ISNA conference in Florida, Sun Sentinel glosses over terror ties

The bad news for Floridians is that terror-linked ISNA held a convention there. If there is any good news, it’s that not many people showed up. But why didn’t the Sun Sentinel publish any background on ISNA and the Muslims it interviewed for this puff piece? via Muslim conference in Lauderdale urges community involvement – South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com.

FORT LAUDERDALE Again and again, listeners at a regional Muslim conference Saturday heard the message: Don’t stay in your own circles, work with others in making better communities.

Helping others is more than practical, speakers said at the conference of the Islamic Society of North America. They said it’s a religious duty.

“Serving people is an integral part of our religion,” college professor Zaid Shakir told 300 listeners at the conference at the Broward County Convention Center. “Allah will continue to help his servant as long as the servant helps his brother.”

The three-day conference, which started Friday, was the first in South Florida for the major Muslim organization. Topics included family relationships, domestic abuse, higher education, the Internet and youth development.

Leaders cited several goals for the conference: networking, training for community work and building Muslim identity.

“We want to give people a dose of hope that their work is worthwhile, and to make them feel good about being Muslim in America,” said general secretary Safaa Zarzour of Plainfield, Ind.

Conference speakers drew on classical Islamic sources — including the Quran and the Hadith, the recorded words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad — to support their case for civic involvement.

Related post: Jihad in the Quran and Sunnah

Not everyone was convinced. A group called Americans Against Hate drew about 30 people to a sidewalk rally, denouncing the Islamic association as a “radical Muslim group.”

AAH chairman Joe Kaufman accused the Islamic group of supporting organizations that raise funds for terrorists. The group is not on the State Department‘s watch list.

“It’s a smart thing, to try to make yourself look like a nice, kind organization,” Kaufman said. “But they’ve never condemned any of the things they’ve been involved in.’

In response, Magid said the Islamic Society has always condemned suicide bombings and other terrorist acts and said he didn’t want to “waste energy” responding to such groups.

Conference chairman Asad Ba-Yunus of Miramar said he hopes attendance would reach 1,000, although Saturday’s events drew a few hundred each.

Some of the missing background withheld from millions of south Floridians. The tip of the iceberg on ISNA:

Established in 1981 by the Saudi-funded Muslim Students’ Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) calls itself the largest Muslim organization on the continent. ISNA was created by MSA with the help of one of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s founding students, Sami Al-Arian.

ISNA focuses heavily on providing Wahhabi theological indoctrination materials to a large percentage of the mosques in North America.

Through its affiliate, the North American Islamic Trust — a Saudi government-backed organization created to fund Islamist enterprises in North America – the Saudi-subsidized ISNA reportedly holds the mortgages on 50 to 80 percent of all mosques in the U.S. and Canada.

According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, ISNA “is a radical group hiding under a false veneer of moderation”; “convenes annual conferences where Islamist militants have been given a platform to incite violence and promote hatred” (for instance, al Qaeda supporter and PLO official Yusuf Al-Qaradhawi was invited to speak at an ISNA conference); has held fundraisers for terrorists (after Hamas leader Mousa Marzook was arrested and eventually deported in 1997, ISNA raised money for his defense); has condemned the U.S. government’s post-9/11 seizure of Hamas’ and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s financial assets; and publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Islamic Horizons, that “often champions militant Islamist doctrine.”

Adds Emerson: “I think ISNA has been an umbrella, also a promoter of groups that have been involved in terrorism. I am not going to accuse the ISNA of being directly involved in terrorism. I will say ISNA has sponsored extremists, racists, people who call for Jihad against the United States.”

Upon learning of the arrest of Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer science professor who eventually would be found guilty of conspiring to fund the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, ISNA issued a statement criticizing the U.S. government for its prosecution of Al-Arian.

ISNA was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document — titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” – as one of the Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded “organizations of our friends” that shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation. These “friends” were identified by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”

Considering the federal government considers ISNA a co-conspirator in the largest terrorist financing conviction in U.S. history, one would think a reporter would include at lest that bit of information. More from Discover the Networks:

Shakir is known for having expressed his desire to see the United States eventually become — “not by violent means, but by persuasion” — a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law. “Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country,” he said.

WND noted, Zaid Shakir Exhorts Islamic faithful to target planes carrying ’82nd Airborne’:

Radical Islamic cleric Zaid Shakir, a frequent guest speaker at CAIR events, tells his Muslim audiences: “Jihad is physically fighting the enemies of Islam to protect and advance the religion of Islam. This is jihad.”

Acceptable targets of jihad, he says, include U.S. military aircraft.

“Islam doesn’t permit us to hijack airplanes filled with civilian people,” Shakir once told a Muslim audience. However, “If you hijack an airplane filled with the 82nd Airborne, that’s something else.”

The 82nd Airborne Division’s elite paratroopers fly out of Fort Bragg, N.C., which is part of North Carolina state Sen. Larry Shaw’s district. Shaw is CAIR’s new chairman.

Zarfour was previously a president and Chairman of Hamas-linked, unindicted co-conspirator Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Imam Magid has been the center of many a puff piece before, and Militant Islam Monitor even called out TIME for their one-sided reporting of Magid:

MIM: TIMES journalist Waller’s ‘failure” to mention that Magid and ADAMS are closely tied to terrorism and are part of the Al Qaeda funding network raided by the FBI and JTTF in connection with ‘Operation Greenquest’ is another example of how the MSM deliberately tries to cover for radical Islamists, and endangers the American public by falsely portraying extremist Muslims and mosques as ‘moderate’.

All’s well in Ft. Lauderdale though, where just over a year ago Muslims were kicking and screaming in the streets for Jews to go back to the ovens. Is this the type of community involvement Hamas-linked ISNA is urging?