Why Michele Bachmann Is Right About Keith Ellison-Vindicated Bachmann Under Attack

Why Michele Bachmann Is Right About Keith Ellison

Posted By Robert Spencer On January 16, 2013 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 9 Comments

Editors’ note: While Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has been vindicated for suggesting that Muslim Brotherhood elements have infiltrated the U.S. government, the left-wing activist group, People For the American Way (PFAW), has launched a petition drive against Rep. Bachmann in an effort to remove her from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Frontpage editors felt this was an opportune time to put a spotlight on other attackers of the Congresswoman and their troubling associations, and so we deemed it important to rerun Robert Spencer’s article, “Why Michele Bachmann Is Right About Keith Ellison,” from our July 23, 2012 issue, below:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has accused Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) of having a “long record of being associated” with the Hamas-linked Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Evoking the days of McCarthyism, a common charge being leveled at Bachmann these days, Ellison responded: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” He accused Bachmann of religious bigotry:

“I think she has a very narrowly prescribed definition of who belongs and who doesn’t. And there’s a whole bloc of people she don’t like. I think she thinks that we’re evil because we don’t understand God the way she does….It’s also about marginalizing and alienating a certain group of Americans who she does not view are American enough.”

Not content with that, he accused her of petty attention-seeking:

“But you have to ask yourself, you know, why did she make this so public? Why did she seem to be seeking public attention for these allegations she was making? If she really had actionable intelligence, why wouldn’t she go to the agencies that investigate these things? I think the answer is clear that she wanted attention. That was her goal all along.”

The only problem with Ellison’s wounded-martyr stance toward Bachmann’s accusations is that what she said is true: Ellison really does have a “long record of being associated” with Hamas-linked CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As long ago as 2006, Ellison’s closeness to Nihad Awad, co-founder of Hamas-linked CAIR, was a matter of public record. Awad, who notoriously said in 1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement,” spoke at fundraisers for Ellison, raising considerable sums for his first Congressional race. According to investigative journalist Patrick Poole, Ellison has appeared frequently at CAIR events since then, despite the fact that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

Poole explains that “according to Justice Department, Awad is a longtime Hamas operative. Multiple statements made by federal prosecutors identify Awad as one of the attendees at a 1993 meeting of US Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. The topic of discussion during that 1993 meeting was how to help Hamas by working in the U.S. to help sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords.” But none of that fazed Ellison.

CAIR is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Awad and CAIR’s cofounder, Omar Ahmad, were officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) before founding CAIR. A captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document lists the IAP as one of the Brotherhood’s allied groups in the U.S.

And as for the Muslim Brotherhood itself, in 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is the Muslim American Society? The Muslim Brotherhood. “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” So reported the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb. The Muslim American Society, according to Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “is the de facto arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. The agenda of the MAS is to … impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism policy.”

Weirdly, Mahdi Bray, Executive Director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, denied that MAS had funded Ellison’s hajj: “Keith Ellison is a member of Congress who knows that congressmen don’t take trips sponsored by nonprofits. That would be a breach of congressional ethics.” Bray apparently failed to check with Ellison’s office before issuing this statement, as his office issued its own statement saying: “The trip, funded by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, was fully reviewed and approved in advance by the House Ethics Committee.”

Imagine if a conservative Congressman had taken a trip that had been paid for by a Christian group that was, according to one of its own internal documents, dedicated to “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house” so that Christian law would replace the U.S. Constitution. I expect we would hear more of an outcry than we ever heard about Ellison’s Brotherhood-funded hajj.

Ellison has also retailed the Muslim Brotherhood-invented concept of “Islamophobia,” which was cooked up in a Brotherhood think tank, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, as a weapon to intimidate Americans into being afraid to resist jihad terror and Islamic supremacism. And in March 2011 he famously began weeping during Congressman Peter King’s (R-NY) first hearings on Islamic jihad terrorism, as he read what turned about to be a false report about a Muslim who went missing on 9/11 and was suspected of terror ties until he turned out to have been killed in the jihad attacks of that day. Ellison’s crocodile tears stole the show on that day, and successfully diverted media attention from what should have been the focus of the hearing: Islamic jihad activity in the United States.

