…both ISNA’s and NAIT’s intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Committee, and the defendants in this case. Accordingly, there is no possible basis for petitioner’s “expungement” from the government’s list of co-conspirators.11
For starters, the U.S. Brotherhood’s own internal memos confirm that ISNA and NAIT were among those groups created by the Brotherhood. A 1991 memo identified twenty-nine front groups. Topping the list was the Islamic Society of North America.
Another Brotherhood document confirms the relationship by stating that the secret group exercised leadership and direction over ISNA, including “setting expectations for ISNA for the next decade.”12 Yet another Brotherhood document, in the form of a spreadsheet, lists ISNA under the heading: “The Apparatuses.”13
BANKROLLING HAMAS
Equally convicting is the evidence that reveals ISNA collaborated in the Holy Land Foundation conspiracy to funnel money to Hamas terrorists.
Prosecutors say Brotherhood leaders sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas through bank accounts controlled by ISNA and its financial arm NAIT. The proof ranges from wiretapped conversations to bank records and other documents, including:
ISNA checks deposited into the ISNA/NAIT account for the Holy Land Foundation, which were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahadeen,” the original name for the Hamas military wing;14
An expense voucher from NAIT made out for $10,000 in the name of Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook;15
A $10,000 check drawn on a NAIT account made payable to Abu Marzook;16
Another NAIT check for $10,000 made out to Abu Marzook’s wife, Nadia Elashi;17
FBI recordings revealing Hamas leaders discussed ISNA during their secret 1993 Philadelphia meeting to plot ways to launder payments through Brotherhood charities and nonprofit organizations;18
A NAIT check for $30,000 made out to a Hamas school in the Gaza Strip with the name of Shukri Abu Baker—the now-convicted U.S.-based leader of Hamas—written in the memo line;19
A Brotherhood phonebook listing Abu Baker and two Indianapolis phone numbers for him—including an ISNA fax number still in use today—indicating the Hamas leader had worked out of ISNA’s headquarters near Indianapolis;20 and
A three-page internal Brotherhood memo citing Abu Baker as the point man for “coordinating with ISNA in the accounting” of funds for the Palestinian “Intifada,” the bloody anti-Israel uprising led by Hamas.21
FBI investigators say they’re continuing to collect evidence against ISNA that could sway prosecutors to seek a full criminal indictment. The FBI’s Washington and Indianapolis field offices recently put together a fifty-page dossier on the Brotherhood front group.
ROGUES’ GALLERY
In addition, several ISNA founders and board members have been accused of supporting or having ties to terrorism. They include:
Jamal Badawi: a founding father of the U.S. Brotherhood and a current ISNA board member who was listed among unindicted co-conspirators who raised money for the terrorist front Holy Land Foundation;22
Siraj Wahhaj: an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who has urged Muslims to overturn the U.S. system of government and set up an Islamic dictatorship. He has served as an ISNA vice president and board member;
Abdurahman Alamoudi: Former MSA president and ISNA regional representative for Washington now in prison for plotting terrorism and financing al-Qaida;
Sami al-Arian: Confessed Palestinian terrorist who admits he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood during the time he helped found ISNA;
Bassam Osman: Longtime NAIT director and landlord of al-Arian’s Islamic Academy of Florida, a madrassa accused of raising funds and providing other support for Palestinian terrorists;
Yusuf al-Qaradawi: U.S.-designated supporter of terrorism barred from entering the country. He co-founded ISNA’s office in Boston and helped finance ISNA’s national headquarters;
Sayyid Syeed: Former board member of Dar al-Hijrah, the 9/11 mosque, and longtime director of academic outreach at IIIT, the Brotherhood think tank under investigation for bankrolling terrorism. He has served as secretary general of ISNA, and is currently director of ISNA’s Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances in Washington;
Esam Omeish: Dar al-Hijrah vice president who personally hired the 9/11 imam, and who recently was exposed on video encouraging “the jihad way” and praising Palestinian terrorists as martyrs. He’s a former MSA president and ISNA board member; and
Jamal Barzinji: Original trustee holding title to Dar al-Hijrah accused by federal authorities of being “closely associated” with Hamas and other terrorist groups, according to court records. He served as president of MSA, and was a key founder and board member of ISNA. As an MSA leader in the early 1970s, in fact, Barzinji hosted top leaders of the Egyptian Brotherhood, just released from sixteen years in prison, for two weeks of meetings in Indianapolis.23
In 2008 ISNA awarded Barzinji for his “pioneering service” with its annual Dr. Mahboob Khan Community Service Award. Khan, one of the early founders of the Brotherhood movement in America, started a mosque in Santa Clara, California, which hosted and raised money for Egyptian Brotherhood leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now second in command of al-Qaida. (Khan’s son, who claims to be a Republican, infiltrated the White House and U.S. Transportation Department during the previous administration.)
THE ISNA-CAIR NEXUS
ISNA is a sister organization of CAIR. The two Brotherhood fronts coordinate operations, share funding, and maintain interlocking boards of directors.
