Group That Sponsored Ellison’s Hajj is a ‘National Security Threat’

CLCDecember 19, 2016

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Group That Sponsored Ellison's Hajj is a 'National Security Threat'

In the latest news concerning U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, who has been working to become the next Democratic Committee Chairman, new revelations has been revealed that the group that paid for U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison’s December 2008 hajj to Mecca is actually a “national security threat,” a Muslim scholar wrote in a 2010 email.

John Rossomando of Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reported this breaking news in which the Muslim American Society (MAS), the group that paid $13,500 for Ellison’s pilgrimage, had ties with terrorism and had a phony commitment to the American constitutional order, al-Husein Madhany wrote in the email, which was posted on the “Muslim Justice League” listserv. He made these assertions as part of a discussion of how the Muslim community should respond to the Ground Zero mosque controversy.

John Rossomando reported:

The listserv included top U.S. Islamist and liberal intellectuals, as well as Obama administration representatives. CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen and prominent American Muslim playwright and polemicist Wajahat Ali also were part of the list. “When I said that I believe MAS halaqas (religious gatherings) to be a national security threat, it was only part in jest. My caution comes from what I have personally heard said at MAS halaqas during my time in graduate school and based on what I know about their ideological (but financial) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas,” Madhany wrote .

Madhany, who has ties to the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Georgetown University, and New America Foundation, co-authored a 2008 piece for Brookings with President Obama’s former U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, about the role of Islam in counter-terrorism policy.

At the time, Madhany wrote, some non-governmental groups were building a case for designating the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates as terrorist groups.

Part of that case was built on the fact that “MAS continues to teach to their members — at its highest levels of leadership — that all governments should become Islamic and that non-Islamic judicial systems should be boycotted or replaced, by soft power and by force, Madhany wrote. “They do this while promoting the idea in public that their goal is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.”

Madhany is no conservative. His 2008 Brookings piece argued that using the terms “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamic extremist” gave religious legitimacy to Al-Qaida, suggesting “Al-Qaida terrorism” instead.

Madhany was not the first or the only person to connect MAS with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004. In 2008, federal prosecutors said that MAS was founded as the “overt arm” of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

Convicted Al-Qaida financier and jailed prominent U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdurrahman Alamoudi confirmed this assertion in 2012: “Everyone knows that MAS is the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Recently, due to one of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reports about Ellison’s anti-Israel comments, the ADL stated that the speech has now raised new doubts about Rep. Ellison’s ability to represent traditional Democratic support for Israel and in his words, raised the specter of age-old stereotypes about Jewish control of our government.