Michele Bachmann is right: Keith Ellison’s Brotherhood ties should be investigated. That he and so many others on the Left have had such a furious reaction to her mere call for an investigation is only an indication that they have something to hide. John Boehner and the rest of the Republican Congressional leadership should be defending her and joining her call for investigations into Muslim Brotherhood influence in the Government. Instead, to their shame, they have joined Ellison in throwing her to the wolves, demonstrating that mainstream Republicans are no better than mainstream Democrats in confronting the threat of Islamic supremacism. And meanwhile, the Islamic supremacists continue to advance.

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Vindicated Bachmann Under Attack

Posted By Robert Spencer On January 15, 2013 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 79 Comments

The Leftist advocacy group People for the American Way (PFAW) has launched an all-out war against Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). On Monday it plans to present House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) with a petition bearing 178,000 signatures, demanding that Bachmann not be reappointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Michael Keegan, president of PFAW, explained Bachmann’s crime: “Michele Bachmann has used her position on the Intelligence Committee to spread baseless conspiracy theories and smear the reputations of honorable public servants. Speaker Boehner himself called her actions ‘dangerous.’ It’s mysterious, then, why he has chosen to reward her reckless extremism with continued access to sensitive national security information and a powerful platform for her agenda.”

Since Boehner has indeed previously thrown Bachmann under the bus, he may be susceptible to this appeal; if he is at all fair-minded, however, he will recognize not only that Bachmann deserves her place on the Intelligence committee, but that she may be more deserving than any of her colleagues of such a place.

For while Bachmann was widely criticized and ridiculed for daring to suggest that Muslim Brotherhood elements had infiltrated the U.S. government, corroboration of her allegations has recently come from an unlikely quarter: Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef magazine, which asserted in a December article that six highly-placed Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the Obama Administration had transformed the United States “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (A translation of the article is available from the Investigative Project here.)

According to the Investigative Project, “the six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.”

These represent many of the individuals and groups about whom Bachmann had raised concerns. For example, Bachmann’s letter last summer to the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security stated that Elibiary had “extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” and “sympathy for Islamist causes,” and accused him of “gain(ing) access to classified documents.”

And indeed, in 2011 investigative journalist Patrick Poole reported that “Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet.” According to Poole, Elibiary approached “a left-leaning media outlet” with reports marked For Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant “Islamophobia” in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The media outlet declined to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping the Official Use Only documents in the first place?

Poole checked with Steve McCraw, director of the Texas DPS, who “confirmed that Elibiary has access to the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports and products that are intended for intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies.” Said McCraw of Elibiary: “We know that he has accessed DPS documents and downloaded them.”

There have been questions about Elibiary’s true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out. Among those who found this explanation wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, whose skepticism angered Elibiary. The great moderate subsequently threatened Dreher, telling him: “Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.”

Yet despite all this, Elibiary still got his appointment to the DHS Advisory Council. Mohamed Elibiary has risen as far as he has without ever being properly vetted because government and law enforcement officials, and the media, are so avid to find a moderate Muslim who will stand against Islamic jihad terrorism that they will accept virtually anyone’s claim to be just that, no questions asked.

Bachmann had also raised concerns about the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference), to which Hussain is the ambassador, and about Magid’s Islamic Society of North America. And so the Egyptian article stands as vindication of her concerns, and shows that she her request that an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration be opened was entirely reasonable, and not a manifestation of “bigotry,” “racism,” or “McCarthyism” at all – contrary to the hysterical (and formulaic) claims of her Leftist detractors.

Of course, the Egyptian article has to be taken with a grain of salt. It could be the product of a Muslim Brotherhood advocate in Egypt, anxious to bolster perceptions of his movement’s clout and credibility. While that is possible, however, it cannot responsibly be assumed to be the case without closer examination; it is equally possible that the article represents a genuine indication that Bachmann’s concerns were entirely justified, and that the Muslim Brotherhood has indeed penetrated to the highest levels of the U.S. Government.

We’ll never know for sure without a careful, unbiased, non-partisan investigation – which is exactly what Michele Bachmann had called for. If they really had any genuine concern for the American way, instead of calling for her removal from the Intelligence committee, the People for the American Way would be calling for Bachmann to be appointed to chair that committee, and to open the investigation into Muslim Brotherhood infiltration that is so desperately needed.

But of course PFAW doesn’t really have any such concern. And the fact that they have been able to get 178,000 signatures calling for the head of a dedicated American patriot in order to punish her for asking for an investigation that obviously needs to be carried out is a sign of just how much the public discourse has degenerated in this dreary age of Obama.

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