some of Obama’s deputies, especially Valerie Jarrett and Tom Perez, who runs the civil-rights section in the Justice Department, have also been enthusiastic supporters of the outreach policy.

Jarrett spoke at ISNA’s 2009 conference, and Perez spoke at its 2012 event.

TheDC emailed or called the White House, MPAC, CAIR, Safi, Sarsour’s press secretary and Abudayyeh for comment. None responded.

Examiner.com, October 14, 2012

While the Obama administration and many members of the elite news media appear confused as to the true nature of the national security threat posed by al-Qaeda, and its offshoots Al Shabaab, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) appears to be the “go-to” lawmaker for all things involving Islamic terrorism. As evidenced by his appearances on CNN, Fox News Channel and interviews with reporters in the print media on Wednesday, King presents an alternative to the touchy-feely, politically-correct anti-terrorism of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, many within the law enforcement and intelligence communities told the Law Enforcement Examiner on Wednesday.

“Islamic terrorism is the most diabolical threat facing our nation today. No American ever wants to relive the attacks of 9/11. This is particularly true on Long Island where hundreds of our friends and neighbors were murdered on that horrific day,” stated King in a statement on his web site.

In his statement, King noted that he and his Homeland Security Committee conducted a series of hearings on the extent of radicalization in the Muslim-American Community. “We must move beyond political correctness and address the root causes of how and why certain individuals are being radicalized here in the United States and participating in terrorist attacks against Americans,” Rep. King noted.

On Mar. 10, 2011, King’s House Homeland Security Committee held the first of several hearings that focused on the extent of radicalization in the Muslim-American Community and that community’s response to these homegrown Islamists.

“At the hearing we heard from two individuals whose relatives became radicalized and were encouraged to commit jihad. We also heard from noted Islamic expert Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy,” stated King.

That hearing was followed by three subsequent ones dealing with the threat of Muslim-American Radicalization in U.S. Prisons (Jun. 15, 2011), Recruitment and Radicalization within the Muslim-American Community by Al-Shabaab (Jul. 27, 2011), and a joint-hearing with the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee regarding the threat to military communities inside the United States as well as the threat from radicalized Muslims within our military (Dec. 7, 2011).

King concedes that he was heavily criticized by special interests and their allies in the media for conducting these and other hearings, but most Americans supported him according to polls.

“I stood by them because I knew they were the right thing to do to publicize and discuss this grave threat to Americans. That is why I have held additional hearings this year on the Hezbollah threat in the U.S. (Mar. 21, 2012) and the response of Muslim Americans to the radicalization hearings (Jun. 20, 2012). The outstanding witnesses at the June hearing were Dr. Jasser, Asra Nomani and Dr. Qanta Ahmed,” King said.

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, King pushed both sides of the aisle to pass legislation securing U.S. ports, chemical plants, and airports. He said he also reached across the aisle to pass legislation protecting the nation’s rail and transportation systems.

by Karen Lugo, Gatestone Institute, October 17, 2012

‘Even though the Syrian-American artist was disinvited and the award cancelled, his parents in Homs, Syria, were beaten and their home was later ransacked. Jasser points to extortionist campaigns to force on Americans policy that does not have popular support and calls on liberty-minded Muslims publicly to criticize such tactics.’

The Iranian Green Revolution had brave Neda Agha-Soltan, and the Pakistanis have the stubbornly courageous Malala Yousufzai. At fourteen, when the Taliban tried to assassinate Malala for promoting education for girls, she had been defying the Taliban for years. Whether these girls are catalysts for sustained revolutions may well depend on how many in the West champion their heroism.

Russian dissident Natan Sharansky tells Westerners that demonstrators would rush to the streets for minutes, risking the gulags, in hope that “at least one foreign journalist was present so that, the next day, at least one Western news source would come out with a story that could in turn elicit a chain reaction of more and greater press attention and, we hoped, a vocal Western response.” The Russian dissidents knew that a vocal response from the West would lend a megaphone to their cause. How devastating it would have been if President Reagan and Americans had failed to rally with them.

One of the insistent voices currently calling on Americans to champion liberty in the face of aggressive “Shariahites” — Shariah is hardline religious code whether pushed under Shia, Sunni, Salafist, or Wahhabist banner — is self-described devout Muslim, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. At a time when the West is asking how to identify and trust moderate Muslims; wondering what to do about insular Islamist communities that are burrowing into city surrounds; and, calculating how to block Islamist political infiltration, Dr. Jasser suggests that moderate Muslims can play a pivotal role in exposing and discrediting the Islamist agents.

In his first book, A Battle For The Soul Of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith, Dr. Jasser demonstrates that his devotion to preserving American ideals against aggressive Islamism has required that he pledge of his own sacred honor as did the founding-era freedom fighters. Close observers would say he has also committed much of his life-energy and fortunes to speaking, writing, and organizing for the cause of American-style individuals’ rights.

Dr. Jasser was born to immigrant Syrian parents in Canton, Ohio. His parents, taking stock of their recent flight from Hafez Assad’s oppressive regime, taught Jasser reverence for the American model of consensual government based upon the rule of law created by elected representatives of the people. He wrote that he also learned what he calls an “intense love” for the American military and the symbolism of democratic alliances that the troops represent around the world.