For example, Ishsan Bagby—the Islamic “scholar” who advises Muslims they can “never be full citizens of this country” until they change it—currently sits on the boards of both CAIR and ISNA.
Safaa Zarzour also has a high-level role in both groups, as chairman of CAIR’s Chicago chapter and ISNA’s Education Forum. Khalid Iqbal, moreover, served as CAIR’s national operations director as well as an ISNA vice president and director, chairing ISNA’s annual convention for six years, according to a copy of his resumé.
Despite ISNA’s proven ties to terrorism and extremism, politicians in Washington continue to reach out to it, fooled as they are by the front group’s carefully manicured facade of moderation.
A PRAYER FOR OBAMA
Most recently, a top aide to President Obama this summer provided a keynote address at ISNA’s national convention in Washington. The senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, had the dubious distinction of being the first White House official to address ISNA.
Earlier in the year, Obama invited ISNA President Ingrid Mattson to deliver a prayer at the inaugural National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral. As a woman, Mattson, an ex-Catholic convert to Islam, cannot be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. But she has served to soften ISNA’s image and put a more benign face on its operations.
Mattson also spoke at a prayer service at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. James “Yousef” Yee, the Gitmo military chaplain accused of spying for al-Qaida, worked ISNA’s table at the convention, while serving as an Obama delegate.
In 2007, the Justice Department’s civil rights division actually co-sponsored ISNA’s annual convention in Chicago over the objections of career prosecutors who feared the outreach would undermine its case against the Holy Land Foundation and its co-conspirators.
Justice officials even manned an information booth at ISNA, angering Republicans.
“It is disgraceful that our Department of Justice was prosecuting ISNA in Texas while attending an ISNA conference in Illinois,” said Representative Sue Myrick (R-NC), who fired off a letter to the attorney general protesting the overture.24
The Justice Department wasn’t alone. The Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Defense also set up tables at the ISNA event.
Most disturbing, the Pentagon put up a job booth to recruit Muslim chaplains and Arabic linguists. Pentagon officials even met with ISNA le
aders. One of the military officials was Hesham Islam, an Egyptian immigrant who rose to the position of special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense.25 Just months earlier, Islam spoke privately with CAIR Governmental Affairs Director Corey Saylor, notes from a CAIR executive staff meeting reveal.
That same year, Islam invited ISNA officials to lunch with then-Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England at the Pentagon. England spoke at ISNA’s 2006 convention. Islam arranged it.
Raising more suspicion, Islam has run major interference for ISNA. For example, he recently convinced Pentagon brass not to renew the contract of Pentagon analyst Major Stephen Coughlin after Coughlin argued in briefings that the Defense Department should cease outreach programs with ISNA because of its radical Muslim Brotherhood ties.
PLANTING MUSLIM CHAPLAINS
Islam’s influence is particularly alarming concerning chaplain recruitment.
ISNA maintains a chaplaincy board to recommend Muslim clerics for the military. One of the board members is Ahmed Alwani, dean of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences. The GSISS president is Taja Alwani, a key Brotherhood figure and an unindicted co-conspirator in the al-Arian terror case.26
SITE Institute executive director Rita Katz told the St. Petersburg Times that Taja Alwani is a “person who supports and funnels money to terrorist organizations, and he’s training Muslim chaplains for the military.” He also co-founded a fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, organization with Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood spiritual leader who has issued fatwahs calling for suicide attacks against U.S. soldiers.
GSISS, which adopted the alternate name Cordoba University after federal agents raided its offices, has trained and certified an alarming ten of the Pentagon’s fourteen Muslims chaplains, as well as some of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ chaplains. It counts among its alumni one Warith Deen Umar, a longtime federal and state prison chaplain in New York who applauded the 9/11 hijackings and promoted black inmates who converted to Islam as ideal candidates for future terrorist attacks.
A few years ago, the Justice Department’s inspector general recommended that the Federal Bureau of Prisons suspend ties to ISNA until the FBI could conduct a thorough investigation of the group. The inspector general cited reports that ISNA-sponsored chaplains were helping radicalize inmates.
But after pushback from ISNA, the prison bureau lifted its moratorium the very next year. It’s now accepting ISNA’s endorsement of Muslim prison chaplains—and by extension, GSISS’s.
So is the Pentagon. It rejected a recommendation from its own inspector general to use the FBI to help screen ISNA and other religious organizations that certify military chaplains. The Pentagon said it would be “legally problematic” to do so.27
As it stands now, the Pentagon will not remove or reject Muslim chaplains unless they have been charged or convicted of terrorism or if the religious organization endorsing them appears on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations.28
Even at the FBI, the PC outreach continues unabated.
