Terror-Funded MSA at Ohio State
By Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, April 28, 2008
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=9549C72C-532A-41F9-AB85-4EADB44DABDF
February 20, 2006 proved to be an eventful day for the Muslim Students
Association (MSA) at The Ohio State University. Not only did that date
mark
the conclusion of their weekend-long "Leaders of Tomorrow" conference, but
that was also the day that their conference sponsor, Kindhearts, was
raided
by federal law enforcement and closed by order of the Department of the
Treasury for financing terrorism, freezing its assets.
According to the US government, Kindhearts, which was established
following
the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation,
was not only engaged in providing millions for HAMAS in Lebanon and the
West
Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified by HAMAS
head Khaled Mishal as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed
El-Mezain. (For additional background on Kindhearts and its multiple
connections to the international terrorism finance network, see Joe
Kaufman's
FrontPage article, "The Black Hearts of Kindhearts")
Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU
MSA conference. Also sup****ting the MSA's conference was its local parent
organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the
Central Ohio area as "Masjid Al-Qaeda". The mosque nearby the OSU campus
was
home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US since 9/11, with two
former members - Iyman Faris and Nuradin Abdi - already convicted and
serving prison terms for their participation, and another cell member -
Christopher Paul - currently awaiting trial.
The third identified sponsor of the MSA conference, Ilmquest Productions,
is
the media arm of the Al-Maghrib Institute (profiled last year here at
FrontPage, "Jihad U"). Ilmquest not only publishes and markets DVDs and
CDs
of Al-Maghrib "scholars", but also a long-line of other extremist
speakers,
including Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin, and Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar
Al-Aulaqi.
As noted recently here at FrontPage, the Ohio State MSA is no stranger to
controversy. Three months after 9/11, the Associated Press re****ted that
the
OSU MSA was under federal investigation for its MSA News email list that
regularly published news releases by a whole host of Islamic terrorist
organizations, and also for encouraging readers to purchase videos from a
terrorist sup****t website:
- Ohio State University's Muslim Student Association produces and
distributes MSA NEWS, which publicizes events featuring controversial
speakers and has included news releases from terrorist groups such as the
Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which is on the State Department's list of
terrorist organizations Americans are forbidden to sup****t or finance, and
the Islamic Salvation Front, a fundamentalist political party banned in
Algeria.
- During last year's Ramadan fast, MSA-NEWS urged campus groups to
purchase
a videotape called The Martyrs of Bosnia and show it to Muslim-only
gatherings. The video was sold by London-based Azzam Productions, which
featured articles on its Web site like "Taliban: Allah's Blessing on
Afghanistan," and solicited funds there for the Taliban rulers in
Afghanistan. The site, and a related German site, were shut down by the
British and German governments as part of their Sept. 11 response.
Two years later, the OSU MSA played a critical role in hosting the Third
National Conference on Palestinian Solidarity, whose keynote speaker was
none other than now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and former
University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian.
And more recently, the OSU MSA jointly sponsored an event to counter last
October's Islamofascism Awareness Week featuring notorious wife-beating
advocate and Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi, "Interfaith Relations
-
A Muslim Perspective". The event was paid for by the university through
student fees. As I re****ted here at FrontPage, "Fatwa Fraud", Badawi was
one
of the featured speakers and an honored guest last July at a terrorist
confab in Doha, Qatar honoring HAMAS spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi
and
attended by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal.
College students and administrators would do well to consider that Islamic
terrorism and extremism are not phenomena distant and far removed from
American college campuses (even though Ohio State professor John Mueller
contends there is no threat from Islamic terrorists).
In fact, Islamic terrorism and extremism might be closer than they would
ever realize - as close as the nearest Muslim Student Association.
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