Guess Who’s Speaking At the Local Mosque?

by Robert Spencer
http://www.humanevents.com
Posted: 05/14/2008


Khalid Yasin speaking at an MSA event in 2007.

Unless you live in a rural area, there is probably a mosque (or more than one) in your town, and most people -- including local law enforcement officials -- regard them with the complete indifference shown the local churches. It is the height of political incorrectness to even suggest that possibly, just possibly, it might be worth checking into the local mosque’s sources of funding, and what they’re teaching there. As a Las Vegas city councilor exclaimed when some people objected to a proposal to build a mosque right beyond the fence of the international airport, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a church!”

But imagine what the outcry would be if your local church sponsored speakers like Khalid Yasin, Siraj Wahhaj and Ingrid Mattson.

According to Patrick Poole of Central Ohioans Against Terrorism, Khalid Yasin will be lecturing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton on May 16, sponsored by Dayton’s Masjid-at-Taqwa. Who is Khalid Yasin? Patrick Poole says that he “says that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks” and claims that “AIDS was invented at a US government lab and spread by Western governments through UN agencies and Christian missionaries. Of course, so far he sounds just like Jeremiah Wright, but he goes a lot farther than even Jeremiah’s jeremiads.

Yasin has also, according to Poole, advocated that homosexuals be put to death; not only called equal rights for women “foolishness” but justified wife-beating (which is mandated in the Qur’an, 4:34); called the beliefs of Jews and Christians “filth” (Jews and Christians are unclean according to Qur’an 9:28); and warned Muslims against taking Jews and Christians as friends (in accord with the prohibition in Qur’an 5:51).

And, according to Poole, Yasin has “justified the terrorist bombings in Bali because of years of Western oppression”; “visited Jemaah Islamiah terrorist leader Abu Bakar Bashir in prison,”; “lectured with Hizb-ut-Tahrir hatemonger Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was banned from the UK in 2006”; “was in Saudi Arabia on 9/11 soliciting support from the Al-Qaeda front Al-Haramain Foundation, which was designated a terrorist organization in 2004 by the US government, to help finance his Islamic Broadcasting Company”; and above all, he “rejects any separation between Islam and the state and openly advocates for the reestablishment of the caliphate.”

Meanwhile, on May 4 in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Islamic Society of Greater Manchester held a fundraiser for its new mosque, featuring Imam Siraj Wahhaj.

Siraj Wahhaj is a big star on the American Muslim speaker circuit. In 1991, he was the first Islamic cleric to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. However, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has lamented that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”



Siraj Wahhaj speaking at Vanderbilt Univeristy in March 2008.

In the early 1990s he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey; Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahhaj was designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator.”

Just days before Wahhaj appeared, on April 30 the Islamic Society of Manchester also brought in Ingrid Mattson of the Islamic Society of North America.

The Islamic Society of North America was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation jihad terror charity case last summer. Also, it was named in a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the organizations pursuing in the United States “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.”

Now imagine if the local Catholic parish featured a speaker who said that the beliefs of Jews and Muslims were “filth” and that homosexuals should be killed, or a speaker who said that Constitutional law should be replaced by religious law, or who was a representative of an organization that was an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror funding case, and was named as part of an effort to destroy Western civilization in a memo from the group spearheading that effort.

If any of that were happening in your local parish, do you think you’d only be hearing about it in HUMAN EVENTS?

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" , "The Truth About Muhammad" and "Religion of Peace?" (all from Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).