Liberals Join With Muslims To March On Washington DC
Muslim American Society (MAS), in conjunction with the A.N.S.W.E.R (Act Now to End War and Racism) are joining to together to march on Washington DC in an act that they claim is to attempt to convince our government to stop the war on Muslims in other countries. The "Stop the War" march and rally, as they are calling it, will fall on the third day of Ramadan. MAS Freedom will also be there and is planning a massive Iftar (the breaking of the fast) that evening in Lafayette Park across from the Whitehouse.
In May 2005, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reported in The Weekly Standard that MAS is a U.S. front group for the Muslim Brotherhood and, as such, wishes to see the United States governed by sharia, or Islamic law. "The message that all countries should be ruled by Islamic law," writes Gartenstein-Ross, "is echoed throughout MAS's membership curriculum. For example, MAS requires all its adjunct members to read Fathi Yakun's book To Be a Muslim. In that volume, Yakun spells out his expansive agenda: 'Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.'"
MAS is described by Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam, as "a major component" of the "Wahhabi Lobby" that channels money from and advances the policies of Muslim-fundamentalist Saudi Arabia.
MAS publishes The American Muslim magazine. In a July 2003 article titled "Reaching the Roots of Terrorism," author Omer bin Abdullah blames America's "forceful" foreign policy for having provoked the 9/11 attacks. "Terrorism enables the weak to confront the strong," he writes, "and thus has an enduring appeal to those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. … Its causes usually can be traced to political oppression, cultural domination, economic exploitation, ethnic discrimination, and religious persecution. … The U.S. has placed itself in a corner: It insists that other governments stop, prevent, and even help it to fight terrorism, and yet arms such practitioners of state terrorism as Tel Aviv. Today, terrorism refers to those whom the U.S. dislikes, especially Muslims."
In 2002 Randall Royer was the Communications Director of MAS. The following year, federal agents arrested Royer and charged him with conspiring with a Pakistani Wahhabist group -- Lashkar-I-Taibi, or "Army of the Righteous" -- to commit terrorism in Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere.
Closely linked to MAS is the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, whose Executive Director is Mahdi Bray, a former Students for a Democratic Society activist now affiliated with International ANSWER, an anti-war front group for the Communist World Workers Party. "Our mission," Bray has written, "is to build an integrated empowerment process for the American Muslim community." Toward this end, Bray and MAS have been involved in a voter-registration drive and an effort to train 1,000 "activists" in the "skills necessary for effective activism."
MAS also has close ties to Islamic American University, an unaccredited university in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, which teaches Islamic law and other subjects. (One IAU faculty member is Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who until at least June 2003 was also the Chairman -- in abstentia -- of the university's Board of Trustees. )
In addition, MAS operates programs for educating the young, providing fellowship for Muslim youth, creating its own network of Islamic schools, and sustaining a nationwide Council of Imams.
MAS was a signatory to a February 20, 2002 document, composed by the radical group Refuse & Resist, condemning military tribunals and the detention of immigrants apprehended in connection with post-9/11 terrorism investigations.
MAS strongly opposes the Patriot Act, which it says "strips away the fundamental checks and balances that safeguard many of our basic civil liberties," and has "drastically infringed upon every American's rights by giving the government expanded powers to invade privacy, imprison and deport people without due process, and punish political dissent."
As of early June 2007, the Minnesota chapter of MAS featured the following anti-Semitic, pro-jihad quotes on its website,
www.masmn.org:
# "The Holy Prophet (and through him the Muslims) has been reassured that he should not mind the enmity, the evil designs and the machinations of the Jews ..."
# "In view of the degenerate moral condition of the Jews and the Christians, the Believers have been warned not to make them their friends and confidants."
# "If you gain victory over the men of Jews, kill them."
# "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'"
# "May Allah destroy the Jews, because they used the graves of their prophets as places of worship."
# "A Muslim must always worship Allah and wage jihad until death in order to reach his ultimate goal … Regularly make the intention to go on jihad with the ambition to die as a martyr."
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