Free Republic

Two Muslim clerics with outspoken backgrounds are among the speakers at St. Cloud State University's Islam Awareness Week, which starts today. One of them is Siraj Wahhaj, who will speak on "What is Jihad?" at 2 p.m. Thursday in the Atwood Memorial Center Theatre. Wahhaj, an American-born imam of a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y., is on the executive committee of the Muslim Alliance in North America, a network of organizations addressing needs in American Muslim communities. In 1991, speaking to an Islamic association of Texas, Wahhaj called Operation Desert Storm "one of the most diabolical plots ever in the annals...

The influential Muslim cleric lives quietly on a gated 26-acre compound in the Pocono Mountains, where he prays, works, meets admirers and watches from afar as terrorism accusations that have landed him on Turkey’s most-wanted list unfold in court. Rarely seen in public, Fethullah Gulen has long been one of Turkey’s most important scholars, with multitudes of followers in his native country and around the world. More recently, Turkey’s increasingly autocratic president, Recip Erdogan, has accused Gulen of plotting to overthrow the officially secular government from his Pennsylvania idyll some 5,000 miles away. Gulen’s supporters call the charge baseless and,...

The State Department announced Wednesday that it has added two people to the federal list of designated terrorists, one of whom was once detained at Guantanamo Bay military prison. Ayrat Nasimovich Vakhitov, one of the newly added jihadists, was a former detainee at Guantanamo for less than two years from June 2002 until February 2004 before being turned over to Russian officials in his home country. Turkish authorities recently arrested Vahkitov in connection with the June 29 suicide bombings at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport that killed 42 people. While no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. and Turkish authorities...

ABC News' Rachel Martin reports: The US intelligence gathering program known as “extraordinary rendition” was essentially put on trial for the first time - in Italy - and this week the court rendered a guilty verdict. Italian Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a street in Milan, Italy. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, alleged that he was abducted by CIA operatives who then shuttled him between US bases in Europe and then moved him to Egypt where Omar says he was tortured. The Italian judge tried the Americans, all but...

IÂ’m used to Planned Parenthood saying and tweeting idiotic things. IÂ’ve also come to expect that mainstream media will ignore the lunacy of this taxpayer-funded activist group. Before I get to the sheer stupidity of a billion-dollar abortion chainÂ’s tweet, letÂ’s take a look at what led to the outrageous statement. An American-born Islamic terrorist, Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, slaughtered 49 precious human lives in a gay strip/dance/drag club in Orlando, Florida. My heart goes out to the families of those killed and to those left behind trying to make sense of such a vile act. The President blamed the...

The mosque at the centre of the San Bernardino terrorist attack is back in the spotlight after one of the organisation's clerics, Roshan Abbassi, was found to have had repeated contact with terrorist Syed Farook in the months before the deadly attack which left 14 people dead and 24 people injured. Mr. Abbassi and his fellow teachers at the mosque had previously claimed that they barely knew Mr. Farook, despite his repeat attendance at the Dar al Uloom al Islamiyyah mosque in San Bernardino.The mosque is now believed to be a haven for Tablighi Jamaat activists - a fundamentalist, proselytising Islamic...

Controversy has erupted in Belgium after it emerged that some Belgian mosques were refusing to join public prayers for non-Muslim victims of the recent terror attacks in the capital Brussels. A report by the United Arab Emirates TV station Al-Ghad Al-Arabi explained that the Council of Belgian Imams rejected the prayer initiative, saying that praying for the souls of non-Muslims runs counter to Islamic law (Sharia). During the report, which aired March 26 and was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Sheikh Abdelhadi Sewif, Chief Imam of the Great Mosque of Brussels, suggested Muslims might be able...

Austria has just made a new law: Muslim imams will no longer be able to conduct their sermons in Arabic, but in German; all Korans will now have to be written completely in German, and Muslim groups will no longer be able to accept foreign money. The updated “Law on Islam,” which was prepared by the coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party, aims to regulate how Islam is managed inside the country, and includes provisions requiring imams to be able to speak German, standardizing the Quran in the German language, and banning Islamic organizations from receiving...

Saudi Arabia's execution of 47 'terrorists' in one day including top Shiite cleric triggers wave of protests across Middle East and around the world Saudi Arabia has executed 47 people convicted of 'terrorism' today, including a prominent Shiite cleric behind anti-government protests, according to the interior ministry. Shiite Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a 56-year-old cleric was a driving force of the protests that broke out in 2011 in the Sunni-ruled kingdom's east, where the Shiite minority complains of marginalisation. Scores of Shi'ite Muslims marched through the Qatif district of Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province in protest at the execution of cleric Nimr...

The Clinton family and Hillary Clinton’s campaign are being accused of accepting millions of dollars from what at least one U.S. ally is calling a terrorist network. The U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen is a longstanding ally of Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their cozy relationship has included dinners and speaking arrangements throughout the years. He is suspected of controlling $25 billion in global assets and his followers have reportedly poured millions into the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But now Gulen has been accused in a U.S. court of being the ringleader...

White House Holds Meeting With Muslims And Sikhs by KRISTIN DONNELLY, CHRIS JANSING and CORKY SIEMASZKO President Obama's top advisers held a series of meetings Monday with Muslim and Sikh religious leaders to discuss the fallout their communities are facing in the wake of the deadly San Bernardino shootings. Senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Munoz, and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes took part in the White House sit-downs — a dozen days after a radicalized Muslim couple fatally shot 14 people and wounded 21 more in California. The Chicago-born Syed Farood and his wife Tashfeen...

The 41-year-old recently completed a master's degree at Seattle University's School of Theology and Ministry, where he was the first Muslim to ever enroll. "I was looking for a place to be accepted as myself and to be the true face of Islam, though I am not the best follower," Polovina said. . . . . Studying the Bible with the other students, almost all Christians, was a little uncomfortable at first, he said. But he quickly settled into sharing his own perspective and appreciating the overlaps. There are many similarities between Islam and Christianity, he said, from moral values...

<p>A chaplain at Rikers Island has been banned from counseling inmates because of his ties to a Brooklyn mosque linked to al Qaeda fund-raising.</p> <p>Amin Awad, who was named president of the board of trustees at Al-Farooq mosque earlier this month, cannot have contact with inmates and has been reassigned to administrative duties, Tom Antenen, a spokesman for the city Department of Correction, said yesterday.</p>

The woman who took part in the ISIS-inspired San Bernardino massacre is linked to her native country's most notorious radical mosque, American officials believe. Sources have told Daily Mail Online that US officials handed over information to their Pakistani counterparts about links between Tashfeen Malik and the Red Mosque in Islamabad. The mosque is infamous for its links to violence and authorities in Pakistan are now considering taking action against its preacher, Maulana Abdul Aziz, after the disclosures by US officials. It is unclear currently how law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US have connected Malik to the mosque.

World 15 Islamist Kurds suspected of planning attacks arrested across Europe 12/11/2015 BARCELONA, Spain - Radical Kurdish cleric "Mullah Krekar" and 14 other Iraqi Kurds were arrested across Europe on Thursday in a coordinated police swoop on Islamist militants planning attacks, Italian media reported. The Corriere della Sera newspaper said the suspects were arrested in countries across Europe in collaboration with police from Italy, the UK, Norway, Finland, Germany and Switzerland. A non-Kurd, a man from Kosovo, was also arrested. Among the suspects picked up for links to the Islamic State group (ISIS), seven were arrested in Italy, four...

Imams in Britain do not know about Britain’s laws against martial rape, according to the findings of an academic at Hull University who has concluded a study into “Preventing Sexual Violence in South Asian Communities” The report also states that South Asian women are not finding justice for crimes committed against them because of “cultural norms” and “honour”, which results in crimes going unreported. ... The news comes shortly after a glowing reference by a UK Imam for a rapist who is said to have taken advantage of young girls. As reported by Breitbart London, letters of reference were written...

The current Sheriff is Scott Israel; he was elected to office in November 2012. As Sheriff, Israel has made it a point to reach out to diverse crowds, including those who could be considered enemies of the U.S. and her allies. Broward Sheriff Scott Israel’s 2015 radical Muslim tour began this past January, when he posed for photos with Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout and a member of Zakkout’s Miami-based AMANA group at a local mosque. Zakkout is a big supporter of Hamas. On his Facebook page, one can find Hamas logos and photos of Hamas militants and leaders, including Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and...

U.S. authorities are seeking to revoke the citizenship of an Oregon imam who they say tried to conceal past associations with radical Islamic groups. Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye raised money, recruited fighters and provided training for insurgent groups battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Justice says in a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Portland. Kariye was one of more than a dozen people who filed a lawsuit challenging the no-fly list, winning last year a court order saying the government must provide information about why people are on the list. The...

Top Muslim authorities in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan spoke out over the weekend against extremism, the latest examples of religious figures doing what Western governments encourage as part of a broad campaign to reject and delegitimize any link between terrorism and Islam. In both cases, however, the authorities concerned have controversial records themselves, having drawn criticism in the past for justifying terror in the Pakistani instance and for inciting hatred of non-Muslims in the Saudi one. Addressing students at a Saudi-affiliated Islamic school in London at the weekend, the government-appointed imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, urged...

John W. Gaissert, the police chief of Commerce, Georgia, near the MOA camp in Franklin County, is a retired Navy commander who has spent a career in law enforcement, working directly on military and civilian counter-terrorism issues. Gaissert was a security consultant for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and also testified in 2010 to a U.S. House Subcommittee on Intelligence. He believes it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamaat Fuqra and Muslims of America as merely pietistic Muslims trying to live in peace out in the countryside. “Their spiritual mentor is Sheikh Gilani and his concept is to...