Did Hate Sheikh Khalid Yasin Defraud Ohio Muslims (and did ISGC officials looking the other way)?

In May I reported here that international hate sheikh Khalid Yasin was making an appearance in Dayton sponsored by Masjid At-Taqwa and a weeklong schedule of events in Islamic Society of Greater Columbus mosques, in addition to an event at Ohio State (flier for the OSU event below).

But as I write in FrontPage today, “Khalid Yasin: Hate Sheikh, Con Man?”, some Muslims are speaking out and expressing grave concerns about Yasin’s long history of fraudulent fundraising and the complicity of so-called Muslim “leaders” who look the other way at his fraud:

But the issue raising concerns amongst some Muslim leaders in the US is not just Yasin’s cross-country tours promoting his toxic blend of rancid theology and conspiracy-mongering, but also about his fraudulent fundraising and questionable business practices. These Muslim leaders are also concerned that some Islamic institutions have willing looked the other way and ignored these scams as long as Yasin continues to regularly rake in substantial sums on their behalf.

Others have also expressed outrage that while Yasin has taken home as much as a hundred thousands dollars in an evening, thanks to his usual 50/50 split of all funds raised at an event, his wife and child live on public welfare in their home in Sheffield, England.

One source speaking out about Khalid Yasin’s fraudulent fundraising is the Salafi Burnout blog, which has alleged that the hate sheikh is enriching himself in a series of scams preying on the American Muslim community:

Having been exposed as a fraud in Australia and the UK, Khalid Yasin is currently back in the United States still peddling his television scam and raising money and taking up to half the money as his personal cut. He has also raised money in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries for a supposed Qur’an Memorization School in Alabama that did not exist. Last report, he was taking this money and investing it in real estate in Long Island in his own name. Should Muslims continue to allow this individual to trade on his name and swindle his community out of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

These sentiments have been echoed by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who praised Salafi Burnout for publicly challenging Yasin and questioning how the American Muslim community has allowed a con man to operate so wantonly in their midst without the slightest criticism from Muslim leaders until now:

By now almost everyone is caught up in the buzz swirling around recent revelations of “Sheikh” Khalid Yasin’s long history of fraud and deceit. I applaud the courageous blog Salafi Burnout for attempting to protect the Muslims from what can only be described as a criminal enterprise, and to make us all aware of the tremendous damage it has caused to the community. As Yasin’s criminal house of cards appears to finally be falling, we are left with many unanswered questions as to why this kind of thing has been allowed to go on for so long.

Let there be no mistake, other shoes will drop, not only on Khalid Yasin but a whole host of other “du’ aat” and Imams who have with impunity betrayed the trust of the Muslims, and have left us wondering how individuals with such shady and dubious backgrounds were allowed to attain such stature, influence, and respectability in the first place. It is no exaggeration to say, as we shall soon learn, that our community is top heavy with these types of scoundrels, and yet the larger question remains; why did so many responsible and affluent Muslims fork over huge sums of money to a man who spouts the kind of absurd, preposterous, indeed psychotic things that he does?

As I reported previously, this is far from the first time that allegations of fraud and deception have dogged Khalid Yasin. When investigators for the Australian Sunday program looked into his academic background and his media company, the Islamic Broadcasting Corporation, back in 2005 they found a pattern of rampant fraud, deliberate misrepresentations, a mountain unpaid debts by Yasin, and unanswered questions about his phony academic credentials:

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Exit question: Were ISGC leaders (such as Mohammad Tarazi) aware of Khalid Yasin’s history of fraudulent fundraising before they invited him to into their mosques to prey on the Muslim community in Columbus?

Final comment: Bravo to those Muslims courageously speaking out against the corrupt leaders who tolerate lies and fraud, and who sell their congregations away to rancid preachers like Khalid Yasin for money.

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!

The Muslim Brotherhood in Central Ohio

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports from the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror financing trial in Dallas that during testimony yesterday an FBI agent was questioned regarding a Muslim Brotherhood phone directory showing the terror organization’s US leadership (“Muslim Brotherhood Phonebook Confirms that MAS is Brotherhood’s Baby”).

A quick look at the Muslim Brotherhood directory shows that one member of their board of directors at the time (1992) was located right here in Columbus (in the 614 area code):

The office number for Hani Saker/Shaker is an Ohio State University phone number that currently goes to the OSU Department of Orthopedics, but additional information on Saker’s past/present relationship to OSU will need to be the subject of further research.

It has been known that the Muslim American Society (MAS) organization was the ideological training operation for the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, especially after a September 2004 Chicago Tribune exposé on MAS, “A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America”, featured an interview with Ahmad Elkadi, who worked with current international Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Mahdi Akef to found the organization here and served as the leader in the US for several years in the 1970s and 1980s. Elkadi and other MAS officials admitted their relationship to the mothership of Islamic terrorism and extremism. These new documents and testimony in the Holy Land Foundation trial support this prior evidence about the role of MAS as an arm of the international Muslim Brotherhood. Counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt has already testified in the trial about the MAS-Muslim Brotherhood connection.

For those not familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood, its credo is: “Allah is our objective, the Koran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations”, and it has spawned virtually every single Islamic terror organization in the world today. It’s chief theorist, Sayyid Qutb, articulated the jihadist ideology that undergirds the present global jihad, and the graduates of the Muslim Brotherhood include Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Youssef, 9/11 leader Mohammad Atta, et al.

The MAS-Columbus affiliate has been one of the more important groups in the national organization. So important, in fact, that Muslim Brotherhood operative Salah Sultan made Central Ohio (specifically, Hilliard) his home. Sultan was a MAS board member from 2000-2004, he worked for the group at the head of their Tarbiyah department in the late 1990s, and was the founder of the Islamic American University in Michigan, where he installed his mentor and Specially Designated Global Terrorist Yousef al-Qaradawi as honorary chairman. So important was this major Muslim Brotherhood figure’s move to Columbus, that MAS-Columbus posted a major annoucement heralding Sultan’s arrival on their website (archived copy).

Another prominent member of the MAS-Columbus group is none other than my good friend, Ahmad Al-Akhras. When he was appointed to the Leadership Columbus Hall of Fame, MAS-Columbus again posted the announcement on their website, crowing that a MAS member had been chosen for such an honor.

Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and close advisor to Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? Say it isn’t so, Joe!

The day before MAS-Columbus posted that announcement regarding Al-Akhras, it published an article entitled, “Palestine: Is it the Jews’ Promised Land?”. Believe it or not, it concludes that it isn’t. I know you are staggered in disbelief. In conclusion, it states:

Though, seizing the chance of Muslims’ lapsing in weakness and deviating from Allah’s teachings, the Jews have occupied Palestine, they will never remain there forever, for the evil within themselves is beyond description. They will suffer another defeat and sever blow; we hope this will be at the hands of Muslims once they return back to their Lord and be unified again.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Central Ohio? The documents don’t lie, even though its members do.