A university professor who believes there's a relationship between terrorism and Islam has been accused of anti-Muslim bigotry by a prominent U.S. Muslim advocacy group that was founded by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint with the University of Central Florida against Professor Jonathan Matusitz, charging that his communications courses portray Islam in an inaccurate and biased way, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
CAIR – founded in 1993 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood who aspire to replace the U.S. government with an Islamic state – points to a video posted on Youtube of a lecture in a special series on terrorism at UCF in which Matusitz, 36, emphasizes the link between terrorism and Islamic culture.
The professor contends countries should resist the global spread of Islam.
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"Why do so many Muslims, relative to other religions, want to kill us?" he asks in the video. "The answer is easy, very easy. It is seven letters –culture."
Matusitz, who was given an award by his university for outstanding performance, also contends Islam cannot be changed.
"How can you change a movement in which you have 1.5 billion members? It's impossible," he says. "We just have to resist it and just elect people who are willing just to resist it and just be true American. That's the only answer. We're not going to change Islam."
Matusitz, according to his bio on the UCF website, came to the U.S. from Belgium in 2000. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2006. He has 95 academic publications and more than 100 conference presentations to his credit and taught at a NATO-affiliated military base in Belgium.
CAIR touts itself as Muslim civil rights group, but federal prosecutors in 2007 named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas, and more than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in Egypt after the demise of the Ottoman Empire with the aim of resurrecting the Islamic caliphate and helping establish the global rule of Islam, as taught in the Quran.
CAIR's chief national spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, told the Orlando paper he does not understand how a publicly funded university could allow a professor to promote hatred toward Muslims.
"What he is teaching his students at UCF is just raw, anti-Muslim hate," Hooper said. "If somebody suddenly decided they were very fond of the KKK and they were tenured and decided they were going to teach KKK ideologies to the students, I don't think that would be permitted."
The professor is the author of a book published this year titled "Terrorism and Communication: A Critical Introduction." His classes include one called Terrorism and Communication.
UCF spokesman Grant Heston told the Sentinel the video features an "outside-of-the-classroom presentation" that took place in January.
He said no one had complained about Matusitz's classroom work, and the university is not reviewing it.
"Dr. Matusitz expressed his opinion, which is his right," Heston said.
Matusitz is seen in another YouTube video objecting to claims that Islam is a "religion of peace."
"So when my colleagues tell me that Islam is a religion of peace, I tell them that Islam is a religion of pieces — piece of body here, piece of body there," he says.
Earlier this month, a Florida political blogger took credit for a decision by the Pinellas County Republican Party, in the St. Petersburg area, to cancel a scheduled speech by Matusitz at its monthly meeting. Party leaders apparently concluded, according to the blogger, that the professor's views on Islam would harm the party's election prospects.
The Justice Department tied CAIR to its terror-finance case against the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, which was convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas.
FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a "media twinkle" to the Muslim leaders' agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.
As WND reported in 2010, a federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group has been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas."