OSUMSA speaker Sami Al-Arian indicted — AGAIN

Bad news for local supporters of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian, who was indicted against today for contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury looking into terrorism financing by Al-Arian’s former benefactor, the International Institute for Islamic Thought. Al-Arian remains in prison for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about the involvement of his associates in terrorist financing in the US.

Here’s a few paragraphs from a report today by the Investigative Project on Terrorism describing the new charges:

Convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian has been indicted in Virginia on two counts of criminal contempt after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury despite a grant of immunity.

Al-Arian, who pled guilty in 2006 to conspiring to provide goods and services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, has argued that his plea agreement ruled out any cooperation with the government. Two appellate courts, the 4th Circuit and 11th Circuit have rejected that argument, saying no such agreement is in the written plea and was not uttered during Al-Arian’s plea hearing.

The indictment offers few details, except to give Oct. 16, 2007 and March 20, 2008 as the dates of his alleged criminal contempt. The grand jury’s focus is believed to be on terror financing by the Herndon, Va.-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

IIIT was the single biggest donor for Al-Arian’s Tampa-based think tank, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE). The president of IIIT Al-Arian wrote a letter in 1992 referring to WISE as an extension of IIIT.

IIIT also housed Bashir Musa Nafi, one of the original founders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In 1995, Al-Arian sponsored a petition for a workers visa on behalf of Nafi to allow him to work as a research director employed by WISE. However, Nafi was actually employed by IIIT, and false information on his INS petition leading to Nafi’s deportation to London in June 1996.

Back in April we noted that in 2002 Al-Arian was a featured speaker for the Ohio State Muslim Student Association (“OSUMSA speaker and convicted terrorist leader enters fifth year in prison”).

That would also be the same Sami Al-Arian who delivered his infamous “Let us damn America!” speech at the Islamic Center of Cleveland. You can see Imam Fawaz Damra’s introduction of Al-Arian, where he acknowledges that Al-Arian’s organization is “the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine”. Nor can we forget his other greatest video hit, the “Jihad is our path, death to Israel” diatribe. Both of these speeches were BEFORE he spoke at the OSUMSA event.

Moderate Islam in full bloom in Central Ohio!

Ohio State Muslim Student Association funded by terror organization Kindhearts

A belated plug for my article published on Tuesday, “Terror Funded MSA at Ohio State”, regarding the Ohio State Muslim Student Association’s financial backer, Kindhearts, which was raided by federal authorities and shut down by the US government for terrorist financing. (I would also note our recent post about the OSU MSA’s playing host to now convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian.)

Here’s the intro:

February 20, 2006 proved to be an eventful day for the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at The Ohio State University. Not only did that date mark the conclusion of their weekend-long “Leaders of Tomorrow” conference, but that was also the day that their conference sponsor, Kindhearts, was raided by federal law enforcement and closed by order of the Department of the Treasury for financing terrorism, freezing its assets.

According to the US government, Kindhearts, which was established following the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, was not only engaged in providing millions for HAMAS in Lebanon and the West Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed El-Mezain. (For additional background on Kindhearts and its multiple connections to the international terrorism finance network, see Joe Kaufman’s FrontPage article, “The Black Hearts of Kindhearts”)

Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU MSA conference. Also supporting the MSA’s conference was its local parent organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the Central Ohio area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”. The mosque nearby the OSU campus was home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US since 9/11, with two former members — Iyman Faris and Nuradin Abdi — already convicted and serving prison terms for their participation, and another cell member — Christopher Paul — currently awaiting trial.

The third identified sponsor of the MSA conference, Ilmquest Productions, is the media arm of the Al-Maghrib Institute (profiled last year here at FrontPage, “Jihad U”). Ilmquest not only publishes and markets DVDs and CDs of Al-Maghrib “scholars”, but also a long-line of other extremist speakers, including Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin, and Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

Read the whole article.

OSU MSA speaker and convicted terrorist leader enters fifth year in prison

It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but as Robert Spencer reminds us today in an article for Human Events, “A Jailed Jihadists Unhappy Anniversary”, this week marks the fifth anniversary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian’s incarceration. Happy Anniversary, Sami!

