Proselytizing Islam at Penn October 24, 2008

Proselytizing Islam at Penn

by Cinnamon Stillwell
Fri, 24 Oct 2008 at 2:44 PM
http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2008/10/proselytizing-islam-at-penn.html

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Islam Awareness Week 2008 is underway at the University of Pennsylvania. Organized by the Muslim Students Association, Islam Awareness Week also has academic sponsors, including the university’s Middle East Center.

While “awareness” may be a laudable goal, blatant proselytizing is another matter entirely. Yet today’s event, “State and Need for Dawah in the West,” promises just that. Here is the description (received by e-mail; emphasis added):

Harvard Chaplain and well-studied individual of Islam, Taha Abdul-Basser will deliver the Friday sermon on the lack of Dawah (invitation) on the part of Muslims in North America, not only to convey a message of submission to God alone but also to wash away misconceptions some share about Islam. Seven years after 9/11, Taha Abdul-Basser will elucidate on the importance of such education, sharing important Prophetic narratives and other occurrences in Islamic tradition that epitomize the magnitude of this act. We expect many non-Muslims to observe our Jummah outside, visually understanding the importance of this holy day.

Clearly, the “need for Dawah in the West” is being met at the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, it’s coming courtesy of the Muslim Students Association, an organization tainted by Saudi/Wahhabi funding, ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a history of inviting radical and anti-Semitic speakers to its events.

Moreover, why would the Middle East Center cosponsor such an event given its overtly religious nature? It amounts to the Middle East Center doing its own version of Dawah. Would the same Center, or any academic department, co-sponsor an event involving evangelical Christian proselytizing? I very much doubt it. But when it comes to Islam, propriety goes out the window.

Technorati Tags: University of Penn, Saudi, Wahhabi

Obama Office Operates in Philly’s Islamist Corridor October 24, 2008

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Obama Office Operates in Philly’s Islamist Corridor by David J. Rusin Pajamas Media October 22, 2008 http://www.islamist-watch.org/article/983 When Barack Obama’s campaign needed a base for harvesting votes from the southern precincts of Philadelphia, it set up shop in a building owned and managed by controversial real estate baron Kenny Gamble. Also known as Luqman Abdul Haqq, Gamble holds a senior position with the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), whose founding is traced to a convicted cop-killer and whose leadership is stacked with radicals. He likewise serves as a community organizer of sorts — one who has been accused of slowly transforming his neighborhood into a “black Muslim enclave.” The office opened on August 21 at 1501 Christian Street, with Gamble himself cutting the ceremonial ribbon. Makeshift banners proclaim it the “South Philly Obama Headquarters,” the address of which is listed on the Obama-Biden website as a field office for the Pennsylvania Campaign for Change. Philadelphia tax records identify Gamble as the owner of the property, while signage indicates that the building is home to Universal Educational Management, part of his Universal Companies conglomerate. Gamble’s associates and agendas expose him as a dubious figure that politicians seeking to present an image of inclusion would be wise to avoid. This is doubly true for a campaign like Obama’s that already has suffered serious missteps in its interaction with the Muslim community. Best known for his work in the music business, Gamble has held high-ranking posts with the Muslim Alliance in North America, which focuses on African-American converts to Islam. That description fits Gamble and most of the group’s senior members, some of whom also have roots in the Nation of Islam and Black Panther movement. Indeed, the formation of MANA was inspired by Jamil Al-Amin, the onetime Panther “justice minister” H. Rap Brown. MANA’s enthusiasm for Al-Amin remains untainted in the wake of his conviction for the 2000 murder of a sheriff’s deputy. He has even addressed, by telephone, MANA meetings at Gamble’s United Muslim Masjid. MANA’s governing bodies teem with Islamists: Siraj Wahhaj, the organization’s amir, was named as a potential unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, supports Shari’a-prescribed punishments, and predicts America’s demise unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” Johari Abdul-Malik directs outreach activities for a Virginia mosque repeatedly tied to terrorism cases. Abdul Alim Musa promotes anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracy theories and has expressed admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Osama bin Laden. Musa’s radical As-Sabiqun group advises Muslims to assemble self-contained strongholds, a strategy similar to what Gamble is pursuing in Philadelphia. As he explained in an interview with Saudi TV, “One of the intentions that we had from the beginning was to create a model, so that, in the coming years, Muslims would be able to live close to each other, that they would live closer to the masjid [mosque], that they would eventually be able to open up businesses so that they would be able to employ each other and develop community life.” More darkly, Philadelphia magazine has reported that some South Philly denizens “fear that Gamble, a convert to Islam, is inclined toward racial and religious segregation” and aims to carve out a “black Muslim enclave.” The Obama office resides at the center of this storm. Gamble’s mosque is just a few doors to the north. On the same block stands the headquarters of his Universal Companies, a local giant that specializes in urban renewal projects and runs a vast array of housing, businesses, and other facilities — even a charter school. Records of 1501 Christian also highlight Gamble’s modus operandi for growing his empire: get land and buildings dirt cheap from the city, which often seizes them through eminent domain for the express purpose of having Universal renovate them. According to the Board of Revision of Taxes website, Gamble bought the property now hosting Team Obama for one dollar in 1991. (The database labels the plot as 822 South 15th, but the available information makes it the only possible match for 1501 Christian.) It is not just the heavily Islamic atmosphere of the surrounding neighborhood — complete with men in traditional dress praying on the sidewalks — that feeds speculation about a veiled agenda. Gamble’s bizarre statements to Philadelphia magazine last year added more fuel to the fire: “You don’t see the lion with the tiger. You don’t see the tiger with the panther,” he said. “You don’t have people selling goods and services in the Irish community from some other community. In the Russian community, you don’t have people from other communities. In the Puerto Rican community, the Puerto Ricans have their own economy, they have their own stores.” The article notes that Gamble’s musings sound like an endorsement of segregation and a desire to engineer a zone exclusively for black Muslims. The placement of an Obama field office in Philly’s Islamist corridor is not the first link between questionable representatives of Muslim America and the senator’s presidential campaign. Mazen Asbahi, Obama’s initial Muslim-outreach coordinator, stepped down in August for connections to a controversial Islamic investment fund and Illinois imam. His successor, Minha Husaini, then “accidentally” attended a meeting with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Muslim American Society, two groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, Muslim-Americans for Obama has peddled a policy wish list colored with Islamism and run partisan voter registration drives from swing state mosques, which would appear to violate their tax-exempt status. Obama’s staff could be forgiven for accepting contributions from Gamble, but renting office space from him at the heart of his troubling socioreligious enterprise falls well beyond the boundaries of good judgment. Simply put, the campaign is doing business with someone who may embody the type of change that Islamists and racial separatists can believe in. Originally published at: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-office-operates-in-phillys-islamist-corridor/ David J. Rusin is a research associate at Islamist Watch and a Philadelphia-based editor for Pajamas Media. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania. Please feel free to contact him at rusin@meforum.org.

