U.S. Senate hearing: Witness accuses Muslim congressmen of Muslim Brotherhood ties, media in uproar
“Allegations that Ellison and Carson are secret Muslim agents with extremist leanings are usually found among fringe groups online, often discussed in dire tones on poorly designed websites. Rarely, if ever, do such sentiments get read into congressional testimony, with the imprimatur that offers.”
The media elites’ scorn for the unwashed masses is brimming over in this article: “fringe groups” who speak in “dire tones” on “poorly designed websites” couldn’t possibly be saying anything true or accurate, right? If your website design is poor, what you’re saying must ipso facto be false — not to mention “bigoted” and “Islamophobic”! And Ellison and Carson are not “secret Muslim agents with extremist leanings.” They’re just careless about appearing before groups with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood — and why should they care, when the mainstream media so eagerly runs interference for them instead of calling them to account?
But this really shouldn’t be so hard, even for a blinkered Leftist propagandist like Sam Stein of the HuffPo. He quotes Faryal Khatri of ISNA saying: “I can definitely tell you we are not Muslim Brotherhood. We are not affiliated with them at all and never were. That much I can reassure you.” But he doesn’t tell his hapless readers that ISNA has actually admitted its ties to Hamas, which styles itself the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nor does he bother to note that it wasn’t “fringe websites” or Frank Gaffney or Ted Cruz who identified ISNA as a Muslim Brotherhood front group; this designation comes from the United States Department of Justice, which classified ISNA among entities “who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”
There is still more that Stein failed to notice in his haste to excoriate Cruz for “Islamophobia” and association with “poorly designed websites”: in 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “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.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.
“Witness At Ted Cruz Hearing Accuses Congress’ Two Muslim Members Of Muslim Brotherhood Ties,” by Sam Stein, Huffington Post, June 28, 2016:
In explosive testimony Tuesday, a witness before a Senate panel about Islamic terrorism accused the two Muslim members of Congress of having attended an event organized by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The charge was leveled by Chris Gaubatz, a “national security consultant” who has moonlighted as an undercover agitator of Muslim groups that he accuses of being terrorist outfits, and it was directed at Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.). At the heart of his accusation is the attendance by those two members at a 2008 convention hosted by the Islamic Society of North America — a Muslim umbrella group, which Gaubatz claims is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I attended a convention in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008, organized by Muslim Brotherhood group, ISNA, and both the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons had recruitment and outreach booths,” Gaubatz said in his testimony. “Both Congressman Keith Ellison, MN, and Andre Carson, IN, spoke at the Muslim Brotherhood event.”
Allegations that Ellison and Carson are secret Muslim agents with extremist leanings are usually found among fringe groups online, often discussed in dire tones on poorly designed websites. Rarely, if ever, do such sentiments get read into congressional testimony, with the imprimatur that offers.
Responsibility for this rare instance lies with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who oversaw the hearing as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts and whose staff likely saw the testimonies of the witnesses.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) later addressed Tuesday’s hearing and defended Ellison.
“He is my congressman. He is a man of great patriotism,” she said, adding that he has advocated for additional funding for efforts to detect what attracts young people to join terrorist groups.
An aide to Ellison confirmed that he did attend the 2008 ISNA convention. He’s gone to a few of the group’s conventions, in fact. Carson’s office didn’t return a request for comment. But news reports show that both he and Carson led a discussion at the 2008 convention on how to mobilize Muslims politically. President Barack Obama has addressed the group as well, though only via a video recording.
Critics of ISNA have insisted that these politicians have either turned a blind eye to — or explicitly embraced — the group’s affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, an affiliation that is based on ties some of the founding ISNA members have allegedly had to the hard-line religious organization. ISNA has long insisted that no such connection has ever existed.
“I can definitely tell you we are not Muslim Brotherhood. We are not affiliated with them at all and never were,” said Faryal Khatri, an official with ISNA. “That much I can reassure you.”
ISNA is not the only group targeted by Gaubatz. In 2009, he told Talking Points Memo that he obtained an internship with the Council on American-Islamic Relations as part of an effort to secretly collect evidence against the group to be used in a book written by his father. The book, “Muslim Mafia,” alleged that CAIR, a Muslim advocacy group that works to combat Islamophobia, was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood….
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One of the panelists was Chris Gaubatz, a national security consultant. He has every reason to be awake to the threat of the Islam since he conducted undercover research with HAMAS/Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) at their Washington, D.C. headquarters as well as in Virginia and Maryland. He worked alongside them as an intern, and was able to keep many physical files that were to be destroyed.