The Council on American-Islamic Relations continues to portray itself as simply a champion of civil rights for Muslims, but a fundraiser for one of its state chapters featured a leader of a Virginia mosque named by the Treasury Department as “a front for Hamas” that is “associated with Islamic extremists.”
Three 9/11 hijackers, the late al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hamas political leader Mousa Abu Marzook and terrorist fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi are among the terror-related Muslims associated with the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque where imam Johari Abdul-Malik serves officially as outreach director and spokesman.
Abdul-Malik was a featured speaker at the annual fundraiser for CAIR’s Cleveland chapter Saturday night. And he’s scheduled to speak at the fundraiser for CAIR’s Columbus, Ohio, chapter April 15.
Abdul-Malik himself is known for publicly defending a number of figures who later were convicted of terror-related offenses.
He once said that al-Awlaki, the infamous al-Qaida senior recruiter killed by a U.S. drone strike who was once an imam at the Virginia mosque, was “articulating the same message that I articulate today.”
Abdul-Malik called the investigation of Sami al-Arian a “witch hunt” after the U.S. government raided 14 homes and offices of northern Virginia Muslims in 2002. Al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor, later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to help a “specially designated terrorist” organization, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
A convert to Islam as a graduate student at Georgetown University, Abdul-Malik became outreach director at Dar Al-Hijrah in 2002.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the mosque operates “as a front for Hamas operatives in U.S.” and “is associated with Islamic extremists.”
Treasury said the mosque “has been under numerous investigations for financing and providing aid and comfort to bad [organizations] and members” and has been “linked to numerous individuals linked to terrorism financing.”
CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas and designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates, along with groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida. According to evidence entered in the 2007 Hamas-financing case, CAIR was founded by figures associated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the worldwide movement that has stated its intent to transform the U.S. into an Islamic state. More than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
CAIR has sued the authors of a WND Books exposé, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” which documented the group’s radical ties. A trial in the case is expected to commence this fall.
One week ago, the director of CAIR’s national office, Nihad Awad, claimed in a speech at Wake Forest University that Muslims and other religious minorities in America face bigotry that could lead to a holocaust similar to the one that killed 6 million Jews.
Awad was the keynote speaker at the CAIR event in Cleveland on Saturday.
Defender of terrorists
In 2003, Abdul-Malik defended al-Amoudi, founder of the American Muslim Council, when al-Amoudi was indicted on charges of engaging in illegal financial transactions with Libya, noted Discover the Networks.
Al-Amoudi, however, pleaded guilty to financial and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 23 year years in prison.
Another worshiper at the mosque, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who also was a mosque teacher and camp counselor, was charged with plotting with members of al-Qaida to assassinate President George W. Bush.
Abdul-Malik came to Abu Ali’s defense in February 2005.
“Our whole community is under siege. They don’t see this as a case of criminality. They see it as a civil rights case. As a frontal attack on their community,” Abdul-Malik said.
Later that year, however, Abu Ali was convicted of providing material support to al-Qaida and conspiracy to assassinate Bush. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Abdul-Malik also defended and raised support for Ali al-Timimi of Fairfax, Virginia, an American-born Muslim cleric who was convicted of inciting followers to wage war against the U.S. days after 9/11 and for recruiting for the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Toiba.
“There is a view many Muslims have when they come to America that you could not be arrested for something you say,” Abdul-Malik said. “But now they have discovered they are not free to speak their minds. And if our opinions are out of vogue in the current climate, we feel we are all at risk.”
Al-Timimi was sentenced to life imprisonment.
When Shaker Elsayed became the new imam at Dar al-Hijrah in June 2005 despite his support for numerous terror suspects before they were convicted, Abdul-Malik called Elsayed “a good choice to lead Dar al-Hijrah because of his pre-eminence as a scholar and his ability to relate to both the immigrant and the native-born communities.”
In a September 2004, Abdul-Malik praised Dar Al-Hijrah congregant Ismael Selim Elbarasse, a high-ranking Hamas operative who had recently been arrested for suspected terrorist activity.
Get the new paperback edition of the remarkable, undercover exposé of CAIR, “Muslim Mafia.”
In February 2010, the mosque hosted a fundraiser for Sabri Benkahla, who was serving a 10-year prison sentence for perjury and obstruction-of-justice related to a terrorism investigation.
A former member of Dar al-Hijrah’s board of trustees, Abdulhaleem al-Ashqar, has close ideological and financial ties to Hamas.
Along with Awalki, Dar al-Hijrah’s imams have included the late Mohammed al-Hanooti, a Hamas fundraiser and an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center attack; and Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, a former Baltimore regional director of the Islamic American Relief Agency, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
At a 2001 conference for the now-defunct Islamic Association of Palestine, the parent group of CAIR, Discover the Networks noted, Abdul-Malik called for Muslims to wage jihad attacks against Israeli infrastructure targets.
“I am gonna teach you now. You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work,” he said. “You can blow up power supplies … the water supply, you can do all forms of sabotage and let the world know that we are doing it like this because they [we] have a respect for the lives of innocent people.”
In a November 2004 sermon at Dar Al-Hijrah, Abdul-Malik predicted that Islam would one day become dominant in the United States.
“[T]he deen (religion) of Islam is growing because people see even within all of this struggle it is better to be a Muslim under these conditions than to be a kaffir (infidel) under any conditions. … [B]efore Allah closes our eyes for the last time you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America – that’s where we are now – to being the first religion in America.”
In 2014, Abdul-Malik encouraged Muslims not to go out of their way to to publicly condemn ISIS, because in doing so, they “sounded like they were apologizing for something they haven’t done.”
‘Ample evidence’
While CAIR has complained of the unindicted co-conspirator designation, 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.”
In 2008, the FBI cut off official contact with CAIR, citing evidence from the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial which documented the connections between CAIR and its founders to Hamas.
In a lawsuit CAIR filed in 2009 against an undercover investigative team that published evidence of CAIR’s ties to Islamic jihad, the group alleged its reputation was harmed, and it sought damages in court.
But a federal court in Washington determined CAIR failed to present a single fact showing it had been harmed, and the organization gave up that specific claim against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, whose findings were published in the WND Books expose, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.”