Technorati Tags: Kenny Gamble, Universal Educational Management

What’s the Matter With Free Elections? October 24, 2008

THE MORNING BELL
FRIDAY, OCT. 24, 2008

What’s the Matter With Free

Elections?

In his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” social critic Thomas Frank accuses conservatives of distracting blue-collar Americans from economic issues that matter to them with “the illusory threat of gay marriage.” Let’s stipulate for right now that Frank is right and that the issue of gay marriage is largely irrelevant to the lives of blue-collar workers. Why then, may we ask, is the California Teachers Association (CTA), one of the state’s largest unions, spending $1.25 million of its members’ dues to defeat Proposition 8 , an initiative on the California ballot that would define marriage as between a man and a woman? How, pray tell, does Lindsay Lohan’s ability to marry her current girlfriend help California public school children learn?

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The answer is that unions, as they exist today, have nothing to do with protecting the interests of those they supposedly represent. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The CTA and its parent organization, the National Education Association, have used tens of millions of dollars in mandatory teachers’ dues to advance all manner of left-wing political causes. … In some years barely a third of the NEA’s budget has gone toward improving the lot of teachers themselves. In addition to vigorously fighting school choice and other reforms that benefit underprivileged children but threaten the public education monopoly, the NEA has directly (or via state affiliates) bankrolled ACORN, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and, naturally, the Human Rights Campaign.”

Organized labor has become indistinguishable from the Democratic Party. Union-backed groups have given $52.3 million directly to Democrat campaigns this year and also spent about $6 million on advertisements in close Senate races since Labor Day. Their goal: a permanent leftist majority in Washington. And they may well have identified the tool to realize their dreams — the Orwellian named “Employee Free Choice Act.” This legislation, also known as card check, replaces secret ballot elections — the method by which most workers join unions — with publicly signed union cards. This is a recipe for intimidation and corruption . Just ask 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern:

As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor. … The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as “card-check.” There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.