He pled guilty to conspiracy to assist a terrorist organization and was sentenced to 57 months in prison.

Here’s what he admitted to, courtesy of the Department of Justice:

Al-Arian admits that he performed services for the PIJ in 1995 and thereafter, when he was a professor at the University of South Florida and after he knew that the PIJ had been designated by President Clinton as a terrorist organization. Al-Arian also acknowledges in the plea agreement that he knew the PIJ used acts of violence as a means to achieve its objectives. Nevertheless, Al-Arian continued to assist the terrorist organization, for instance, by filing official paperwork to obtain immigration benefits for PIJ associate Bashir Nafi, and concealing the terrorist associations of various individuals associated with the PIJ. He further admits to assisting PIJ associate Mazen al-Najjar in a federal court proceeding, a proceeding in which al-Najjar and Nafi both falsely claimed under oath that they were not associated with the PIJ. Moreover, Al-Arian acknowledges that in late 1995, when Ramadan Shallah, co-conspirator and former director of Al-Arian’s “think tank,” the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE) was named as the new Secretary General of the PIJ, Al-Arian falsely denied to the media that he knew of Shallah’s association with PIJ.

But we should be reminded that one of his last appearances before heading to the pokey was here in Columbus, where he spoke in October 2002 for the Ohio State Muslim Students Association. Here’s a report of the OSUMSA event with the now-convicted terrorist leader Al-Arian:

EDUCATOR LAMENTS ‘ATTACKS’ ON MUSLIMS
October 17, 2002

A Florida professor suspended for alleged ties to terrorism said he’s been accused in all of the major terrorist acts in the United States, but got into trouble after Sept. 11 because of a growing disregard for civil rights.

Sami Al Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, said he and other Muslims were “attacked” after two attacks at the World Trade Center — in 1993 and on Sept. 11, 2001 — and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

His talk to a group of about 80 people last night at Ohio State University was arranged by OSU’s Muslim Student Association.

“These kinds of attacks have been taking place for years, especially since 1995, but liberties have only been threatened since Sept. 11 because America feels hysteria,” Al Arian said. “Everybody is engulfed in the feeling of insecurity.”

He said he founded a research institute to try to debunk the belief that Muslims and Americans have an inherent “clash of cultures” and since then has been under a cloud of suspicion.

“The theory to us is not right, and we wanted to do something about it.”

His pro-Palestinian views, however, have led to accusations that he helped fund terrorist groups.

That’s the pretext the University of South Florida in Tampa has used to suspend him and take steps toward firing him from his job as a computer-science teacher.

He denied any such funding and said there’s been no proof of it. The university has filed a lawsuit against Al Arian.

Al Arian said his story became overblown when a Fox TV reporter “baited” him to be interviewed on a news show after the Sept. 11 attack.

Comments he made — including “death to Israel” — years before were reported out of context, Al Arian said.

He was then banned from campus “for safety reasons” and, a short time later, the university’s trustees — buckling to “pro-Zionist” pressure — moved to suspend him.

“If I had said ‘death to God,’ I would not be here today. This issue here is freedom of speech.”

Attitudes toward Muslims have developed since the fall of the former Soviet Union, with Muslims being made America’s new enemy, he said.

“People are busy looking for an enemy, and that enemy was found in Islam. Instead of a Red Scare, it’s a Green Scare.”

As we now know, he was lying the entire time about his involvement with terrorism and his protestations of innocence were nothing but lies. In fact at his sentencing, that was the very conclusion that trial judge James Moody arrived at, calling Al-Arian “a master manipulator”, saying at his sentencing hearing:

Dr. Al-Arian, as usual, you speak very eloquently. I find it interesting that here in public in front of everyone you praised this country, the same country that in private you referred to as “the great Satan”; but that’s just evidence of how you operate in the face of your friends and neighbors. You are a master manipulator. You looked your neighbors in the eyes and said you had nothing to do with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This trial exposed that as a lie.

