The New York Times Finds Some Moderate Muslims
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/05/the-new-york-times-finds-some-moderate-muslims/
The recent New York Times Sunday trumpeted this MPAC video as a rebuttal of Islamic “militants,” although it is long on vague generalities but (surprise, surprise) short on Qur’anic specifics, which are the only thing, could they be produced, that might actually induce an Islamic supremacist or jihadist to reconsider his position.
And that’s the best that can be said about it. Among the Islamic leaders it features is Suhaib Webb of the Muslim American Society. The Muslim American Society is the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. The Muslim Brotherhood’s own website carries the Chicago Tribune expose that identifies the MAS as the Brotherhood’s arm in the U.S.: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” So reported the Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now reproduced on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.
Why is the MAS connection with the Muslim Brotherhood significant? The Muslim Brothers “must understand 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 and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” So wrote Mohamed Akram in “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” May 22, 1991.
On the video, after Webb comes Maher Hathout, who trots out another familiar dodge, complaining about people quoting the Qur’an without knowing the Arabic or the context, as if “slay the pagans wherever you find them” (9:5) somehow becomes “establish religious dialogue” in the Arabic or “in context.” If so many Muslims weren’t murdering people in explicit obedience to verses like this one from the Qur’an, Hathout might have a case here; but they are, and he doesn’t. Hathout also, according to Steve Emerson, “has called Israel a nation of butchers and accused the United States of state terrorism; he has justified the actions of Hizbollah and defended terrorist financiers.”
Ihsan Bagby follows Hathout, and says unequivocally: “we cannot kill innocent people.” He does not, of course, define who is innocent, thus leaving the door open for jihadists like Anjem Chaudary and others who say that no non-Muslim is innocent. Bagby himself once said this about Muslims in America: “Ultimately we can never be full citizens of this country, because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”
Mohamad Magid comes next. He is the Imam and Executive Director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center in Sterling, Virginia. In 2004 Ben Johnson reported this in FrontPage: “The chairman of ADAMS is Ahmad Totonji, an Iraqi-born citizen of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a key target of Operation Green Quest. Totonji was also named as a defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by more than 600 relatives of people who died in the 9/11 attacks. He acted as a co-founder and officer of the Saudi-founded/Saudi-funded (and now defunct) SAAR Trust. Additionally, he served as Vice President of the Safa Group and the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT). Officials have linked the non-profit IIIT to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.” The IIIT is also linked with the Muslim Brotherhood.
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