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Soft Pedaling Radical Islam: The New York Times Discovers the MSA
by Steven Emerson http://www.investigativeproject.org/610/soft-pedaling-radical-islam-the-new-york Neil MacFarquhar's latest paean to radical Islam appeared in Thursday's New York Times, "For Muslim Students, a Debate on Inclusion," in which he praises a known radical leader of the Muslim Students' Association as some kind of moderate. MacFarquhar begins the story with a sweet vignette about Mertaban's alleged moderate bona fides:
Mertaban the non-hypocritical "moderate," as MacFarquhar would have you believe. Mertaban apparently likes girls in miniskirts – at least enough to not refuse them admission to the MSA. But what does Mertaban have in store for this flouncing, attractive, be-miniskirted undergrad? Here's what he told an MSA audience at U.C. Berkeley in April 2007:
Of course, polygamy is illegal in the United States. And Mertaban's speech that day was not limited to Islamic marital relations. He continued:
That's very moderate, indeed. Of course, you won't read this in the New York Times, but Mertaban began his speech that day with a stirring defense of none other than Osama Bin Laden, imploring his audience that, no matter what Bin Laden may – or may not – have done, Muslims are obliged to defend him "to the end." Here's what he said:
At the same conference, Mertaban defended radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on the same grounds:
So, according to Mertaban, not only is Muqtada al-Sadr a "tight Muslim," but Time Magazine should not show images nor report on an influential radical Islamic leader having a major impact in the Iraq war because of how he looks. But again, you won't read about this speech in the Times, just about how "inclusive" Mertaban is. Not content to simply downplay one of the MSA's most radical leaders, MacFarquhar goes on to sanitize the founding of the entire organization. In describing the MSA's origins, he writes, "Organized in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted collective prayers where there were no mosques, the associations were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia." That is a complete whitewash. It is well known that the MSA was not merely founded by "foreign students." It has been reported in multiple sources that the MSA was formed by members of the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood. The Chicago Tribune reported just that nearly four years ago:
More conclusive information linking the MSA to the Muslim Brotherhood came out during last year's Hamas-fundraising trial in Dallas against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). A 1991 document entered into evidence titled "Shura Council Report on the future of the Group: Work paper #1," ("Group" is the code name for the Ikhwan) stated:
That history matters. The Muslim Brotherhood, an 80-year-old social and religious order established in Egypt, seeks a global Islamic state governed by Shariah law as its ultimate objective. Its guiding ideologues have served as the inspiration for virtually all Sunni terrorist organizations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Al Qaeda. Other exhibits from the HLF trial, dated in the early 1990s, show Muslim Brotherhood members in the U.S. saw their role as a "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 God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." And while MacFarquhar writes of the MSA, "That past has given the associations a reputation in some official quarters as a possible font of extremism," he immediately undercuts that by adding, "but experts in American Islam believe college campuses have become too diverse and are under too much scrutiny for the groups to foster radicals." And yet he makes no attempt to cover the fact that MSA's routinely invite radical Islamic speakers who justify suicide bombing and make virulent anti-Semitic and anti-American statements. We are just simply to believe there is some kind of "debate" going on concerning "inclusion." Well, let's talk about inclusion. Here's radical Imam Abdul Malik Ali speaking at an MSA event at San Francisco State University in April 2002:
I wonder which side of the "inclusiveness" debate Mr. MacFarquhar thinks suicide bombers belong to. Or what MacFarquhar would write about this, as Malik Ali continued:
Very inclusive, indeed. Another MSA favorite speaker is Mohammed al-Asi. At a 2002 MSA event at the University of California, Irvine, al-Asi had posed his own unique contribution to the inclusiveness debate, telling the crowd:
Not every story is going to be an investigation. But every story, even soft features with appealing anecdotal leads, require some real reporting and a challenge to the assumptions and conclusions a reporter reaches. As we have pointed - out - repeatedly, there is no evidence of this in MacFarquhar's reporting. You can look it up. Related Topics: Campus, Media, Muslim Students Association (MSA) | Steven Emerson Reader comments on this itemgood article Submitted by Benyamin Solomon, Mar 17, 2009 21:51 This is a good article showing how western journalists are duped by these "mainstream" Muslim figures and groups like CAIR and MSA. MSA comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, as shown in this article. CAIR comes from the Hamas front the Islamic Association of Palestine [IAP]. Hamas is the Palestinian faciton of the Islamo-Fascist Muslim Brotherhood. This is a good article that exposes the truth.
Infiltrating these groups, such as MSA is the only answer Submitted by Philip Topps, Dec 4, 2008 14:41 It is my sincere hope that these groups are being infiltrated by agents, and their leaders monitored, as they represent a clear and present danger, working to expand their influence among impressionable young minds. They WILL find receptive, disgruntled "students" to follow. At that age, I, too, was against almost everything that represented "authority". However, I drew the line at wishing the downfall of the country. I had heard all of the pro-soviet diatribes on campus, and was aware of the genesis of these discourses. Later, as an officer in the US Army, studied the impact and effects of the known presence of KGB ops on the college campus. Today, the risks are greater, as MSA and other such groups are more disposed to the use of violence than even the groups such as the Weathermen and Weather Underground of the '60s and 70's were. As yet they have not, appaarnetly, acted on the rhetoric, but it may only be a matter of time. In Viet Nam, we had out sources on information from agents inside the VC organizations, which aided our capability in the plans of that organization. Today, the stakes HERE in America, are greater. After the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the clear message was ignored by the Clinton administration. The result was, ultimately, 9/11, not to mention other attacks in other parts of the world. We cannot stand idly by, and turn a blind eye, or ear, to radical islamic, or any other group, which has as a goal, the destruction of this country.
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