Recent polling shows that 71% of union members believe that the current private-ballot process is fair, versus only 13% who disagree. Fully 78% of union members favor keeping the current system in place rather than replacing it with one that provides less privacy. But union leadership does not care what their members want. They only want more union members and more union dues to funnel into the left’s crony capitalist machine.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, EFCA, NEA

Obama Would Fail Security Clearance October 24, 2008

Obama Would Fail Security Clearance

by Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia Bulletin
October 21, 2008
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5983

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Obama’s Indonesian school registration listing him as Muslim. Click to enlarge

With Colin Powell now repeating the lie that Barack Obama has “always been a Christian,” despite new information further confirming Obama’s Muslim childhood (such as the Indonesian school registration listing him as Muslim), one watches with dismay as the Democratic candidate manages to hide the truth on this issue.

Instead, then, let us review a related subject – Obama’s connections and even indebtedness, throughout his career, to extremist Islam. Specifically, he has longstanding, if indirect ties to two institutions, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), listed by the U.S. government in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding trial; and the Nation of Islam (NoI), condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for its “consistent record of racism and anti-Semitism.”

First, Obama’s ties to Islamists:

• The Khalid al-Mansour connection: According to former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, Al-Mansour “was raising money for” Obama’s expenses at Harvard Law School. Al-Mansour, a black American (né Don Warden), became advisor to Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal, CAIR’s largest individual donor. Al-Mansour holds standard Islamist views: he absolves the Islamist government in Sudan of sponsoring slavery, he denies a Jewish tie to Jerusalem, and he wrote a booklet titled “Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against S. Arabia.” (Both Obama and al-Mansour deny Sutton’s account.)

• The cover of one of Khalid al-Mansour’s books, “The Mind and the Mindless – Will the West Rule Forever.”

  The Kenny Gamble (also known as Luqman Abdul-Haqq) connection: Gamble, a once-prominent pop music producer, cut the ribbon to the Obama campaign headquarters housed in a south Philadelphia building he owns. Gamble is an Islamist who buys large swaths of real estate in Philadelphia to create a Muslim-only residential area. Also, as the self-styled “amir” of the United Muslim Movement, he has many links to Islamist organizations, including CAIR and the Muslim Alliance in North America. (MANA’s “amir” is Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)

• The Mazen Asbahi connection: The Obama campaign’s first Muslim outreach coordinator resigned after it came to light that he had served on the board of a subsidiary of the Saudi-sponsored North American Islamic Trust, with Jamal Said, another unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Hamas funding trial. Asbahi has ties to CAIR’s Chicago and Detroit offices, to the Islamic Society of North America, yet another unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas funding trial, and to other Islamist organizations.

• The Minha Husaini connection: The campaign’s second Muslim outreach coordinator has an Islamist background, having served as an intern in the Muslim Public Service Network. Immediately upon her appointment by Obama, she met with a group of about thirty Muslims including such notorious figures as CAIR’s Nihad Awad; the Muslim American Society’s Mahdi Bray, who has publicly supported the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups; and Johari Abdul Malik of the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, Va., who has advised American Muslims: “You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work.”

Second, Obama’s ties to the Nation of Islam:

Obama’s long-time donor and ally Antoin “Tony” Rezko partnered for nearly three decades with Jabir Herbert Muhammad, a son of NoI leader Elijah Muhammad, and says he gave Jabir and his family “millions of dollars over the years.” Rezko also served as executive director of the Muhammad Ali Foundation, a rogue organization that, without Ali’s permission, exploited the name of this CAIR awardee.

Kenny Gamble

Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s esteemed pastor for twenty years, came out of a Nation background, recently he accepted protection from an NoI security detail, and has praised Louis Farrakhan, the NoI’s leader, as one of the “giants of the African American religious experience.” Wright’s church celebrated Farrakhan for his having “truly epitomized greatness.”

Farrakhan himself endorsed Obama, calling him “the hope of the entire world,” “one who can lift America from her fall,” and even “the Messiah.”

That Obama’s biography touches so frequently on such unsavory organizations as CAIR and the Nation of Islam should give pause. How many of politicians have a single tie to either group, much less seven of them? John McCain charitably calls Obama “a person you do not have to be scared [of] as president of the United States,” but Obama’s multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees.

Islamic aggression represents America’s strategic enemy; Obama’s many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America’s commander-in-chief.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Pipes, CAIR, John McCain