Hilliard resident Salah Sultan (kneeling) sharing a private moment with Specially Designated Global Terrorist Yousef Al-Qaradawi (far right) at a conference honoring Qaradawi held last month in Doha, Qatar (image from Islamonline.net)A little over a week ago, I posted information on Hilliard resident Salah Sultan, president of the Hilliard-based American Center for Islamic Research, speaking at a conference honoring US-designated global terrorist Yousef Al-Qaradawi in Doha, Qatar (“Hilliard man roasts global terrorist Qaradawi at conference in Qatar”). Over the weekend, I discovered the picture above of Sultan and HAMAS/Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Qaradawi together during a dinner at that same conference on the Qaradawi-owned and supervised Islamonline.net website.
In that previous post I included pictures of Sultan speaking at the conference and greeting attendees, which were included in Sultan’s speech at the conference and a paper he delivered there on Qaradawi’s intellectual contributions that are published on Qaradawi’s personal website. The conference also featured a speech by HAMAS political leader Khaled Mash’al, who praised Qaradawi for his groundbreaking fatwa authorizing HAMAS suicide bombings (remarks by Mash’al and Qaradawi have been translated by MEMRI).
What makes this situation interesting is that the Columbus Dispatch “cleared” Salah Sultan of charges I had made about his connections to Qaradawi in a May 2006 article by Felix Hoover, “Muslim Milestone”, and likened him as a moderate because he was a signatory to a bogus CAIR fatwa “against terrorism”, even though the fatwa condemned no terrorist organization, individual or any specific act of terror, nor did it even define “terrorism”. For continuing to report on Sultan’s activities for the past year and a half I have been savagely attacked by several Central Ohio Muslim writers and an advisor to Mayor Michael Coleman. In a dossier compiled by Ahmad Al-Akhras and circulated by him to various government and establishment media officials attacking FrontPage Magazine and myself, he specifically cites Hoover’s article as proof that my claims about Sultan have been debunked (more on the Al-Akhras dossier later this week!).
Will an apology from Dispatch executive and CAIR lackey Mike Curtin be forthcoming? I won’t hold my breath.
Another interesting element is that despite the multiple reports I have had published regarding Sultan’s open support for terrorist organizations, including his appearance last summer at a rally in Istanbul in support of HAMAS (see “Hometown Jihad: The HAMAS Connection”, and a COAT post by Scanderbeg, “The Hilliard-HAMAS-Muslim Brotherhood Connection”), his videotaped appearance on Al-Risala TV claiming that 9/11 was planned by the US government and praising another US-designated Al-Qaeda terrorist [video], several Central Ohioans have risen up to defend Salah Sultan.
Chief among Salah Sultan’s public defenders has been none other than Abukar Arman, who was recently “cleared” by the Columbus Dispatch for his repeated statements in support of terrorist organizations, including his characterization of Qaradawi as a “moderate”, even though he was forced to resign from the Homeland Security oversight board because he wasn’t eligible according to Ohio law to serve on the panel (see “Terrorist Sympathizer Tossed from Homeland Security Oversight Panel”). After my initial FrontPage exposé on Sultan, “Hometown Jihad”, Abukar Arman likened me to Joseph Goebbels and denouncing my “Goebbelian excercise [sic] of freedom of speech”:
Only a few days ago, one such moderate Muslim, Dr. Salah Soltan, a renown scholar and a member of the North America and the European Fiqh Council, and Sunrise Academy, a Kindergarten to Seventh Grade Islamic school which this author has been sitting on its board for the past six years, were implicated with those all too familiar innuendoes as terror-promoting individual and institution. The accusatory article was written by a gentleman who claims being a “policy researcher” . . . . and boasts to have only spent 3 hours to arrive at that conclusion. (“The Trilogy that Muffles Moderate Muslims”)Just as a point of clarification, the “3 hours” comment about the amount of time I spent researching Salah Sultan is pure fiction by Arman. After the series of reports I published on Sultan’s activities, it would take someone less than 30 minutes to arrive at that conclusion.
Another vocal local Salah Sultan defender is Mahmoud El-Yousseph, who just this weekend had an article published, “Muslim Basher, Patrick Poole, Preys on People’s Fears”, complaining of my reports on Sultan’s terrorist support activities:
Last May he attacked Salah Sultan, a nationally noted Muslim scholars. For no reason other than his views — the very same thing he accused Abukar Arman of. [The US Constitution guarantees freedom of expression to every citizen and non-citizen living in this free country.]This is not the first time that El-Yousseph has promoted and praised Salah Sultan in print. In an op-ed published in the Newark Advocate on June 23, 2005, El-Yousseph called him “one of America’s most noted Muslim scholars” and promoted Sultan’s website and books:
I asked doctor Salah Soltan of Central Ohio, who is one of America’s most noted Muslim scholars, about a woman’s rights to drive from an Islamic perspective. He said, “There is nowhere in the Holy Quran or the teaching of the prophet Mohammad that prohibits a woman from using any mode of transportation, even traveling by herself.”If observing that one of my Hilliard neighbors is regularly cavorting with known designated international terrorists makes me a “Muslim Basher”, it should give us all pause; if being concerned about it makes me an “Islamophobe”, than my accusers have all the evidence they need to find me guilty. And if self-proclaimed local Muslim leaders, such as Ahmad Al-Akhras, Abukar Arman and Mahmoud El-Yousseph, are all too eager to rise up in defense of Salah Sultan’s activities supporting terrorists (Qaradawi) and terrorist organizations (HAMAS), it should indicate that these gentlemen are not representative of moderate Muslims in Central Ohio at all. With such abundant information now available about Salah Sultan’s known terrorist associations, we can safely conclude that Ahmad Al-Akhras, Abukar Arman and Mahmoud El-Yousseph, along with their buddy Salah Sultan, are exactly the extremists I have portrayed them to be.
Dr. Soltan recently wrote a book about women’s rights under Islamic law. In fact, he pointed out 25 examples where women have more right than men when it comes to inheritance. A visit to his Web site www.salahsoltan.com could be very useful for people seeking information about Islamic topics.
