A radical Muslim group that was an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to raise money for Hamas has an extensive relationship with the Obama administration, this column has learned.
Last week, President Obama’s top adviser on counter-terrorism, John Brennan, came under fire for controversial remarks he made in a speech to Muslim law students at New York University. The event was sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA.
The ISNA-White House relationship began even before Obama took office. One week before last year’s presidential inauguration, Sayyid Syeed, national director of the ISNA Office for Interfaith and Community Alliances, was part of a delegation that met with the directors of Obama’s transition team. The delegation discussed a request for an executive order ending “torture.”
ISNA President Ingrid Mattson represented American Muslims at Obama’s inauguration, where she offered a prayer during the televised event.
Mattson also represented ISNA at Obama’s Ramadan dinner at the White House.
Last June, Obama’s top aide, Valerie Jarrett, invited Mattson to work on the White House Council on Women and Girls, which Jarrett leads.
Also that month, Jarrett addressed ISNA’s 46th annual convention. According to the White House, Jarrett attended as part of Obama’s outreach to Muslims.
ISNA was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document – “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” – as one of the Brotherhood’s likeminded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation, according to Discover the Networks.
Arab Rocket Factory In Jerusalem?
Israeli border police last month secretly raided an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem to search for a suspected Kassam rocket factory, according to a senior Palestinian security official with knowledge of the incident.
Israel told media that the purpose of the raid, which took place in the Shoafat neighborhood on Feb. 8, was to arrest tax evaders and enforce municipal laws. But the security official told this column that border police also searched Shoafat’s metal and steel workshops and factories for a suspected Kassam manufacturing site.
Upon further questioning, border police spokesman Moshe Finsi told this reporter that part of the Shoafat raid indeed focused on anti-terror activities and not just municipal matters.
“Yes, part focused on anti-terror action to prevent organized terror, search for bombs, drugs, weapons,” he said. Finsi denied the raid included searching for a Kassam factory.
Shoafat is located in the northeast section of Jerusalem. The village is entirely inhabited by Arabs and Palestinians, although many of the Arab homes there are built illegally on Jewish-owned property. Although Shoafat is technically in Jerusalem, Arab roads there lead directly into the West Bank.
If a rocket factory production site was found inside a Jerusalem neighborhood, it would signify a major expansion of the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure.
On Wednesday, Israel announced to the public that the Palestinian Authority two weeks ago – just before Israel’s raid on Shoafat – arrested five members of Hamas and discovered a Kassam rocket in Beit Likya,a village about four miles from Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.
PA security sources did not rule out the possibility Hamas was intending to fire the rocket as part of its revenge for the assassination in Dubai last month of Hamas member Mahmud al-Mabhouh.
Ex-Obama Czar Not The Quiet Type
Van Jones, President Obama’s former “green jobs” czar and a newly appointed Princeton lecturer has a history of sparking protests against universities and once slammed non-activist students as “worthless people” obtaining “worthless degrees,” this column has learned.
Jones also implied a university education must help students become “revolutionaries.”
Jones resigned in September from his post as adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Qualityafter it was exposed that he founded a communist revolutionary organization and signed a statement that accused the Bush administration of possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Jones also called for “resistance” against the U.S. Jones previously stated that his advocacy for green jobs was part of a broader movement to destroy the U.S. capitalist system.
Princeton last week announced Jones has been appointed a visiting fellowin the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the university’s Wilson School.
In just one example of his campus activism, in April 1999, Jones helped lead more than 300 University of California-Berkeley students and community members in a protest vigil and hunger strike in support of the university’s ethnic studies department, which was facing major budget cuts and the scaling back of courses.
Jones told the university’s newspaperthe vigil and attendant hunger strike was a critical point in the movement to defend what has been called the “systematic dismantling” of UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department.
“There are thousands of worthless people here signing off checks to the administration to get their worthless degrees,” he said. “You have the sense to know that you’ve got to fight for what you [really want].”
Jones said budget and faculty cuts in the ethnic studies department signaled that the UC Berkeley administration is willing to do anything to “prevent you from becoming revolutionaries.”
Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He appears throughout the week on leading U.S. radio programs and is the author of the book “The Late Great State of Israel.” Follow Klein on Twitter under the name “AaronKleinWND.”
Advertisement