Mohamed Elsanousi Archives

“The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was established in July 1981 by U.S-based members of the Muslim Brotherhood with a background as leaders of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). As author and terrorism expert Steven Emerson puts it, ISNA “grew out of the Muslim Students Association, which also was founded by Brotherhood members.” Indeed, Muslim Brothers would dominate ISNA’s leadership throughout the Society’s early years. Striving “to advance the cause of Islam and serve Muslims in North America so as to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life,” ISNA was highly dependent upon Saudi funding during its early years.” — from Discover the Networks

From the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

In its latest filing before the federal district court in Dallas on behalf of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and its affiliate organization, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) in the Hamas-terrorism financing case, the ACLU has made a noteworthy admission.

Rather than deny that there is copious evidence tying ISNA and NAIT to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the brief argues that such evidence is merely dated. In a curious footnote on page 7, the reply states:

Assuming the authenticity of documents’ dates, the most recent documents to mention either ISNA or NAIT are dated 1991, Gov. Exhs. 3-3 and 3-85, but the majority of the documents are older. Almost all of the numerous exhibits that purport to show financial transactions and that contain any mention of ISNA or NAIT are dated 1988 and 1989 (there are two dated 1990), almost a decade before the majority of the overt acts the government alleges in support of its conspiracy charges against the HLF defendants.

So ISNA and NAIT are not saying that the documents tying their organizations to Hamas are “inauthentic,” but that the problem with the evidence is just that it is old. Then, even more curiously, the reply goes on to argue something that the government has not even alleged:

Even if the “evidence” provided some basis for alleging criminality against petitioners, the government’s discussion of it shows the government utterly fails to grasp the singular weight and consequence that an official accusation of criminal conduct carries in our criminal justice system and in our society.

But, of course, the government has not charged ISNA or NAIT with criminal conduct, or the two groups would be indicted in their own right, rather than un-indicted co-conspirators who worked with the Holy Land for Relief and Development (HLF), the defendant and alleged Hamas-front. The reply brief then, as Shakespeare might write, “doth protest too much.”

“Biden’s Muslim Brotherhood-connected Religious Freedom Commissioner,” by Ben Poser, JNS, August 6, 2024:

The Biden administration recently announced its appointment of Mohamed Elsanousi, director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

The White House may not know that judging by his actions instead of his words, Elsanousi is an advocate for neither peacemaking nor religious freedom.

The Sudanese-born Elsanousi spent 12 years as director of community outreach and interfaith relations for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a long-standing Muslim Brotherhood front group. He has hardly repudiated this connection, displaying it as a credential on his official Peacemakers network bio. His bio also boasts of a bachelor’s degree in “Sharia and Law” from the International Islamic University in Pakistan.

ISNA is not a minor Brotherhood operation. It is cited as the very first on a list of 29 organizations named in the Brotherhood’s “Explanatory Memorandum” outlining its plans for the future.

The 1991 manifesto, discovered by an FBI search warrant in 2004, describes such organizations as part of “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Founded in 1981, ISNA was directly connected to the infamous Holy Land Foundation, shut down in 2007 and deemed at trial to be the Brotherhood’s foremost American-based funder of Hamas—an outgrowth of the Brotherhood itself.

A close ally of ISNA is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), exposed in the same trial as another prominent Hamas money-laundering enterprise. CAIR’s leader, Nihad Awad, has openly said: “I am in support of the Hamas movement.”

Not surprisingly, despite its use of humane buzzwords and avoidance of hateful language, Islamic institutions tied to ISNA have nurtured jihad against Americans.

One example is the Islamic Society of Boston, founded the same year as ISNA by convicted terrorist conspirator Abdurahman Alamoudi with the late Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf al-Qaradhawi as a board member. When the ISB began construction on its “sister” mega-mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, its 2003 tax exemption filing named ISNA as its parent organization.

Since then, both the ISB and ISBCC have produced 14 (known) associates, former members and students who are at large, dead, in prison or have been deported for involvement in terrorism….