Tag: Islamic Society of North America

Linda Sarsour, the Zelig of jihad

Linda Sarsour and friends (among them, notice actress Susan Sarandon)

Linda Sarsour’s social circle is a thing of wonder. This began to become common knowledge not long after she became a public figure on January 21, 2017 – the date of the Women’s March on Washington, of which she was a leading organizer and at which she was a prominent speaker. As we have discovered, Sarsour is chummy with Louis Farrakhan; she enjoys the support and admiration of socialists Bernie Sanders and Van Jones; and she turned out to be a good friend of Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim who lost this summer’s Democratic primary for governor of Michigan.

Imam Siraj Wahhaj

But that was nothing. After the stunning news came, early in August, that a group of Muslims had been operating a camp in the New Mexico desert where they were teaching kids to become school shooters, it turned out that this compound had a Linda Sarsour connection. Specifically, three of the five people who were arrested at the place after a raid by authorities are the children of a Brooklyn imam named Siraj Wahhaj. Who is this imam? Well, for one thing, he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For another thing, he is an old pal of Linda Sarsour, who has mentioned him frequently with affection and gratitude.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj

In the case of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of the imam, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Like his pop, Sonny Boy would appear to be a past master in the fine art of killing innocents. That’s was he busy training those kids in New Mexico to do. The kids, by the way, were found starving and ragged in an underground trailer crammed with weapons and ammo. Also found there were the remains of a three-year-old boy who is believed to have been Wahhaj Junior’s son, whom he apparently abducted from the home of the child’s mother in Georgia.

Leo Hohmann

As Leo Hohmann spelled out in an August 10 article, Siraj Wahhaj – the dad – has close ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Sarsour, as it happens, “has become the face of ISNA.” At an ISNA conference last year, reports Hohmann, “she praised Wahhaj Sr. as her ‘favorite person’ and called on U.S. Muslims to wage political jihad against the Trump administration.” And we quote:

And to my favorite person in this room, that’s mutual, is Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor, motivator, and encourager of mine. Someone who has taught me to speak truth to power, and not worry about the consequences. Someone who has taught me that we are on this earth to please Allah and only Allah, and that we are not here to please any man or woman on this earth. So I am grateful to you Imam Siraj, and you might think this is weird, but every once in a while, when I get into that deep dark place, Imam Siraj comes and talks to me. And he helps me to emerge out of those places, so I’m grateful to you Imam Siraj, and may Allah bless you and protect you for a long time for our community, because we need you now more than ever.

Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream media, which have been so eager during the last year and a half to promote Sarsour, this self-identified “feminist” in a hijab, would consider her ties to the Taos County jihad camp big news? No, of course you wouldn’t, unless you were an incredible naif. In fact, as expected, the media have all but buried this story. Along with it, they’ve buried the fact that, as Hohmann records, “Wahhaj Sr. was an honored guest at the Clinton State Department and the Obama White House,” that he “was the first Muslim to lead prayer at the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991,” and that he has proclaimed that it is the duty of Muslims “to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.” (He’s also “called for death to all homosexuals and lesbians,” but that’s hardly surprising from such a devout Muslim.)

Once again, then, Linda Sarsour has dodged scandal. She remains a darling of the American left and of the American media. One wonders what it will take to change that. Maybe if she takes off the hijab?

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The American left’s favorite jihadist?

At least in terms of turning herself into a household name, Linda Sarsour has come a long way in a very short time.

Linda Sarsour

She first came to the attention of most of us on January 21, the day after the presidential inauguration, when she was one of the major speakers at the Women’s March in Washington. As executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and a spokesperson for the National Network for Arab American Communities, she was one of the event’s four co-sponsors.

Sarsour (right) with Gloria Steinem

Sarsour might have come and gone without making much of an impression on viewers around the country except for a couple of things. She wore a hijab. She began her speech with the words “as-salāmu ʿalaykum.” She said she would not respect Donald Trump. And she charged that Americans Muslims had been “suffering in silence for the past fifteen years” – in other words, 9/11. While omitting to mention any of the countless acts of jihadist terror that have taken place during those fifteen years, she painted a picture of post-9/11 America as a nightmare of Islamophobia.

Bernie Sanders

Sarsour presented herself as a progressive feminist. But it soon emerged that she is a champion of Hamas, of the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, and, not least, of the introduction of sharia law into the United States. That didn’t keep her from being praised by Bernie Sanders, being named a “Champion of Change” by the Obama Administration, and being cheered on by a wide range of major figures and organizations on the left.

Tony Kushner

In response to criticism of Sarsour, much of it coming from the right, a group of 100 prominent Jewish figures, including Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, signed a letter defending her. A gay Israeli actually felt obliged to pen an article for the Forward headlined “On LGBTQ rights, Linda Sarsour Is No Ally,” while Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, wrote a similar piece for the same publication entitled “Why Linda Sarsour Is a Fake Feminist.”

