The push to place Muslims in elective offices. My latest in FrontPage:
Editor’s note: In this monograph, Robert Spencer reveals the disquieting agenda and goals of those who are working hard to get Muslims elected to political office at the national, state, and local level. He shows how this initiative is gaining ground despite the frank anti-Americanism of Ilhan Omar and others – or is it because of that anti-Americanism?
Building power
“Invest in building power for Muslims in politics,” is the invitation from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) in a tweet on May 23, 2020, which features a photo of a smiling Salam al-Marayati, MPAC’s President and co-founder, with the notorious Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.).[1] “We ensure that Muslim voices are heard by decision-makers in Washington, DC,” the tweet also says, “and we work diligently with policymakers like Rep. Adam Schiff to advocate for legislation that protects our communities.”[2]
To those who are aware of Adam Schiff’s central role in the attempt to frame President Trump for an impeachable offense and railroad him out of office, MPAC’s upbeat declaration of civic engagement was hardly reassuring. Even more disturbing was the fact that the stated goal was not something to the effect of “Help Muslims begin to participate in the American political process,” much less anything such as “Encourage Muslims to assimilate and adopt American values,” but “invest in building power for Muslims in politics.”
Building power. It is not unreasonable to surmise from this language that MPAC, at very least, appears to be aiming toward establishing a Muslim bloc in American politics, one that will wield power and influence with its Muslim identity at the forefront, contending for candidates and policies that it deems to be in line with Islamic teachings and values.
While there are many organizations in the United States defending their own group’s interests, MPAC’s endeavor is different from the others in that Islamic law, Sharia, is authoritarian by nature, denying the freedom of speech, as well as aggressive, expansionist, and supremacist. In its classic formulations, Islamic law denies equality of rights to women and non-Muslims, and allows for a host of practices that are incompatible in numerous with American principles and customs; discussion of these issues, however, has been effectively silenced by charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry,” not least from al-Marayati and MPAC itself.
Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch asked pointed questions in November 2019, after another Islamic advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), sent out a press release celebrating the large number of Muslims who had just been elected to various offices. “One might wonder,” Corcoran wrote, “as I did here in 2007 why if refugees and Muslim migrants of all stripes were eager to assimilate did they need to place their people (representing their religion) into local, state and federal government? And, just imagine, I asked then, if we would blatantly say—we want Catholics, Jews, other Christians as our leaders—wouldn’t all hell break loose in the media? Yet, no one seems to care if CAIR says we are electing our people, Muslims, everywhere we can!”[3]
Becoming dominant
Yet there is ample cause to be concerned about this. Not a few Muslim leaders in the United States have been quite clear about their long-term goals and intentions, including Omar Ahmad, CAIR’s co-founder and longtime Board chairman, who once said in an unguarded moment: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”[4]
When confronted about these words, Ahmad vehemently denied saying them; however, the original reporter, Lisa Gardiner of the Fremont Argus, hardly a hardline “Islamophobe” with an axe to grind, stood by her story.[5]
What’s more, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper once said: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”[6]
Meanwhile, according to a captured internal document, the Muslim Brotherhood (to which all the major Muslim groups in the US, including CAIR, are linked) is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house….so that it falls, and Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.”[7]
Then there was the Washington, DC imam Abdul Alim Musa, who declared in 2007 that he wanted to “establish an Islamic State of America by 2050.”[8]
Record numbers
Whether the drive to elect as many Muslim candidates to office as possible is part of the effort to make Islam “dominant” in the United States, or is rather a healthy manifestation of Muslim assimilation, it has been gathering steam in recent years. NPR reported in July 2018 that “a record number of Muslim Americans ran for statewide or national office this election cycle, the most since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made Islam a political target for many, according to Muslim political groups. The Muslim civil rights group, Emgage, estimates that as many as 100 Muslims filed to run for elected office this year. Of those 100, about 50 Muslim-American candidates remain more than midway through the primary season…which is significantly higher than the dozen that ran in 2016.”[9]
NPR claimed that this was because of “Islamophobia” and Donald Trump: “Many of the candidates say they were motivated by growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S., inspired by President Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies. ‘I’m running for office because I felt a dire need to help the community,’ says Saima Farooqui, who, if elected, would be the first Muslim representative in the Florida statehouse [she lost]. ‘[Trump] has kind of ignited the minorities to be together and stand with each other and to make a difference.’”[10] The Washington Post agreed, running a story with the headline “The blue Muslim wave: American Muslims launch political campaigns, hope to deliver ‘sweet justice’ to Trump.”[11]
The Post and NPR were not alone. This unprecedented number of Muslim candidates received abundant and enthusiastic attention from the establishment media. The Associated Press announced happily in July 2019: “Record number of Muslim Americans make bids for elected office.”[12] Despite the evidence to the contrary that was right before their faces in the very fact of these candidacies themselves, some media outlets still did their best to portray Muslims as the victims of widespread discrimination and harassment in the United States. The Seattle Times headline for AP’s story was “Muslims run for office in record numbers but the path is uphill.”[13] Minnesota’s Star-Tribune headlined the same story: “Muslim candidates running in record numbers face backlash.”[14] The article laments that “the path to victory can be tougher for a Muslim American. Some promising campaigns already have fizzled out while many more face strong anti-Muslim backlash.”[15]
As an example of this backlash, the AP offered the claim that “in Michigan, Democrat candidate for governor Abdul El-Sayed continues to face unfounded claims from a GOP rival that he has ties to the controversial Muslim Brotherhood, even though Republican and Democratic politicians alike have denounced the accusations as ‘conspiracy theories.’”[16]
However, it was not simply a “conspiracy theory” that, as the Christian Post reported, “while a student at the University of Michigan, El-Sayed was ‘an active member’ and vice-president of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) – a group founded mainly by members of the Muslim Brotherhood for the express purpose of spreading Wahhabist ideology — an austere form of Islam that insists on literal interpretation of the Quran and views those who disagree as enemies.