Jasser’s maternal grandfather was head of the Syrian Shariah Supreme Court from 1975 to 1985; and his paternal grandfather was a journalist-turned-dissident, who ultimately lost his business and his home as exaction for his outspoken criticism of Baathist fascism. Inspired by his grandfathers, Jasser spent many hours with his father re-interpreting Islamic text to provide contexts based on reason and a modern perspective.

The record shows that Jasser, in a society that offered opportunities, excelled in scholarship, and served with distinction in the US Navy. Trained as in internist, he served as a physician on a Charlie-class amphibious cargo ship. Although the Black Hawk Down debacle occurred at this time, Jasser was not singled out as a Muslim for persecution or “hate” messages. He says he comported himself as “an American officer who happened to be Muslim.”

Before entering the private sector with a medical practice in Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Jasser’s public service culminated with his selection to the highly competitive position of Attending Physician for Congress and the Supreme Court.

Dr. Jasser’s character was most vividly revealed — they say that adversity does not create character, but simply reveals it — in 1995 when he confronted an Islamist “Muslim brotherhood legacy group” head on. After presenting a paper at a medical convention, Jasser stayed an additional day for the opening of the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) annual convention to see what 15,000 Muslims — some in military uniform — had gathered to discuss. One of the headliners, Imam Siraj Wahhaj made claims about replacing the US Constitution, a suggestion that enraged Lt. Col. Jasser to the point where, in his dress whites, Jasser took to the microphone at the close of Wahhaj’s tirade to confront the sedition-like statements. Jasser encouraged military personnel who were in the audience to leave. However, even the most supportive of those who approached Jasser told him he was overreacting.

Americans ask why there are not more Zuhdi Jassers speaking out against outrageous Islamist pronouncements and plans generated by mega-conventions and mosque co-operatives. One reason, often overlooked by those impatient to see greater anti-Sharia-law activism coming from the moderate Islamic community, is the monitoring by “minders,” who threaten economic and physical retaliation against family members back in the homeland for what is said by Muslims in America.

The U.S. has been complicit in this coercion: it has created conduits between petro-dollar rich Middle Eastern power centers and American universities, publishers, media outlets, mosque developers, and community groups. With just one example, Dr. Jasser illustrates how efficiently American interests can be influenced: in 2011 a Syrian-American classical pianist and composer was selected for an Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee award; but the honor was withdrawn when the honoree refused to change song selections in deference to demands that Syrian freedom lyrics were provocative. Even though the artist was disinvited and the award cancelled, his parents in Homs, Syria, were beaten and their home was later ransacked.

Beyond these syndicate-like controls, Jasser explains, residual tribalism is an even stronger force. For many Americans this is a tough sell, as it is all but impossible to imagine a community morality so restrictive that everything familial, social, and political is judged according to generational customs. Although Dr. Jasser does not ask Westerners to accept this mentality as an excuse for passivity in the face of Islamist oppression, this real syndrome does handicap efforts to reform Islamic thinking — including Muslims who are substantially Westernized, such as Jasser’s own family.

The question is whether, in light of the Muslim reluctance to defy establishment Islamists, it is worth making overt efforts to recruit Muslims to the campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political activists. If Dr. Jasser calls these passive, or currently undeclared, Muslims “indispensible to countering Islamism,” then what do Americans have to lose in standing with them?

If the number of Muslims congenial to American constitutionalism does indeed constitute a sizeable majority, it makes good sense to try to understand their predicament and to engage them as allies in the cause of liberty. Complaining that there are not enough moderate Muslims to make a difference is self-defeating; this is resignation before a sound strategy has even been developed. In fact, the very assertion that a certain number is required before the effort is credible discounts the value of leaders capable of reaching this community from within and it deprecates the courageous efforts of current reformers.

Some doubt the fidelity of so-called moderate Muslims to American constitutional standards of equal rights for women, uncensored speech, freedom of religious choice, and separation of civic life from religious oversight. On these issues Dr. Jasser asks Muslims for clarity to the degree that they note and oppose politico-religious codes. Citing examples of the “lawfare” tactics — the use of subversive lawsuits to create privileged status for Muslim rights in the courts — behind stunts such as the “flying imam” demonstration and the teacher who demanded excessive time off to go on a hajj, Jasser points to extortionist campaigns to force on Americans policy that does not have popular support and he calls on liberty-minded Muslims publicly to criticize such tactics.

Modern Muslim reformers such as Irshad Manji, Dr. Tawfik Hamid, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and now young Malala Yousufzai are looking for more dissidents to join them in the public square and they also desperately need the material aid and support that freedom-loving Westerners bring to the cause.

Dr. Jasser recently spoke for the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia where a reporter summarized that Jasser’s “American Islamic Forum for Democracy is engaged in the right kind of jihad.” This columnist said that Jasser’s organization “deserves the support of anyone worried about what kind of American Muslims emerge to lead that community.” The writer closed with this simple and prescient warning for the West: “Their jihad is our jihad.”