Obama Campaign Official
Raises Money For Syrian Rebels
The former director of Muslim outreach for President Obama’s 2008 campaign is now raising money for a charity in the U.S. to fund the jihadist-tied Syrian opposition.
Mazen Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, resigned from Obama’s first presidential campaign after the Wall Street Journal reported that he sat on the board of an Islamic investment group called the Allied Assets Advisors Fund. Also on the board was Jamal Said, an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, the Texas-based group that raised millions of dollars for the Hamas terrorist organization.
The Allied Assets Advisors Fund was itself a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust, which is directed by the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA.
ISNA was established in 1981 by activists from the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Muslim Students Association. ISNA was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land terrorism financing case.
ISNA was the subject of a terrorism investigation in December 2003 by the Senate Finance Committee, which looked into possible links between nongovernmental organizations and terrorist financing networks.
The official court documents in the Holy Land case named ISNA among “entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.”
Now Asbahi is back in the spotlight as the lawyer for the Syrian Support Group, which is raising money to fund the rebels attacking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Earlier this year, Asbahi applied to the U.S. government for a license to fund the Free Syrian Army.
There have been scores of reports worldwide that Al Qaeda and other jihad groups are among the ranks of the Free Syrian Army. It is well established that jihadists dominate the Syrian opposition and various Free Syrian Army branches.