Siraj Wajjah

Amid all the chaos and controversy, Sarsour has since moved from triumph to triumph. In June she delivered the commencement speech at the City University of New York School of Public Health. And in early July, she made headlines with a speech given at the convention of the Islamic Society of North America. She began the speech by thanking an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center – one Siraj Wajjah. She went on to savage the Trump administration, whose members she described as “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes,” and spoke darkly of “the potential chaos that they will ensue [sic] on our community.” She then suggested that she and her audience – and, presumably, Muslim-Americans generally – would “stand up to those who oppress our communities” and expressed the hope that “Allah” would accept that resistance “as a form of jihad.” Rejecting the idea of assimilation, she affirmed that Muslim-Americans’ “top priority” is “to please Allah, and only Allah.”

Matt Duss

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sanders and contributor to The Tablet, actually defended Sarsour’s appalling remarks, specifically her use of the word “jihad.” He tweeted: “If you’re a journalist shaming @lsarsour’s choice of words instead of helping readers better understand them, you’re bad at your job.”

Kathy Griffin

Lee Smith, writing in The Tablet, compared Sarsour with comedienne Kathy Griffin, who had recently received extensive media atttention by posing with a bloody Trump mask. Like Griffin, suggested Smith, “Sarsour wanted to have it both ways – get lots of attention for having done something sensational, and then play the role of victim when some of the attention invariably turned critical.” In short, Sarsour “has become a very adept self-promoter.”

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Islamic slavery defender is still at it — and he’s got allies

Jonathan A. C. Brown

He’s at it again. In March, we met Jonathan A. C. Brown, a Muslim convert and current head of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding – which is, in effect, a fully paid-for propaganda arm of the Saudi royal family. Our story focused on a February 7 lecture by Brown entitled “Islam and the Problem of Slavery.” It was a masterpiece of evasion, euphemism, exculpation, and prevarication. Brown pulled out all the stops in his effort to defend and normalize slavery under Islam.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

For example, Muslim masters treat their slaves well – often better than their own sons! A slave in a rich Arab household is better off than a member of an Arizona chain gang! Some slaves in the Ottoman Empire actually lived well, wielded power, and enjoyed respect! He claimed (providing no evidence) that Muslim slavery has never been “racialized” and that it’s “kinder and gentler” than antebellum slavery in the U.S. South. Besides, calling a slave a slave is really incorrect, because slaves do get paid in the form of food, clothing, and shelter! Anyway, what does “slave” really mean? What do we mean when we speak of one person “owning” another? Isn’t it all relative? Aren’t we all part of a complex network in which each of us has power over others and others have power over us?

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

It was a breathtaking display, a stunning defense of the indefensible. And it stunned some members of his audience. During the Q & A, Brown out did himself, stating explicitly: “It’s not immoral for one human to own another human.” He compared slavery to regular employment and to marriage. (He had a point: under Islam, marriage is ownership.) Brown even said it was O.K. for slave owners to rape their slaves. “Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex,” he maintained, explaining that “consent is a modern Western concept.”

Looking into Brown’s background, we uncovered other, equally interesting statements by him. In one lecture, for example, he defended Muhammed’s marriage to a six-year-old girl, dismissing concerns about it as ridiculous – back in those days, he insisted, “everyone” married children. Asked in 2015 by Variety, the showbiz publication, to provide an Islamic perspective on same-sex marriage, Brown served up a masterwork of doubletalk, doing his best to avoid stating the plain and simple fact that his religion isn’t just opposed to same-sex marriage – it calls for the coldblooded murder of gay people.

Andrew Harrod

When challenged by critics, Brown lashed out, accusing them of Islamophobia. Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy magazine even rushed to his defense.

Now he’s in the headlines again. On April 14, journalist Andrew Harrod, who had already been expelled (on Brown’s orders) from Brown’s February 7 defense of Islamic slavery, reported that on March 16 he had been thrown out of another Georgetown event, the so-called Peace Requires Encounter Summit. Harrod explained the premise of the event: it “ostensibly sought to ‘build relationships’ – apparently only with those approved by Islamic supremacists” The co-sponsors of the summit “included the Muslim Brotherhood-derived Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Franciscan Action Network (FAN), and Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), a producer of pro-Islam films.” Harrod had been legitimately invited to the summit by a UPF representative, Daniel Tutt of Marymount University, but when Brown glimpsed him at the event, he “demanded that I leave.” Brown them summoned Tutt, who “obsequiously acknowledged his mistake in having invited a ‘noted Islamophobe’ who had ‘slandered’ Brown.”

The net widens. We know who Jonathan Brown is. But who is Daniel Tutt? Answers tomorrow.

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