Earlier this year, with the conviction of the Holy Land charity still making headlines, the FBI allowed its general counsel to sit on a Yale University panel on civil rights with ISNA official Louay Safi. During the same month, ISNA boasted that it met with the FBI to voice outrage over undercover agents in mosques.29
And more recently, FBI Executive Assistant Director Tom Harrington met at FBI headquarters with a vice president of ISNA, a move that followed the bureau’s decision “to use ISNA as their official point of contact with the American Muslim community,” according to Guandolo, who has worked at the FBI since 1996, most recently in the Washington field office’s counterterrorism division.30
Career FBI agents say they were scandalized by news of the high-level contacts, which took place over their objections and in spite of ISNA’s recent Justice Department blacklisting. They say FBI assistant directors involved in outreach and civil rights are hesitant to cut off formal ties to the group because they remain impressed with the moderate and patriotic rhetoric of ISNA officials.
The FBI officials “are quite friendly with them and refuse to believe they are nefarious, because they say—and I quote—‘I have lunch with Sayyid Syeed every week; he is a nice guy,’” Guandolo says.
“Nice or not, he’s Muslim Brotherhood,” the veteran agent asserts. “And they’re the enemy.”
And their next target is the Treasury Department—and Wall Street.
CHAPTER TWENTY
NAIT AND THE ECONOMIC JIHAD
“We can communicate grievances and positions that are relevant to the well-being of the Muslim community to these [non-Shariah-compliant American] corporations through shareholder resolutions, press releases, and divestitures…We are able to implement an economic boycott that reflects our values and priorities.”
-- Omar Haydar, mutual fund director for the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), 2008 letter to CAIR1
THE COUNCIL ON AMERICAN-ISLAMIC RELATIONS invests its employee retirement funds and other accounts with the North American Islamic Trust, another Muslim Brotherhood subsidiary in the center of the conspiracy to conquer North America for Allah.
Adopting a relatively low profile, NAIT fronts as an investment bank, managing the financial accounts of most of the organizations in the Brotherhood network and providing the capital that has helped the Islamofascist movement expand from college campuses to major cities including the nation’s capital. It also holds title to most of the radical mosques and Islamic schools in America.
Millions of dollars in Brotherhood and Hamas money has flowed through NAIT since its founding in 1973—with ample seed capital from Saudi and other Mideast sources. In fact, U.S. prosecutors recently named NAIT in the U.S. Brotherhood conspiracy to fund Hamas and other terrorists.2
While that’s bad enough, the Chicago-based trust is at the center of a broader Brotherhood scheme to create a parallel economic system in America complying with Shariah laws against interest, credit, and other “impure” Western financial practices. The ultimate goal is to Islamize the banking industry and Wall Street in an economic jihad.
It is part of the larger civilization jihad, or “grand jihad,” to destroy and overthrow the non-Islamic system of the West revealed in the secret Brotherhood manifesto uncovered by the FBI. Deep inside the eighteen-page document is a section calling for the creation of an “Islamic Central Bank” and “an organization for interest-free loans.”3
The manifesto does not spell out the Brotherhood’s tactics for imposing Shariah-compliant finance on corporate America. Nor the tools for enforcing it.
However, a letter intercepted from one of the boxes of files that CAIR had marked for shredding at its Washington headquarters provides clues.
The correspondence reveals a “strategic partnership” between NAIT and CAIR to bully publicly traded American firms to conform to Shariah rules or face punishments—including shareholder resolutions, divestments, and boycotts.
FORBIDDEN BUSINESS
What are the Shariah rules for finance? Among other things, Islamic law forbids any businesses dealing in:
conventional Western banking;
alcoholic beverages;
pork or pork byproducts;
tobacco;
Western aerospace and defense;
movie production and theaters;
music;
hotels and casinos; or
any other entertainment.
Business with Israel also is forbidden.
Now back to the smoking-gun letter, which was written in 2008 by Omar Haydar, director of fund operations for NAIT subsidiary Allied Asset Advisors, Inc. He was following up on a prior “discussion” with CAIR’s then-national operations director, Khalid Iqbal.
In his introduction, Haydar informed Iqbal that NAIT has about $20 million under management in one stock mutual fund and plans to offer other Islamic investment products in the future, which would add to its muscle and help it
bend Wall Street and corporate America to the will of Islam.
“Currently, we own nearly four hundred U.S. equities, such as Walgreens, Cisco, and Exxon-Mobil. Thus we have some leverage with the companies whose shares we own,” Haydar wrote. “More specifically, we can communicate grievances and positions that are relevant to the well-being of the Muslim community to these corporations through shareholder resolutions, press releases, and divestitures.”4
If a company does not change its business plan and conform with Islamic principles, he proposed, NAIT could threaten to divest its funds.
“If a corporation does not seem to be receptive to the grievances and concerns,” Haydar said, “we have the discretion to divest ourselves of the corporation’s assets, and making [sic] it a public matter.”5
With CAIR’s help, NAIT could trigger an “economic boycott” forcing targeted corporations to bow to Islamic demands.
“Thus,” Haydar said, “we are able to implement an economic boycott that reflects our values and priorities, putting our money where our mouth is.”6
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