(Welcome to everyone joining us from JihadWatch and Solomonia!)
This picture was taken last month of Hilliard resident and Muslim Brotherhood/HAMAS operative Salah Sultan speaking at a conference honoring Specially Designated Global Terrorist and HAMAS spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi in Doha, Qatar (see the previous post on Sultan, “The Hilliard-HAMAS-Muslim Brotherhood Connection”). The conference, “Imam Al-Qaradawi: A Forum with Students and Friends”, was broadcast on Al-Jazeera TV.
During the conference, Sultan gave a moving tribute to his mentor Qaradawi, describing himself as a “friend and pupil”. Sultan’s speech appears (in Arabic) on Qaradawi’s own personal website, “Pupils do not forget their teachers”. Interestingly, Sultan begins his speech by describing how he has been attacked for his association with Qaradawi in “Boston, Chicago, and Ohio” and the campaign to deny him US citizenship (a story I broke last year, “Hometown Jihad: Our Newest Citizen?”) and brazenly saying that “I endorse Qaradawi; especially on the position of Israel, and support of the Palestinian cause.” He also talks about his meetings with Qaradawi, specifically a meeting in 1999, Qaradawi’s last appearance in the US right before he was designated a global terrorist by the US government, and again in 2003, when he received personal advice and counsel from his mentor.
Sultan delivered another paper at the conference on the “scientific and intellectual development of Qaradawi” — again, posted on Qaradawi’s own website, as the screen capture below shows:
It is interesting that Sultan mentions the “Palestinian cause”, because another important speaker at the conference, HAMAS leader Khaled Mash’al, also praised Qaradawi for his contribution to the "Palestinian cause". And what specifically was that? Here are Mash’al’s comments translated by MEMRI [video]:
“The support we got from Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi is different from the support of anybody else, because of his religious status, his status in terms of morale, and his ability to draw the attention of the nation and the world to the issues of the nation, particularly the issue of Palestine. This support was of great value to us, to the Palestinian people, in the first and second Intifadas, and in all matters pertaining to the Palestinian cause. . . One of the most notable manifestations of this support was when we relied — after Allah — on his support of martyrdom operations. He never hesitated to issue rulings in support of these operations, and there were times when we were in dire need of these rulings.”When he talks about “martyrdom operations”, he’s talking about suicide bombings. In fact, Qaradawi was the first major Muslim Brotherhood cleric to issue a fatwa endorsing suicide bombings, which unleashed a torrent of terror in Israel (one of the most horrific incidents — the bombing of the Sbarro pizza shop — occured six years ago today). By qualifying suicide bombings as “martyrdom” instead of suicide (prohibited by Islamic law), it radically changed the dimensions of the Israel/Palestinian conflict and prompted a rapid escalation in violence.
As I have noted elsewhere, this is not the first time that Salah Sultan has been discovered speaking with officials with the terrorist group HAMAS. I reported a few months ago about his speech in Istanbul last summer at an AKP pro-HAMAS rally, where Sultan spoke, along with HAMAS head Ismail Haniyeh, “Hometown Jihad: The HAMAS Connection”. He has been involved in the following Central Ohio Islamic institutions:
- Islamic Society of Greater Columbus (where he was employed, and which owns several area mosques Sultan has preached for)
- Sunrise Academy (an affiliate of ISGC, where Sultan has regularly lectured)
- Noor Islamic Cultural Center (where he was a regular fixture, being right around the corner from his Hilliard home)
Sultan’s current position as fiqh advisor to the Supreme Islamic Council of the Kingdom of Bahrain was arranged by Qaradawi, and Sultan also sits on two organizations headed by Qaradawi that have endorsed terrorist acts and attacks on US troops: the European Council for Fatwa and Research and the International Association of Muslim Scholars, which in 2004 issued a fatwa to wage jihad against Americans in Iraq.
With such open associations to one of the most notorious terrorist clerics in the world, why is Salah Sultan still allowed to live and work in the US? What are our local Hilliard leaders doing about this immediate terrorist threat?
Update #1: Someone asked me about links to my previous articles on Sultan, so here they are:
Hometown Jihad (04/03/2006)
Hometown Jihad: Blowback (05/24/06)
Hometown Jihad: Our Newest Citizen? (09/08/06)
Hometown Jihad: The Return of Salah Sultan (03/29/07)
Hometown Jihad: The HAMAS Connection (05/11/2007)
