Christians Under Attack

the U.S. have been leaving their fingerprints on the campaign to exchange secular authoritarianism for religious authoritarianism in the Middle East. As these organizations labor stateside to nudge the governing class to embrace Arab Islamists at the expense of liberals — prompting Egyptian intellectual Essam Abdallah to lamentthat “the most dramatic oppression of the region’s civil societies and the Arab Spring … is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington” — several of the groups’ past and current officials have emerged as key players in the Middle East’s new political landscape. The connections underscore that Islamists everywhere are united by a single goal: the imposition of Shari‘a.

One of the prominent figures to embody these ties is Bassem Khafagi, who in March announced his intention to run for president of Egypt on behalf of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to resurrect the caliphate and achieve “mastership of the world.” He failed to get the nod, but his back story is intriguing nonetheless. Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer has pointed out that Khafagi once worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and is among its most notorious alumni. While serving as CAIR’s community affairs director, Khafagi was arrested in 2003 as part of a terrorism support and recruitment probe targeting the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), of which he was a founder. The government deported Khafagi after he pleaded guilty to bank and visa fraud.

Tentacles from American Islamist organizations also reach into the Syrian National Council (SNC), the U.S.-favored civilian umbrella group opposing dictator Bashar al-Assad. The SNC is widely understood to be stacked with Islamists, so these radicals fit right in.

Heading the roster is Louay Safi, a central figure in the SNC and increasingly its public face. Safi may be most familiar, however, as a longtime official with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), serving as executive director of the ISNA Leadership Development Center from 2004 to 2008 and becoming ISNA’s director of communications and leadership development in 2009. A document composed by the Brotherhood lists ISNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” that can advance the “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Like CAIR, it was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case. Safi’s résumé also includes past senior positions with the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which has been the focus of investigations into terror funding, and the D.C.-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), which reformist Muslims have dubbed “a front for some of the most obnoxious members of the ‘Wahhabi lobby’ in America.”

An excellent Dallas Morning News piece, published amid the controversy over Safi’s training of U.S. military personnel at Fort Hood, compiles further evidence of his radicalism. For example, Safi was an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of Sami al-Arian, the professor who pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiring to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Al-Arian’s think tank reportedly received considerable funding from IIIT, where Safi was executive director and later research director. The FBI intercepted a 1995 conversation between Safi and al-Arian in which they discussed whether an executive order banning financial transactions with terrorists would inhibit al-Arian’s work with PIJ. In the course of the call, Safi agreed with al-Arian that “Zionists” were controlling Washington.

Equally troubling are Safi’s musings on the Shari‘a-mandated execution of those who leave Islam. On the one hand, during the international uproar over charges levied against Afghan convert Abdul Rahman in 2006, Safi wrote an article voicing platitudes about individual religious liberty under Islam while laughably blaming Western imperialism for the barbaric apostasy laws in various Muslim countries, where converts can face penalties that include death. Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes described himself as “surprised, even wondrous, at the lack of shame.” On the other hand, a monograph published by Safi a few years earlier, when there was much less media scrutiny of the subject, takes a harder line, concluding that although “a quiet desertion of personal Islamic duties is not a sufficient reason for inflicting death on a person,” execution is “just punishment” if “the individual’s desertion of Islam is used as a political tool for instigating a state of disorder, or revolting against the law of Islam.” Along with the rest of his radical history, these contradictory pronouncements — standard fare whenever Islamists address the public on uncomfortable matters — should cast doubt on any claims made by Safi, particularly his soothing assurances that Syria’s future will be characterized by “equal rights and freedoms of all people.”

CAIR has its own man in the SNC: Yaser Tabbara, a founding member of the Syrian resistance group. After helping launch CAIR’s Chicago office, Tabbara served as its executive director until 2006; he currently sits on its board. Tabbara’s time at the helm of CAIR-Chicago was marked by multiple controversies. He played a major role in the successful drive to get Thomas Klocek dismissed from his post as an adjunct professor at DePaul University, following an out-of-classroom argument in which Klocek defended Israel against the smears of pro-Palestinian students. Tabbara also led CAIR-Chicago’s efforts to circle the Islamist wagons when the family of an American teenager murdered by Hamas sued U.S. charities believed to fund such terrorists. He called the trial a “lynching and a mockery of justice,” but a jury awarded the plaintiffs $156 million. Around the same period, the FBI accused CAIR-Chicago of having “compromised or impeded” an investigation into an alleged hate crime by ignoring the bureau’s request not to issue a premature press release about it.

Yet another important SNC member is Najib Ghadbian, a University of Arkansas professor who recently sat on the CSID board. Ghadbian’s 1997 book classifies Muslim Brotherhood theorists, including Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, as “moderate” Islamists who favor democracy, inspiring Daniel Pipes to observe that “there are no ‘moderate’ Islamists, only deluded analysts who try to convince of their existence.” As the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report notes, Ghadbian has long advocated that the U.S. government reach out to Syria’s Brotherhood, desiring it to have a place at the post-Assad table. Wielding significant influence these days as part of the SNC’s inner circle, Ghadbian was among its representatives at a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva last December. Three months prior, he spoke at an Anaheim town hall beside a State Department official; the event was endorsed by CAIR and hosted by the Syrian American Council (SAC), in which both Safi and Tabbara have held leadership positions.