My (Ohio) Neighbor, the Hamas Leader

Once again the media not only ignored this story but the local media who did sided with the terrorists. via PJ Media .

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My Neighbor, the Hamas Leader

Back in March, my friend and colleague Erick Stakelbeck of CBN News emailed me a link to an article in Tablet Magazine and asked: “Hey — isn’t that your neighbor with the head of Hamas?” Sure enough, it was. My former neighbor Salah Sultan was standing right beside Ismail Haniyeh — the Hamas “prime minister” of Gaza — as Haniyeh left a meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo (purple shirt):

Stakelbeck knew about my neighbor Sultan because Erick and I had worked together on a video segment highlighting Sultan’s activity and residence in my hometown of Hilliard, Ohio, back in 2007. That was more than a year after I had first written about returning home to Ohio to discover that I had an internationally known Hamas cleric living about a mile from my own house. Not only that, but Sultan was the religious director at the local Islamic school, Sunrise Academy, which had taken over the former public library building in town. Sultan was also the resident scholar of the newly built Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Hilliard.

As I later recounted, the Columbus Dispatch attacked me as a racist and a bigot, characterizing me as a Christianist Neo-Nazi. This after I had identified Sultan’s rabidly anti-Jewish remarks, his calls for violent jihad, his open support for Hamas, his ties to Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, and his association with international Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Dispatch article encouraged readers to attend an open house set up in response to my article at the local Islamic school. The relevant section of the Dispatch article responding to my claims was titled “Hostile Assertions”:

The condemnations not only came from my local paper, but also from the “interfaith leaders” in town — namely the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio – who had arranged the Dispatch hit piece. They also came from local residents, who felt free to vent their fury in phone calls made to my family members. One local columnist wrote an article titled “Muslim Basher, Patrick Poole, Preys on People’s Fears.”

Two weeks after the Dispatch article appeared defending Salah Sultan as a well-respected Islamic scholar and local interfaith leader (curiously, the Dispatch article can no longer be found on their website), he appeared on Al-Risala TV where he claimed that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. government plot to victimize Muslims. He also defended designated terrorist and al-Qaeda cleric Abdul Majid al-Zindani. (See video embedded above.)

Needless to say, the Dispatch never followed up, even after I sent the reporter and editors a copy of Sultan’s video translated by MEMRI.

Last year at PJ Media, I revisited some of Salah Sultan’s activities since that time. I was driven to do so after he appeared last August on Al-Jazeera issuing a fatwa authorizing the assassination of any Israeli in Egypt. I titled that review “Yes, my neighbor really was a racist, terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood cleric.”

As a demonstration of how correct I was, take note of the picture below of Sultan being chummy with Khaled Meshaal –the head of Hamas and a specially designated global terrorist according to the U.S. government — that was posted on Sultan’s Facebook page on May 6 this year:

In law enforcement circles, this is what is known as an “investigative clue.”

In case the folks at the Columbus Dispatch still have any doubts about his Hamas connections, here Sultan is again with Ismail Haniyeh in March, just days after the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) — where Sultan sits on the board – greeted Haniyeh as a member:

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Read it all and view the pictures at PJ Media.