The Muslim Public Affairs Council's War on Steve Emerson
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16606
Pseudo-scholar and historical revisionist Ali Mazrui, is being foisted upon students as part of a course requirement in the guise of providing a cartoon “Muslim counter-balance" to Dr. Daniel Pipes’ impeccable Middle Eastern scholarship.
It is a poor commentary on the state of America’s universities when protests against the upcoming lecture by Dr. Daniel Pipes, the distinguished scholar, and member of the United States Institute of Peace, are being heard months in advance of his lecture at RIT while scrutiny of another scheduled lecturer, Ali Mazrui, reveals that he is a leading figure in numerous radical Islamist organizations which have been raided in connection with terrorism.
Ali Mazrui’s documented connections to radical Islam should prompt The Catherine Werner Gannet Lecture Series coordinator, Dr. Paul Grebinger to withdraw his invitation to speak at the Rochester Institute of Technology Campus on the grounds that Ali Mazrui is a propagandist whose Islamist agenda renders his message devoid of scholarly integrity and precludes the possibility of an honest exchange of ideas.
Ali Mazrui is a radical Islamist who lectured last year at the Bin Laden funded ICPI - International Center for he Propagation of Islam, whose founder and director, Ahmed Deedat - and his son Yusuf - are directly funded by the Bin Laden family and have boasted about meeting Bin Laden 'several times'.
Besides being a guest speaker at the Deedat's Bin Laden Centre, Mazrui is also on the board of the Association of Muslim Social Services, the sister organization of the IIIT - The International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Wahabist Islamic propagation front which was raided by the FBI and the JTTF in 2003 for ties to the funding of terror. The executive secretary of the AMSS is Kamran Bokhari, the North American spokesman for the group Al Muhajiroun, which Dr. Pipes cites as "one of the most extremist groups operating in the west today"
For more information on the AMSS and the CSID see AMSS & CSID
The controversy surrounding the Gannet Lecture Series at RIT, featuring Dr. Pipes and Ali Mazrui was sparked by an interview in student newspaper called “The Left Hook," which published an interview with members of the Campus Anti War Network. In that interview their North Atlantic Representative, Monique Dols, disingenuously stated that “ in order to graduate, seniors will be forced to listen to a lecture by Daniel Pipes.
Dols failed to mention the fact that while some RIT senior students are required to attend the lecture series as part of their coursework, they have the same obligation to attend the lecture of Dr. Pipes as that of Ali Mazrui. One of the interviewees was the Campus Anti War Net’s representative on the RIT campus, Josh Karpoff, who did nothing to refute Dols’ false claims.
Gannett lecture series organizer Dr. Paul Grebinger and the RIT Provost Simone have been on the defensive justifying their invitation to Dr. Pipes, while the real focus of condemnation and concern should be the invitation of Binghamton professor, Ali Mazrui, whose revisionist pseudo-scholarship disqualifies him from the role of someone who can, in the words of the organizers, '"provide a counterbalance to Dr. Pipe’s views." Even a cursory examination of Ali Mazrui's work and associations shows that he is a radical Islamist with no commitment to either intellectual honesty or open debate.
Mazrui's statement in support of ex University of South Florida professor/jailbird Sami Al Arian are indicative of his intellectual dishonesty and academic bankruptcy. The charges of terrorism against Al Arian documented in voluminous indictment which includes the names of nearly 100 murder victims of terrorist attacks, including that of Brandeis University student Alisa Flatow - in a bus bombing financed by him and his group Palestinian Islamic Jihad - was dismissed by Mazrui who lamented that:
"...al-Arian was just a "victim of prejudice and of popular ill will..."
RIT's hosting of Ali Mazrui under the guise of “balance" is similar to the disingenuous excuses given by the administration of Duke University, who defended their hosting of an Islamist conference under the guise of the need to provide a forum for “other views." The Duke conference ended up being not only a terrorist recruiting event for the International Solidarity Movement, but the Duke University administration’s defense of the conference unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism and conflict which continues to engulf the campus. The situation at Duke was summed up in this opinion piece in a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled: "The Intifada Comes to Duke :
"...Moreover, and whether or not a university has a duty to license the unfettered expression on its campus of every venomous notion under the sun, the real issue at Duke was always the refusal of the licensing authorities to call such notions by their proper names--in this case, bald anti-Semitism and incitement to the murder of innocents. That refusal on the part of the university and its president, a mark not of "constructive" liberality but of cowardice and complicity, is what led infallibly to the post-conference outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Once the guardians of the citadel granted permission to open the gates, is it any surprise that the in the case of Duke the marauding hordes came storming through?"
Mazrui is not only an anti-Semite, but an active participant in groups and a member of organizations which have been accused of funding terrorism. There are zero degrees of separation between Mazrui giving two lectures at the Osama Bin Laden funded International Center for the Propagation of Islam in South Africa - whose director, Ahmed Deedat, and son Yusuf, boasted of having met and received funding from Osama bin Laden, and his family - as there are between Mazrui’s being a lecturer and member of the board of directors of the Graduate School for Islamic and Social Sciences which:
“… Operation Green Quest investigators raided (GSISS offices) in March 2002, along with 23 other organizations. According to search warrants, federal agents suspected GSISS and the others of potential money laundering and tax evasion activities and their ties to terrorists groups such as al Qaeda as well as individual terrorists [including] Osama bin Laden…"
Additionally, Mazrui is also listed as a member of the “international advisory board" of a dubious institution called “The Center for Balanced Development," an offshoot of the IPO- International Progress Institute, run by an Islamo-facist, Hans Koechler, whose personal photo page shows him together with a bevy of international terrorists and tyrant such as Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Ghaddafi, whom he visited accompanied with Ramsey Clark. The IPO website can be navigated to link to groups such as the Arab Socialists, whose site includes a page entitled - “!0 Reasons Why Killing Israeli Jews is Kosher" - which ended with the message “Indeed those human bombs are not only justified - more of them is (sic) needed." and signed "More later - Ibrahim Alloush."
Mazrui's working relationship with Koechler is further proof of his radicalism, as is the case of his ties to Ahmed Deedat.
Obviously, he has no problems with groups and individuals who openly support suicide bombings.
The administration of the Rochester Institute of Technology should go beyond due diligence in the interests of homeland security and take into account the damage which will be done to the integrity of their institution by hosting Ali Mazrui. His ties to an institute funded by Osama Bin Laden and his role as a board member of several institutions which have been raided in connection with terror funding makes a mockery of the democratic spirit of debate and open exchange of ideas which the administration of RIT claims their institution is aiming to promote.