Interfaith Dialogue: A Testament to Collective Myopia

Back in August 2009, we published an article in the New English Review, “Chelm on the Charles River.” It was about the dedication of the controversial Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  The event was attended by the late Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and leaders of both the Christian and the Jewish Community. It was a testament to the collective myopia in the face of overwhelming evidence unearthed about the ISBCC’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the Muslim American Society. Among the ISBCC Trustees were convicted terror financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi and exiled Egyptian Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al Qaradawi, a notorious anti-Semite and promoter of Jewish genocide.  The investigations were led by Dr. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) who had been the subject of defamation litigation by the ISB back in 2005. It was seeking to impugn Jacob’s reputation, that of Steve Emerson of The Investigative Project, Boston Herald American and FoxNews TV channel WFXT given accusations about those connections.

Jacobs had little support from the established  Boston Jewish community during the litigation brought by the ISB, which subsequently collapsed, after costing a fortune in legal fees; an act of Lawfare.  Jacobs and a contingent showed up at the 2009 ISBCC dedication of the Mosque and Cultural Center built with millions of Saudi financing on city-owned land transferred under questionable arrangements.  Our NER article presented a bill of indictment of the Boston Jewish establishment:  the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Jewish Community Relations Council and prominent members of the local rabbinate for engaging in an act of betrayal of their co-religionists.

In a February 2011 interview with Jacobs of APT he related what he experienced, “Fighting Muslim Brotherhood Lawfare and Rabbinic Fatwas.”  Two years later came the Tsarneav brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings and revelations about their connections to the ISBCC we chronicled in another NER article, “Refugee Jihad Terror in Boston.”  Again Jacobs and the APT team exposed the record of the ISBCC nurturing convicted terrorists in the Hub city’s midst, isolating the ISBCC Imam and trustees  from participating in community memorial  in the aftermath of the attack .

You would have thought that the Boston Jewish community had learned from these experiences amid documented evidence that a radical Mosque, its trustees and Imams nurtured hatred of Jews and Christians as despised kuffar, infidels.

But no. As baseball great the late Yogi Berra might opine in one of his classic malapropism, “it’s deva vu all over again” in “Chelm on the Charles River.”

Today, there is a another interfaith gathering at the ISBCC in Roxbury featuring Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh with a supporting cast of Christian and Jewish Clergy, the latter including members of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis. It is all about solidarity in the face of alleged efforts during the Presidential electoral campaign to discriminate against the American Muslim Community. Some in the Boston and American Jewish establishment mistakenly believe the American Muslim discrimination reminiscent of their own experience in America and a prelude of what occurred during the Holocaust.  They point to spikes in anti-Muslim incidents, while forgetting that FBI statistics show that anti-Semitic incidents continue to seriously overarch anti-Muslim reports. This interfaith gathering at the ISBCC comes after a spike in Islamic extremist attacks in the US in 2015 and 2016 in Chattanooga, San Bernardino and Orlando. The latter at the Pulse nightclub being the worst jihad toll in America since 9/11. Then there was the recent terrorist event at Ohio State University by a Somali Muslim refugee student, employing both a car ramming and knifing of fellow students, reminiscent of Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jewish citizens.

That is what prompted six religious leaders, including a noted counterterrorism expert,  to issue an open letter this weekend condemning this latest example of Chelm on the Charles River.  The signatories of this letter include a long time personal family friend and ally, Rabbi Jonathan Hausman, former Lt. Gen. William Boykin, Pastor Rick Scarborough, Rev. Dr. Rick Joyner, Pastor Sam Rohrer and Bishop E.W. Jackson.

Below is the open letter:

Open Letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Martin Walsh

On Sunday, December 11th, the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) is hosting an event called “Out of Many, One – An Interfaith Call for Dignity & Diligence.” Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh, you have reportedly agreed to participate and make remarks on this occasion, as will Christian and Jewish clerics.  Imams associated with the Islamic supremacist ISB will, of course, be much in evidence, as well.

The practical effect of such a meeting at this particular venue will be to have civic leaders and non-Muslim clerics provide political cover to one of the most intolerant, jihadist mosques in America, to its Muslim Brotherhood-tied leadership and to their agenda.

Proof of ISB’s true character and the threat it poses to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, both in New England and beyond, can be found in the following illustrative examples:

• The first ISB mosque in Cambridge was founded in 1982 by Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a man who convinced both Presidents Bush and Clinton that he was a moderate, but who turned out to be a Muslim Brotherhood operative and al Qaeda financier. He is now serving a lengthy prison term for plotting to assassinate the then-Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

• Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a founding trustee to ISB’s second mosque – the site of the December 11th event – which opened in Roxbury in 1994.  ISB claimed that his name appeared on their documents as a “clerical error” and Boston officials turned a blind eye.  Qaradawi calls for the genocide of Jews and the murder of homosexuals and Interpol has a warrant for his arrest on charges of incitement to murder.

• ISB congregant Ahmad Abousamra fled to Syria in 2006 where he resurfaced as an Islamic State “social media guru,” was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2013 and was reportedly killed in a 2015 coalition air strike against ISIS in Qaim, Iraq in June 2015.

• ISB major donor Oussama Ziade was indicted in 2009 for dealing with terrorist funds and is a fugitive living in Lebanon.

• ISB congregant and MIT-trained neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui raised money for al Qaeda at Boston mosques and, as “Lady al Qaeda,” became the most wanted woman in the world. Arrested in 2009 in Afghanistan with plans for a mass casualty attack on New York City, she opened fire on FBI agents and is now serving 86 years in prison for attempted murder.

• ISB Imam Abdullah Faaruuq provided a $50,000 grant to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office in 2010 (which was publicly accepted) in order to establish Muslim “sensitivity training” for the police, in accordance with which they would be prohibited from studying radical Islamist ideology as a motive for violence.  Imam Faaruuq was later found on tape urging Boston Muslims to “pick up the gun and the sword to defend Aafia “Lady al Qaeda” Siddiqui, who was then on trial.

• ISB congregant Tarek Mehanna, who planned a machine-gun jihad attack on a mall in Attleboro, Massachusetts, was convicted in 2011 of providing material support to al Qaeda and is now serving 17 years in federal prison.

• ISB congregant Rezwan Ferdaus, arrested in 2011 for planning to send remote-controlled airplane bombs into the U.S. Capitol, pleaded guilty and is serving 17 years in federal prison.

• ISB congregant Tamerlan Tsarnaev, caught on surveillance tape placing a bomb, changed his persona, according to his ex-girlfriend, after joining the ISB: “One minute he was a normal guy, the next minute he is watching these crazy Muslim videos.” His brother Dzhokhar, who occasionally attended the Islamic Society of Boston, allegedly helped place and detonate the bombs that killed four and injured 264 in 2013.

While the participants in the 11 December meeting are, of course, entitled to their views, they have no standing to speak for the entire faith community with respect either to the ISBCC or their stated purpose of “challeng[ing] the forces of hate and bigotry.”  As ordained clerics representing and working with millions of people of faith across America, we explicitly disavow any such claim.

We call on you, Senator Warren and Mayor Walsh, to decline to address this or future events sponsored by the Islamic Society of Boston.  To do otherwise will risk implicating your respective offices and personal authority in subversive efforts aimed at promoting this Islamic supremacist center as exemplary of the sort of Muslims with whom it is safe and constructive to engage, which is demonstrably not the case.

Rabbi Jonathan Hausman
LTG (R), Rev. William G. “Jerry” Boykin
Pastor Rick Scarborough
Dr., Rev. Rick Joyner
Hon., Pastor Sam Rohrer
Bishop E.W. Jackson

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

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