Thursday, May 14, 2009

Islamists on college campuses










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Dear Solsticewitch13,

To get a compelling – and alarming – picture of how Islamists are
infiltrating America and using our institutions, liberties, and tolerance
against us, please take a few minutes to read the report below on the
Muslim Students’ Association.








Islamism's Campus Club: The Muslim
Students' Association


by Jonathan Dowd-Gailey
Middle East Quarterly
Spring
2004

http://www.meforum.org/603/islamisms-campus-club-the-muslim-students


The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students'
Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious
group. It promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to
the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a
healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy. Along
these lines, its constitution declares the MSA's mission as serving "the
best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada so as
to enable them to practice Islam as a complete way of life."
[1]

Today, over 150 MSA
chapters exist on American college campuses (divided into five regional
chapters), easily establishing this organization as the most extensive
Muslim student organization in North America. A Washington, D.C.-based
national office assists in the establishment of constituent chapters and
oversees fundraising and conferences while steering a plethora of special
committees and "Political Action Task Forces."

Yet consider some
of these recent activities of the MSA:



  • At a meeting in Queensborough Community
    College in New York in March 2003, a guest speaker named Faheed
    declared, "We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order.
    Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The
    only relationship you should have with America is to topple it …
    Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws
    of Shariah."
    [2]


  • During an October 2000 anti-Israeli
    protest, former MSA president Ahmed Shama at the University of
    California, Los Angeles (UCLA) stood before the Israeli consulate in Los
    Angeles, shouting "Victory to Islam! Death to the Jews!" MSA West
    president Sohail Shakr declared at the same rally, "the biggest
    impediment to peace [in the Middle East] has been the existence of the
    Zionist entity in the middle of the Muslim world."
    [3]


  • Prior to September 11, 2001, the MSA
    formally assisted three Islamic charities in fundraising: the Holy Land
    Foundation, Global Relief, and Benevolence Foundation. After that date,
    all three were accused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of
    having serious links to terrorism and were ordered closed. The MSA
    issued a formal statement of protest: "How three of the nation's largest
    Muslim charities could be made inoperable at the peak of the giving
    season of Ramadan seemed unbelievable."
    [4]

This is only the tip of the iceberg.
There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign
student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a
single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses—a voice espousing Wahhabism,
anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S.
Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist
ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.

A Saudi Creation

On its website, the MSA describes its emergence as
spontaneous and disavows any link to foreign governments.
[5] In fact, the creation of the
MSA resulted from Saudi-backed efforts to found Islamic bodies
internationally in the 1960s. Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security
Policy states,

The Saudis over the years set up a number of large
front organizations, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly
of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and a great number of Islamic
"charities." While invariably claiming that they were private, all of
these groups were tightly controlled and financed by the Saudi government
and the Wahhabi clergy
.
[6]

In the United States,
two leading Saudi-backed organizations were the MSA and the Islamic
Society of North America (the MSA's adult counterpart), both of which
received major funding, direction, and influence from Riyadh.


Personnel, money, and institutional linkages bound these
organizations together from their inception, and all roads led eventually
to Riyadh. Ahmad Totonji, an MSA co-founder, later served as
vice-president for the notorious Saudi SAAR Foundation (a network of
charities named after Saudi benefactor Sulayman ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ar-Rajhi),
which closed down in 2001 after federal agents discovered links to
terrorist groups.
[7] Another MSA co-founder, Ahmad
Sakr, served on a number of Saudi-affiliated organizations, such as the
World Council of Mosques. The MSA is very much a result of Saudi
"petro-Islam" diplomacy.

Current estimates suggest that the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spends $4 billion annually on international aid,
with two-thirds of that sum devoted to strictly Islamic development. Much
of this largesse has ended up at Islamist organizations like MSA. Funded
through private donations or through foundations and charities (only some
of which the MSA officially reports)
,
[8] MSA offers its Saudi
benefactors a powerful tool. However, until the MSA's tax records are made
public (on January 14, 2004, the Senate Finance Committee publicized a
list of Islamic organizations whose financial records are sought,
including the MSA),
[9] the exact extent of foreign
funding for the organization cannot be known.

But even without the
tax records, there is plenty of evidence for the MSA's strident advocacy
of the Saudi-style Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In "Wahhabism: A
Critical Essay," Hamid Algar of the University of California-Berkeley
writes,

Some Muslim student organizations have functioned at times
as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad,
especially in the United States … Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, no
criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions of
the MSA. The organization has, in fact, consistently advocated theological
and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations,
including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati Islam.
[10]

The MSA has played a
major role in spreading Wahhabism. "Its numerous local chapters," Algar
explains, "would make available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the
[Mecca-based] World Muslim League's publications, in both English and
Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified its connections with
Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained strong."
[11]

Stephen Schwartz goes
further, stating in his June 2003 testimony to the U.S. Senate's
Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,

Shia and other
non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American
mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and
an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control … Wahhabi
control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of
imams, training of imams, content of preaching including faxing of Friday
sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in
mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and
organizational and charitable solicitation … The main organizations that
have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America
(ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S.
and Canada (MSA), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR).
[12]

The MSA reflects a
prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge
the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's
Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics:


It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the
politics of their respective university … the politicization of the MSA
means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA
needs to be a more "In-your-face" association.
[13]

All of this, the guide
explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the
campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of
life."

In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special
treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may
actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding
that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established
National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA
chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals
for Muslims only.
[14]

The politics of
segregation practiced by the MSA have included blanket marginalization of
its own female members. Shabana Mir, writing for the
American
Muslim
, summarizes the plight of Muslim women on campus:

It is
particularly important to know what is happening with Muslim women
pursuing higher education. Many Muslim women in MSAs are working toward
the justice and the equality that Islam ordains for humankind. A survey of
sisters' participation in MSAs conducted in 1994 shows that women's
activism in MSAs is at an abysmally low level due in large part to
"brother domination." A related problem is "there is a common attitude
that strict segregation should exist between the genders and that sisters
should not appear in public!" On an MSA mailing list, a popular article
gives a long list of conditions that women must fulfill to gain access to
the mosque. These include obtaining permission from her male guardian,
wearing hijab [veil], not wearing "fancy clothes" or perfume, not
mixing with men, leaving immediately after the prayer, and so on!
[15]

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