The MSA bills itself as a networking and support group for Muslim students. But according to terrorism expert Patrick Poole, the MSA ‘has been a virtual terror factory. Time after time after time again, we see these terrorists . . . MSA leaders, MSA presidents, MSA national presidents — who’ve been implicated, charged and convicted in terrorist plots.’”[17]
Yet throughout El-Sayed’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, his campaign refused to address suspicions about his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood except to charge those raising concerns with “Islamophobia.”[18]
In reality, there was abundant reason to be concerned about the priorities and even the loyalties of Muslim candidates, given the fact that mainstream Islamic teaching holds that one’s allegiance to Islam, and to the worldwide Islamic community (umma), transcends all other loyalties, including one’s loyalty to one’s nation. Whenever such concerns arose, they were buried under accusations of “Islamophobia,” and legitimate concerns were ignored.
The strange case of Ammar Campa-Najjar
Take, for example, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Democratic candidate for a California Congressional seat. Campa-Najjar is not a Muslim at all, but a Christian; nevertheless, he has earned a place in these considerations with his questionable statements about his grandfather. In October 2018, Joel Pollack reported in Breitbart that Campa-Najjar “deleted an Instagram post in which he referred to his grandfather, Palestinian terrorist Muhammad Yousef al-Najjar, as a ‘legend.’ Muhammad Yousef al-Najjar was ‘a senior member of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics,’ according to the Times of Israel, and a deputy for Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat.”[19]
The Breitbart report added: “Earlier this year, when Campa-Najjar’s roots were first reported, he condemned his grandfather’s actions and supported peace. But in a 2015 Instagram post praising his father, who is a former Palestinian Authority (PA) official and Palestinian ambassador, Campa-Najjar referred to his grandfather as a ‘legend.’ He offered no criticism or condemnation of his grandfather’s terrorist acts. Breitbart News reported the existence of that Instagram post on Monday, as well as another in which he noted that his family was close to Yasser Arafat’s.”[20]
What’s more, Campa-Najjar “received a campaign donation from a Palestinian ambassador; and donated campaign funds to a radical group, CAIR, while taking donations from CAIR officials. Breitbart News reported earlier this week that Campa-Najjar’s campaign made a ‘civic donation’ of $650.00 to CAIR in 2017, and that he had received nearly $9,000 from CAIR officials. Breitbart News had reached out to Campa-Najjar’s campaign Tuesday to ask about his appearance on the ‘top ten’ list of political candidates who had received contributions from ‘Islamist’ sources, as compiled by the Middle East Forum’s ‘Islamist Money in Politics’ (IMIP) project. (Campa-Najjar himself is a Christian, of mixed Palestinian and Mexican-American origin.)”[21]
The money from CAIR is a matter of grave concern. Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad, two officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) (which was listed as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s allied organizations in the 1991 memorandum), founded this Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group in 1994. The federal government shut down the IAP in 2005 as a Hamas front.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service reported in 2001 that the IAP was so close to its parent organization that it published and distributed Hamas communiqués on its own letterhead, “as well as other written documentation to include the HAMAS charter and glory records, which are tributes to HAMAS’ violent ‘successes.’”[22] Oliver Revell, a former chief of the FBI’s counter-terrorism department, called the IAP “a front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants.”[23]
Several CAIR officials have already been convicted of participating in violent jihad activities. Randall Todd (“Ismail”) Royer, CAIR’s former communications specialist and civil rights coordinator, participated in the “Virginia jihad group,” which was indicted on forty-one counts of “conspiracy to train for and participate in a violent jihad overseas.”[24] Royer served over a decade in prison after a plea bargain that had him pleading guilty to lesser charges.[25]
Ghassan Elashi, the founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, likewise served time in prison for jihad activity. In 2009, he was sentenced to sixty-five years in prison for funneling over $12 million in charitable contributions to Hamas while serving as head of the Holy Land Foundation.[26] Other former CAIR officials have been convicted of jihad terror activities as well, raising the question of how this supposedly moderate group failed so abysmally to distinguish “moderates” from “extremists.”
CAIR itself was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. The organization not only facilitated donations to the Holy Land Foundation, but also received money from it – no less than half a million dollars. CAIR cofounder Nihad Awad vehemently denied this when terror researcher Steven Emerson confronted him: “This is an outright lie. Our organization did not receive any seed money from the Holy Land Foundation. CAIR raises its own funds and we challenge Mr. Emerson to provide even a shred of evidence to support his ridiculous claim.” Emerson then published an image of the canceled check.[27]
Meanwhile, the two highest-profile Muslim politicians in the United States, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) showed that to dismiss concerns about the loyalty of Muslim candidates simply as signs of “bigotry” was facile and dangerous.
There is much more. Read the rest here.