Your back-up claim is that your efforts were only to provide charities for widows and orphans. That, too, is a lie. The evidence was clear in this case that you were a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You were on the board of directors and an officer, the secretary. Directors control the actions of an organization, even the PIJ; and you were an active leader.

Al-Arian remains in prison for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about the involvement of his associates in terrorist financing in the US. Last year a federal appeals court rejected his claim that he was exempt from testifying as a result of his plea agreement. So thus he remains in prison while he continues to obstruct justice.

Oh, and as for those comments “taken out of context”, I invite you to see for yourself. Such as his “Let us damn America!” speech (a speech delivered in Cleveland). Or his “Jihad is our path, death to Israel” speech. These had been made public several years BEFORE he appeared at OSU.

Now Al-Arian’s supporters will claim that they were duped, but there were very few people who by the time he appeared at OSU in 2002 still believed he was innocent. Even worse, many of these same organizations, including the Muslim Student Association, continue to back him even after he admitted his terrorist ties. Some are even hailing him as the new Martin Luther King, Jr. and a civil rights icon.

The reality is that Sami Al-Arian is a liar and terrorist, and thanks to the OSUMSA, he was brought into our community. As I will be reporting later, Al-Arian’s appearance in Central Ohio was not the first time that a terrorist leader had been to our area. Stay tuned!

Terror-linked Islamofascist, wife-beating advocate speaks at Ohio State

Jamal Badawi: Friend to global terrorists, outspoken advocate of wife-beating, and “multi-cultural” “interfaith” speaker at Ohio State last month.

You have to hand it to CAIR-Ohio and the Muslim Student Association at Ohio State. When they decided to recognize Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week last month, they pulled no punches. What they did was bring in one of the most prominent North American Islamofascists to town, Jamal Badawi, as I discuss in my FrontPage article this morning, “Ohio State Does Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week Right!”. The event was billed by the OSU Multicultural Center as “Interfaith Relations — the Muslim Perspective”.

As I discussed in a Family Security Matters article back in September, Badawi was a featured speaker and honored guest at a conference in Doha, Qatar honoring HAMAS spiritual leader and Specially Designated Global Terrorist Yousef Al-Qaradawi. Badawi is even listed as such in an article posted on Qaradawi’s personal website.

He is also on the Board of Directors of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, an organization founded and run by terrorist leader Qaradawi, which in 2004 issued a fatwa calling on all able-bodied Muslims both inside and outside Iraq to wage jihad against the American military as a religious “duty”.

A press release issued by CAIR-OH following Badawi’s October 15th appearance at OSU quoted CAIR-OH President Asma Mobin-Uddin as saying, “The opportunity to listen to Islamic scholars like Dr. Badawi was a great opportunity for the community to become educated, and it gave people the change to ask questions about things they may have heard about Islamic teachings.”

So what did Badawi talk about? Well, I was not in attendance, however some of Badawi’s favorite past topics include:

• Polygamy (it’s consistent with “Islam’s realistic view of the nature of man and women and of the various social needs, problems, and cultural variations”);
• Wife-beating (It’s OK as long as it’s never on the face);
• Acceptable conditions for suicide bombings (permitted as long as its for “repelling unprovoked aggression or resisting severe oppression);
• Justification for executing Muslim apostates (as long as it’s qualified as treason against the Islamic state).

Then there is Badawi’s famous 2004 fatwa for Islamonline (a website run by Qaradawi) outlining six different conditions in which a wife may properly be beaten according to his understanding of “Islamic teaching”, because, as he states, “there are cases, however, in which a wife persists in bad habits”.

If anyone had doubts about the existence of Islamofascism, listening to Jamal Badawi for an hour would undoubtedly put those concerns to rest. Both CAIR-OH and MSA have done the Ohio State community a tremendous favor by allowing an up-close and personal look at an actual Islamofascist in action. Those same organizations, however, presumably consider Jamal Badawi to be some great interfaith leader and an outstanding Muslim teacher, thus vindicating David Horowitz and the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week effort.

Oh, the irony!